Dakota East
Earnest and soulful, Indie Pop/Country artist Dakota East travels both on a lonesome mountain dirt road and an inner city street.
“I was surrounded by down home American music for as long as I can remember,” says East of her musical upbringing. “Mum would have B.B King and Bonnie Raitt playing around the house. Dad being Canadian loved North American folk singers like Neil Young, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. Growing up in a log cabin on our small island in the middle of an Ontario Lake, the music married with the scenery so well and was the perfect soundtrack to my childhood. As I’ve gotten older I’ve been influenced by so much other music but the essence of pure, raw and unrefined musical emotion has always stayed strong within me and is what I try to evoke as an artist.”
2017 saw East follow her ears and move to Melbourne where she has established herself as a regular performer amongst Victoria’s most loved music venues and has opened for Australian music legends Jon Stevens, Wendy Matthews & Jo Camilleri and The Black Sorrows.
Dreamy and alluring, her eagerly awaited debut single “Runaway” was recorded between Melbourne and Sydney and was released in May 2021. An immediate reception recognizing something fresh and authentic, Runaway was added to Spotify official playlists “Fresh Country” and “Country Chill”, Apple Music official playlists “New Music Daily”, “Todays Country”, “Country Risers” and “Aussie Country”, a massive achievement for an independent artists debut release. Runaway has also received airplay on “Triple M Country” , “ABC Country”, “Kix Country” and MTV’s “CMT” reaching #20 on the Countrytown Hot 50 charts, which in turn led to East being named Countrytown Artist of the Week.
Written with long time collaborator, guitarist and producer Kieran Colton and mixed by Konstantin Kersting, East sings of the experience of fear. “After losing my dad when I was 24, I felt a resurgence of anxieties and fears that I thought were just based in childhood. Things that I thought I had grown out of. Fear of flying, fear of the ocean, fear of the dark. Life felt so fragile and at any moment it could break.” Music and songwriting has always been the way forward for East.
