Neurodivergent Alt-Folk/Art-Pop Artist Kalila Badali Releases Witchy Folk Single Dotty Mae

New Canadian Songs You Should Know, this is Dotty Mae by Toronto alt-folk/art-pop singer-songwriter and psychotherapist Kalila Badali. This erethreal track comes alongside a music video that transports you into a whole new witchy world. Kalila wrote “Dotty Mae” after spending a whole summer working seven days a week as a new psychotherapist and an inclusion specialist at a summer camp. To conclude this busy summer she celebrated with a little too much weed and her beloved co-workers at a cottagein Prince Edward County. It was there that she met Dotty Mae and had her tarot read for the first time sitting cross-legged at the edge of a forest.

Kalila first pitched Dotty Mae to her band Shy By Shy and played the song repeatedly in the early days of this project. Eventually, she opted to bring this song in a folkier, witchier direction and decided to begin recording it with her long-time friend and producer James Atin-Godden. Together they used auxiliary percussion to emphasize/allow for more dynamic space for Kalila’s unique acoustic guitar style of fingerpicking.

The music video narrative plays with similar themes to the song “Dotty Mae” – more specifically about inflated traumatic responses to relationships. It’s about protection, chronic doubt, hiding in plain sight, and reaching for solace in anything and everything that could offer an answer, education, therapists, drugs, and even tarot readers like Dotty Mae.