Dovetail has set the bar high for music at Vassar. The dream-folk project of Naomi Sullins ’27 and Brynne Mershon ’27, Dovetail has been a notable presence on Vassar’s music scene over the past few semesters, performing in spaces from the stage at Folk Fest to intimate dorm shows. This summer, Dovetail released their first single: “raining here, too.” A welcome addition to the playlists of Mazzy Star fans and indie rockers everywhere, “raining here, too” is an elegantly layered ode to distance, love and questions unanswered.
Sullins and Mershon both play a range of instruments—you may have seen them running events for the Student Music Union (StuMu) or playing as Oasis in the Halloween cover show. This year, they are turning their focus towards Dovetail. Though it is early in their career, Dovetail is already gaining traction: They recently surpassed 1,500 monthly listeners on Spotify and were featured on the popular music publication Stereogum. Since its release last July, “raining here, too” has garnered over 5,000 streams on Spotify alone.
Instrumentally, the song is gentle and hypnotic: you do not even realize you are crying until the bridge hits. I had the privilege of hearing it live before its release. The experience of hearing it out loud is powerful—I do not bring up crying irrelevantly. Fans of unreleased songs often worry that the studio version will not capture the magic of the live version. I will admit it: I had that fear. Seconds into my first listen, that fear evaporated.
Lyrically, “raining here, too” is a testament to Mershon and Sullins’ compatibility. Rich and complex, Dovetail layers vocal lines and harmonies with finesse and precision, hitting you where it hurts and pulling back into hazy metaphor.
“Our writing process isn’t really a static thing,” Mershon said. “For other songs of ours, it’s much more collaborative the entire time. For ‘raining here, too,’ this was our first time writing our own verses separately. It was really fun because my verse has a completely different melodic structure and rhyme scheme—Naomi’s verse is a lot more open, mine is a lot more dense and lyrical, and they’re both tied together with the chorus.” The bridge of the song is perhaps its strongest point in terms of composition and emotional impact. “It was almost magical how it came together, when we had the idea to layer these two very different verses with very different melodies over each other,” Sullins said.
Though Dovetail is a two-person show, there is a third member of the team working behind the scenes: Sullins’ father, Roger Sullins. A working musician in Sullins’ hometown of Tampa, Florida, Roger Sullins works with Dovetail on their production.
“My dad is basically an honorary band member,” Sullins said. “He’s this hippie worship leader who’s done music his whole life. He mixes music as a hobby. He got really excited when we sent him the demo, which at first was very bare-bones.”
The demo for “raining here, too” was recorded last April in StuMu’s practice room, located in the basement of Blodgett Hall. “The demo was originally Naomi’s synth part, a melody on the keyboard, a synth bassline, drums and this beeping noise, which were all loops on the practice room keyboard,” Mershon said. “I had my guitar part, which was the chords, and then a picking part I wrote. We sent that over alongside some doubled vocals we did.”
After recording, Sullins and her father worked together to refine the track and add details. The guitar solo at the song’s end, the atmospheric strumming and a few other flourishes are courtesy of him. “The demo turned into the final song—we never re-recorded any elements of it. The vocals you hear on the song, every single vocal part, all of the guitar, and most of the synths were recorded in Blodgett basement,” Mershon said.
By all metrics, “raining here, too” is an indie success story: The song has been streamed all over the country and was recently played on a radio station in the UK. “It was honestly so surprising,” Sullins said. “After a while, it was sort of a pinch-me moment because everything kept going right. I thought, this is usually not how this is supposed to happen. Even getting so far as releasing a song was crazy in its own right, and strangers telling us they like it is even crazier.”
Mershon has already had some original solo music of her own out on streaming platforms, but for Sullins, the world of publicly promoting music is an unfamiliar one. The group’s self-run TikTok account has seen notable success with several videos surpassing 10,000 views. Dovetail is indie in the truest sense of the word: self-managed, self-written and self-marketed. “I was literally googling ‘best online indie magazines’ and doing research to find people who worked in music reviewing,” Mershon said.
Dovetail are masters of DIY—they are frequently seen selling their handmade, block-printed merch at campus events. The cover of “raining here, too” was taken in the woods behind Vassar’s Sunset Lake by the group’s friend Sierra Iames ’27 during their freshman year. The duo edited the photos together, layering drawings and motifs done by Sullins on top.
After the success of their first song, Dovetail is returning to the mixing board. They plan to release an album eventually, and fans of “raining here, too” can expect a second single from them in the not-so-distant future. In the meantime, you can find me in the front row at Dovetail shows, weeping, dancing and singing: “When you said I’d changed, did you mean it in a bad way?”