DANI OFFLINE LEADS WITH LONGING ON “DESIRE (SAY YOU WANT ME)”

There’s nothing half-hearted about a Dani Offline song. Not the lyrics, not the delivery, not the emotion. Her latest single, desire (say you want me), is exactly what it sounds like—an open, vulnerable, no-shame admission of wanting to feel something again. Not just love, but the drama, the intensity, the spark.

“I know how to be alone. I was born alone, I’m gonna die alone. I love to be alone. Even when I’m in a relationship, that is often like a conflict in the relationship is how much I want to be alone,” Dani told me. “But I love to be in love. I love to feel loved. I love to have an experience. I love to feel a little dramatic, sometimes chaotic.”

That craving—for connection and chaos—runs through her upcoming album Lovers Discourse, a project inspired by Roland Barthes’ book A Lover’s Discourse. Like the book, the album unfolds in fragments: moments of longing, contradiction, and self-reflection. “Basically, this book kind of made me feel like, oh, I’ve never had an original thought ever,” she said. “But in a good way.”

One chapter reminded her of a specific memory from high school, when she and another girl realized they were both seeing the same guy. “I was a weird 15-year-old on the internet getting way too much information about a person that I didn’t know,” she said. “But now I can look back at that and be like, oh—I was learning something.”

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Dani’s lived everywhere from D.C. to Guam to Italy. She called Oakland home now, but this is the longest she’s ever lived in one place. “It’s funny because I thought that I would crave that stability,” she said. “And now that I have it, I’m like, oh man, I miss traveling.”

Music, though, has always been a through-line. She started piano as a kid and grew up singing—eventually training in opera and joining a professional children’s choir. “I sang before I could talk,” she said. By age 12, she was running sound at her church. “I ran that s*** like the Navy.” She later studied jazz at Princeton. “It was a trial by fire,” she said. “It’s like 10 white guys playing Giant Steps as fast as they can... but I do feel glad I had that experience because I feel I can hang.”

Her music now fuses those influences—opera, jazz, gospel, soul, R&B—into something personal and vivid. “My mom... loves '70s slow dance music,” she said. “She loves the Whispers, the Delfonics and the New Birth.” Her dad introduced her to Marvin Gaye, A Tribe Called Quest, and Robert Glasper. “Robert Glasper was probably the biggest influence in terms of, oh—this is the kind of music I want to make.”

She’s also drawn to artists who treat their visuals and sonic worlds with the same level of care. “Solange... I feel she has a really good sense of self—sound, visuals, everything aligns to create a world.”

That sense of world-building shows up in her lyrics too—where honesty often comes more easily than it does in real life. “Making music feels like putting a message in a bottle and sending it out at sea,” she said. “I had a conversation with my boyfriend recently. He was like, ‘You’ve never told me that.’ And I had it in a song.”

Her recent back-to-back sold-out shows at SFJAZZ felt like a turning point. “That was something that I thought I would have an opportunity for much later,” she said. “Some of the greatest jazz players and stuff—people that I really look up to—have played there. So it was really cool... it kind of felt like, okay, this proves something.”

She’s still finishing up the album—“I’m still in the lyrics,” she said—but there’s no doubt she’ll get it there.

“I know I’m going to make this music whether people listen to it or not,” she told me. “So I might as well share it.”