Isabel Dumaa

BIO

The way she tells it, Isabel Dumaa doesn’t remember finding music so much as the music finding her. Born and raised in San Francisco, Dumaa was “humming and trilling before she could talk” and pursuing a career making authentic, feminine, story-driven pop shortly thereafter.

Her innate talent and desire was met with nothing but the most profound support from Dumaa’s moms, who schlepped her to chorus classes, summer camps, and singing competitions all across the country. Their insistence on taking her artistic ambitions seriously was an invaluable boon to Dumaa’s confidence and provided an early lesson in trusting one’s gut.

Moving to LA right after high school, the city represented a new frontier professionally. Everyone seemed one degree removed from the stars she idolized, and it required a lot of trial and error to find her voice. Dumaa had to learn to make herself heard as a young woman in the studio and communicate how she wanted to sound. After a few years cycling through various collaborators, she came out with her first single, “Call My Bluff”, in 2022 and followed up quickly with “Quarter Life Crisis” a few months later. The guitar driven indie pop ballad about a girl on the brink of change marked a turning point in Dumaa’s career. After years of making music others wanted her to make, it was the first song that felt authentically like Dumaa.

Together with collaborators, Drew Polovick, Jed Jones, Brandon Shoop, and David Balshaw, Dumaa then put together an EP, Just My Nature, released in 2024. Centered on “Quarter Life Crisis”, Just My Nature is a nostalgia-hued trip through the joys and anxieties of growing up and “a must-listen for anyone looking to process life as they know it while dreaming about what the future holds” (Tongue Tied Mag, 2024).

Still, Dumaa felt compelled to create a project with a more coherent sonic throughline. Creatively, she drilled down on finding her singular sound. One that was influenced by the music she grew up with; the folk singers of the 70’s like Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, and John Prine, the stars of Motown, like Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, and The Supremes, and, of course, The Beatles.

Around this time, Dumaa connected with Sammy Witte, the type of collaborator she “felt like I'd been searching so long for.” Their first session lasted ten hours and produced the seeds of the song, “You Don’t Know Me”, the lead single from her forthcoming EP, Reverie. In addition to understanding her vision, Witte granted Dumaa the space and time to come to her own conclusions, nurturing her point of view rather than steamrolling it with his own.

Like “Quarter Life Crisis”, “You Don’t Know Me” struck Dumaa like a clarifying bolt of lightning. The story of a woman observing the wreckage of a failed relationship became

a center pole for a collection of songs chronicling Dumaa’s youthful attempts at romance.

In her earlier work, Dumaa resisted the idea that she needed a man in her life to fill her notebooks. She wrote to process all sorts of feelings about friendship, coming of age, and her sense of self. But two years ago, Dumaa decided she was ready to let “a little drama in.” After years of intentional singlehood, she realized she “didn’t even know what (she) looked like in a relationship” and she was ready to find out.

Finding out might be the core theme of Reverie. Drawing inspiration from two recent entanglements, Dumaa approaches the universal experiences of young love and heartbreak with clear eyed specificity. Rather than slip into cliche melodramatics, her lyrics contain the knowing perspective of a woman who understands these guys aren’t the one but finds value in examining the pain regardless.

With Reverie, Dumaa hopes fans hear their own experiences reflected. She knows “these are uncomfortable emotions…but I do want to feel them because that’s a part of living”. While the songs may be specific to a certain time in her life, its lessons, she hopes, are eternal. Dumaa says, “I'm not in high school, I'm not in college. But I am still just a young woman encountering the world. And I think that I'm continuing to learn that.”

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