Eliza Niemi is a Toronto-based cellist and singer-songwriter. Her record Progress Bakery will be out March 21, 2025 on Tin Angel Records.
(Photo Credit: Ben Mike)
When I wrote this song I was living alone with no internet in a remote, wooded area. I’d been thinking a lot about the cryptid Dogman that year. I wondered what it would be like to see him there in those woods, from the window I wrote at each day. I felt connected to him. I thought of how love can feel like this — like being connected to something that might not even exist, or might just all be in your head. “DM BF” stands for “Dogman Boyfriend,” but is also just about DMing your lover. It’s about yearning to connect but not being able to. It’s about solitude, inner narratives and my relationship with myself.
My mom told me once that she baptized me herself in a sink when I was a baby and that she’s convinced I had a babysitter who’d done the same. I thought the idea of being double baptized was funny, like, do they cancel each other out? I also thought it was wild to have gone my whole life having no idea I was baptized until then. Let alone twice. It seemed both arbitrary and deeply meaningful, just like a lonely kind of love feels.
I made the music video in Vancouver with jo passed. I thought it was fitting to make the video amongst mountains because I’d written the song next to mountains in Taos, New Mexico. I’m not used to mountains at all, having grown up in Toronto. I remember seeing them for the first time on tour in BC with my old band Mauno and crying. Mountains are so vast and powerful; almost overwhelmingly so.
The song kinda follows a narrative of peaks and valleys: intense isolation, overwhelming optimism, acceptance of the arbitrariness of it all. The video mirrors this too, as it dances on the line between sincere and completely goofed — sorta like how lonely love holds arbitrariness and deep meaning in a sad balance. In the beginning of the video I’m with someone mysterious behind the camera, in the middle we meet, and in the end it was just me all along.
(Photo Credit: Ben Mike)
