Dilly Dally Alley is a Minneapolis-based band that got started in May of 2022 with an Art-A-Whirl debut. Since releasing their debut album in May of 2023, Dilly has gained local reputability for their lively riffs, horn-infused bombast, and performances that integrate public ritual and playful crowd experiments from sources like The Current, MPR, Americana Highways, Rootstime, and more. Ultimately, they just hope their music and their community organizing taps into human universals that make audiences more aware of who they can care for in their communities, their biomes, and their world.

 

Founder and leader, Sophia Spiegel, first beheld the talents of one of her bandmates, Will Kjeer (keys), at Interlochen Arts Academy. She then went on to play cello with her other two mates, Maxwell Voda (bass) and Kevin Yetter (drums) in the St. Olaf Orchestra.  When the pandemic hit and there weren't many folks she could play with, Spiegel picked up the guitar, decided to Mess around on the cello with a loop pedal, and wrote the bulk of the tunes heard in Dilly's upcoming album, Make You Whole. When Spiegel decided to share these songs with her bandmates, the music formed a mind of its own, they had a sense they were making something a lot of folks could dig. Of course that's what every band thinks when they start out, but we're still here, and you're still reading this, so joke's on you. 


They decided to have one last back-alley party and record the tracks for their debut album right before Kjeer and Yetter left for graduate school in August of 2022 (Dilly loves them and eternally wishes them well). Sophia then went on to write horn parts for all of the tracks, and began her collaboration with Adam Tucker in coproducing the excessive bells and whistles heard in Make You Whole. She then recruited all the immaculately-groovéd Twin Cities legends she could think of - Ivan Cunningham (sax), Ben Ehrlich (drums), Levi Schwartzberg (keys), and Mitch Van Laar (trumpet) - and began her work forging the dreams of this freshly-minted group of pals. Since then, they have enjoyed praise and success for their high-energy performances and continue to gain a reputation for their good sounds.