High Waisted’s Jessica Dye Makes Music You Can Dance To

“I'm a terrible dancer, but I can dance to surf-rock really easily," Jessica Dye, the frontwoman for Brooklyn-based surf-rock band High Waisted, told us when we spent the day with her recently. That promising realization, and the fact that she became obsessed with the genre during an expedition to the Rockaways, was part of what led her to start her own band.

The other inspiration? A boy. “This is so cliche, but I had a really terrible breakup and needed some sort of artistic outlet," she said of her first foray into songwriting, “and that's sort of what triggered my initial start into music."

Those post-breakup feels, along with other insecurities and fears, are given a positive, airy beat that we can all very easily dance badly to. Now, Dye writes songs about everything in her life (so, not just the run-of-the-mill cliched breakup song) and brings an upbeat spin to whatever she may be feeling—the negatives turn into positives, and bright times get even happier. She puts a pastel lens over all those feelings, making them not only easier to handle but giving cause to celebrate even life's banalities.

To Dye, staying motivated is easy: All she has to do, she said, is “to remind myself that I have such great fortune in getting to do what I do." With the buzzy style of her music, that doesn't seem too hard for her. Looks like she takes any excuse now to pop a bottle (of Segura Viudas Cava, of course) and celebrate her killer career and the music she gets to make.