ABOUT WHISPER DOLL: At some point, a shift happened. Whisper Doll’s Fiona Tagami moved from a tiny room in the East Village that couldn’t fit a twin mattress to a big, airy, sunny show house in Brooklyn with storybook vines growing over her window. She fell in love with a cat that lived at the bodega down the street, and on her birthday, the bodega let her adopt him. She named him Lucky. She felt it.
Whisper Doll’s second album, Lucky Clover, comes from this time in Fiona’s life — a time when she was actively trying to cultivate whimsy, a sense of possibility. “It’s about this switch of trying to be in the world as a hopeful person,” she says. “Seeing the good in everything, and feeling light and airy in that space. Being able to be very dreamy about things; letting myself daydream.” The record’s dream-pop sound, with its woozy guitars and ethereal vocal melodies, evokes that feeling. Some moments feel weightless and joyous, others dense with mystery. “In the universe, there’s only me and a lucky clover,” Fiona sings on the title track.
Whisper Doll began as a solo project when Fiona was in high school in Atlanta, writing in her bedroom while she fell in love with bands like The Sundays, Mazzy Star and The Cranberries. During the process of making her debut album, 2024’s Perfume Garden, she moved to New York and became quickly wrapped up in the city’s indie scene. While playing in various other bands, she met her future Whisper Doll bandmates: drummer Shawn Majeed, guitarist Maya Lagman and bassist Julia Chrzanowski. Lucky Clover is Whisper Doll’s first full-band record, and the first one made in full in NYC, representing a newfound sense of clarity for Fiona as well as a newly collaborative process.
While writing, Fiona would often have ideas late at night, waking up with little memory of them and only a demo to prove that they happened. She would often write outdoors, too, in gardens and in parks, letting her sense of connection to nature guide her songwriting — an inspiration that’s clear on tracks like “Bluebells,” an ode to her home in Brooklyn, and “Air,” which combines grief with a feeling of oneness with the universe. “It’s very inspired by feeling connected to relatives who’ve passed or are going to pass soon, via the air,” she says of the latter. She refers to the Nick Drake quote, “Now we rise and we are everywhere,” which adorns his tombstone. “He is a huge inspiration, in how he writes about the body and nature and spirituality. I felt more connected to nature and my body while I was making this record, for sure.”
The band worked with producer Oscar Compo from the songs’ earliest stages, as he helped transform them from acoustic demos into their final form. Meanwhile, Fiona met engineer Reed Black at a show at his studio, Vinegar Hill Sound, in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Their shared vision became clear through a conversation about The Sundays: “He was talking about how most songs are in a box, but then there’s some, like The Sundays, that are just able to exit that box and be incredibly expansive. I was like, ‘That’s exactly what I want.’” The band recorded with Compo and Black at Vinegar Hill for eight days, layering the sound with synths, keys, bells and other ambient sounds that aimed to recreate that sense of expansiveness — making something “very dreamy but still grounded.”
Opening track “Lucky Clover” represents that dichotomy, with the sense of wonder in its ambient electronics and glimmering electric guitar sitting alongside the restraint of its acoustic-and-bass anchoring. A pretty verse melody becomes a starry-eyed chorus that exemplifies Fiona’s open-hearted, honest songwriting: “I don’t know how I got here, but I’m here right now / Perched on the edge.” Along with the jangly, sanguine following track “Bluebells,” it’s an introduction to the themes of gratitude and acceptance that float through the record.
Meanwhile, yearning and lust define several songs across Lucky Clover. On the album’s moodiest track, “I Dream Next To You”, Fiona sings about sleeping next to one person while dreaming of another, the song walking the compelling line of sensuality and melancholy. The considerably lighter “Inside” longs for intimacy both emotional and physical, and the dreamy “Sun Signs” details the wilfully delusional early stages of a crush, reading tarot and comparing astrological charts to try to glean some sign that it’s meant to be.
Elsewhere on the record, Fiona explores forgiveness and grace for the past. “Bruises eventually wilt / Words are eventually spoken / Cuts eventually heal / Just let me take it all in,” she sings on “Bloody Knees,” a song about a broken friendship that treats the process of healing with striking tenderness. On “I Know You,” she drew from the experience of running into a childhood friend on a late night walk around her old neighborhood. “I used to play with her as a young kid but I hadn't seen her around in a long time. Her parents were getting divorced and we talked for a long time,” she recalls. The song is delicate and haunting, populated by acoustic guitar and piano. Then there’s the swaying, heady closing track “So Sweet”: “I wrote that song right after spending a week straight in the hospital after complications with a surgery. Once I got out of the bland grey room, everything seemed brighter and sweeter,” Fiona says. “Around then, I ran into someone from high school I had a complicated past with. We hadn't talked since he’d graduated and we agreed to catch up. I was reminded why we got along so well, despite everything. I felt very at peace.”
Fiona is heavily inspired by the 1966 Czechoslovakian movie Daisies, the movie from which Whisper Doll takes its name and which is directly referenced in the murky, eerie track “Apple A Day”. “I love a lot of feminist literature and art and movies that just show women being happy and hopeful and free,” she says. She draws as well from the photography of Jana Sojka, which like Daisies is drenched with vivid and nostalgic color. These visuals play a role in not just how she envisions her songwriting, but also the holistic vision of Whisper Doll. She’s co-creating the album’s music videos alongside director Owen Lehman, with the hope of building a cohesive visual world to match the sonic one.
Fiona comes back to a central analogy to describe the way that Whisper Doll’s world should feel. She asks us to imagine sneaking into a park after hours; the adrenaline combined with calm and quiet, the darkness both unnerving and comforting, the satisfaction of solitude intensified by the lateness of the hour and the knowledge that nobody’s coming to break it. There’s an otherworldliness to the feeling that is nevertheless rooted in space and time. With their meticulously crafted sound and deeply thoughtful songwriting, Whisper Doll place us in this world that’s unmistakably their own.
ABOUT TAKE CARE RECORDS: Take Care Records is an independent record label based in Brooklyn, NY, built from a passion for music. Guided by the simple but profound mantra, “It’s no good unless it’s real,” the label focuses on fostering authentic artistic expressions that resonate on a personal level. Take Care maintains a close-knit connection with the city’s indie music scene, championing singular artists with creative integrity. | 
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