Dolly Creamer is making a stop at the Crepe Place on July 17 as part of its Rough Girls tour, marking the Los Angeles band’s first time playing in Santa Cruz. “Grungtry” is how Sarah Rebecca Harris, lead singer and founder of Dolly Creamer, describes their sound: a fusion of experimental folk and Americana mixed with punk and rock & roll.
Harris, who grew up in Pennsylvania, played piano as a child but didn’t start singing or learning guitar until about six years ago. While she had always held an infatuation for music, she never envisioned herself becoming a musician. Harris moved to LA in 2012 to pursue costume design. She then enrolled in a San Francisco clown school and began MCing events, backup dancing, and participating in improv shows.
Throughout this time, Harris had been writing little pieces in her notes. They were never songs but fragments of words and ideas that played nicely together. Harris moved to Joshua Tree, and it was there she realized music was calling.
She was writing and performing skits and slowly incorporating musical melodies and bits of singing. Harris recalls performing a skit that didn’t land with the audience and suddenly “waking up” and realizing, “I need to make music.” She looked back at those fragments in her notes and tried to form songs.
In the beginning, Harris was “mystified” by songwriting; she struggled but kept tinkering. A guitarist friend of hers put those first songs to music and an album was released in 2020 under her stage name, Lucky Baby Daddy. Harris then “cracked the code” to song writing. “Once you start writing songs, it’s like a curse—you can’t stop thinking of it,” Harris says. Dolly Creamer was born years later and released a single titled “She’s a 10” in 2024.
Harris says she is “a music fan before anything.” She describes music as an alternate way of communicating: “a different language and unexplainable.” She has always been a “lyrical person” who craves the emotions that song writing evokes. Those first few years of playing music for crowds were surreal for Harris. “Playing with a band is a transcendent experience,” she says.
Harris also emphasized that being a musician is the hardest thing she has ever done. When pursuing music professionally was just a dream, Harris thought of the lifestyle as one of world travel while creating and playing music. Now, as the dream has begun to materialize, the work is undeniable.
A musician has to be “good at so many things,” Harris explains: communicating, marketing, planning, juggling ideas, scheduling, budgeting—and then producing a product that people will support.
Harris is not a full-time musician, although she would like to be. She also makes clothes, works at a brewery, and schedules shows for other bands. Although her newfound lifestyle is “more work than I could have ever imagined,” Harris emphasizes the music is “worth it.”
Dolly Creamer’s most recent single, “Rose Neck Tat,” came out May 13. While its release is recent, the song was the first one Harris wrote for Dolly Creamer. They have been performing “Rose Neck Tat” for years but only recently produced a recording that felt just, according to Harris. A “grungtry” twang twists throughout the piece. Her voice is strong and soft and filled with the emotion that Harris chases in the music she consumes.
Dolly Creamer will release an EP titled Green Gardens for Really Rough Girlfriends on June 20, three days after their performance at the Crepe Place on July 17.
