Standing in the crowd in front of Stagecoach’s Mane Stage, Dasha began sobbing. It was April 2023, a year before the rising country star’s single “Austin” would become a viral TikTok hit. At the time, she was just another fan among thousands of attendees at the country music festival in California’s Coachella Valley.
She wasn’t moved to tears by Lainey Wilson’s headlining performance, nor was the singer-songwriter from rural San Luis Obispo, California distraught over any kind of personal trauma triggered by Wilson’s lyrics (country songs are known for having this kind of effect, after all). No, Dasha was crying almost prophetically.
“I broke down because I was like, I’m going to play this stage soon,” the 25-year-old tells Glamour. “I just got this overwhelming feeling of like, oh my God, that’s going to be me.”
She adds, “I was also on mushrooms, so maybe that had something to do with it.”
Dasha, whose real name is Anna Dasha Novotny, was right—maybe not about the mushrooms, but about her imminent rise. On day two of Stagecoach 2025, she played the largest of the festival’s three stages, which can accommodate a crowd of over 80,000 thousand people.
“I’m playing Stagecoach Mane Stage,” she screamed into the mic, throwing a fist into the air as her blonde waves and “signature” cowlick whipped in the wind. Her childlike excitement was contagious, the ecstasy of a performer finding her audience, and the crowd roared.
From the moment she set foot on stage, Dasha never stopped moving, each second of her 35-minute set perfectly choreographed. When she sprinted to the wings to grab a sip of water—it was 86 degrees in the desert, with high-winds whipping dust clouds 10-20 feet into the air—two “lasso dancers” stepped to the front to keep the audience engaged. And then she was back, running at full speed to join her background dancers in formation with a ruby red microphone in hand.
Dasha was wearing a custom Victoria’s Secret Pink denim corset top and matching hot pants for her Stagecoach debut, which she paired with fishnet tights under fringed leather chaps embellished with rhinestones. The inspiration? Coyote Ugly.
“I’ve just always been so inspired by that movie,” she says of Diablo Cody’s 2000 film, citing the “raunchy, Western-y” aesthetic of the bartenders/dancers. “The empowerment, the confidence…I feel like that just perfectly symbolizes who I am and what my music says.”
To close out her set, she finally played “Austin,” the song that started it all. As the crowd shouted her lyrics back at her—”Did your boots stop working? Did your truck break down?”—Dasha’s perfectly rehearsed exterior faltered just enough for those of us in the front rows to see. Standing at the edge of the stage catwalk, gazing out over the sea of cowboy hats, I caught a glimmer of tears in her blue eyes. Not for the first time at Stagecoach, Dasha was about to cry, appearing overwhelmed with gratitude, joy, relief—perhaps all three. But before a single tear could fall, she sashayed back toward the faux neon sign glowing on the screen behind the stage.
It read, “Welcome to Dashville.”
The rolling green hills of San Luis Obispo, or SLO, as Dasha’s hometown is affectionately nicknamed, are the backdrop for one of the wealthiest enclaves in the country. But unlike other pockets of the Central California coast, like Santa Barbara or Montecito, the area maintains a kind of hippie reputation for its low-key, nature-loving residents. (It’s also a college town, home of the esteemed California Polytechnic State University’s SLO campus.) Dasha credits this quirky, vibrant community for her love of a genre that’s not typically associated with the Golden State.
“The festival I grew up going to is called Live Oak Music Festival,” she tells me over Zoom a few weeks before her Stagecoach performance. She describes the singer-songwriters, bluegrass and country musicians, and jam bands that decorate the lineup with a tone of reverence. “Everyone is encouraged to bring their own instruments in their camp. There’s music everywhere. It’s all folky as fuck.”
Harmonicas, guitars, cajóns—she begins listing instruments, some of which I later have to Google. (A cajón is a box drum, the kind you sit on.) Dasha herself learned piano and guitar at around eight years old, but says that even before that, she was the child in the room that was always dancing, always in tune with the music.
“I’ve gone to the festival since I was literally in my mom’s belly—every single year of my life,” she says, then pauses. “I had to miss it last year because I was a little busy.”
“Busy” is an understatement. Dasha released “Austin,” the first single for her second studio album, What Happens Now? on November 17, 2023. A few months later, the song—and Dasha’s TikTok-ready line dance choreography—went viral, a certified country-pop crossover hit. She performed at the CMT Music Awards last April, followed by her debut at the Grand Ole Opry in June. At the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, where she performed, a red lipstick-versus-microphone snafu led to yet another viral moment, but the savvy Gen Z artist was quick to capitalize on the situation and addressed “lipstick gate” on TikTok. Fans loved it.
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By the time we speak in late March 2025, Dasha is phoning in from “somewhere in Canada,” another stop on Kane Brown’s The High Road tour, where she’s an opening act. Along the way, she’s dropped by radio stations and podcast studios (including The Viall Files and Harry Jowsey’s Boyfriend Material), sparing no opportunity to promote her work to whomever will listen. Her tireless work ethic, fueled by an extroversion feedback loop, is reminiscent of one of her role models in the industry, Taylor Swift. (“I just wanted to write songs like her,” Dasha says. “She was always so vocal the lyrics and the stories.”)
It was Dasha’s very first performance, a cover of Sheryl Crow’s “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” that planted the earliest seeds of country-pop stardom. “Something clicked,” she says. Accompanied by her older brother Bardo’s band, “My parents saw how much I came alive onstage.”
The siblings’ collaboration remained a constant throughout their childhoods and continues into the present. Bardo, a 28-year-old producer and member of the LA-based rock band Beauty School Dropout, is still Dasha’s first call when she has a new melody she’s workshopping, a callback to the late afternoons in high school when they’d work together on each other’s projects or even the days they spent making Christmas EPs for their parents as kids.
Dasha credits this supportive family, including her parents and younger sister, Carmen, for encouraging her to chase the music bug. Dasha’s father, Philip Novotny, is the co-founder of BOB’s Strollers, known for their luxury jogging strollers, but “sold his share of the company so he could be more of a Dad, a Dad-ager.” Once Dasha and her brother were middle school-aged, Philip began booking gigs for them at wineries and coffeeshops and even bought a studio in town for his children to work out of. Her mother, Laura, an architect by trade, also dabbles in the music sphere and hosts a radio show in Central California on which she often plays her kids’ music.
As for Dasha’s younger sister, Carmen, the singer says she’s more of an observer. In fact, the aspiring music journalist will accompany Dasha on the road this summer for Vice magazine. When I ask if Carmen was ever a part of the sibling’s music-making enterprises, she says bluntly, “She can’t sing for shit, and she knows it. It’s a whole meme in our family.”
This bluntness—and the tendency towards crass language—is par for the course for the Novotnys, Dasha says. “We love to share opinions with each other,” she says. “It’s almost like a love language…We’ll just fucking say it, knives out, because we care so much.” But her family’s unrelenting commitment to telling it like it is has posed a bit of a problem for Dasha in the country music scene. Although she’s leaned into her unfiltered persona, going so far as to sell camo hats with “Cuntry” embroidered in neon orange lettering, she’s had to learn how to reel it in at times.
“I’m not trying to come out, guns blazing, with my opinions on everything,” she says. “I know how small and how family oriented the country world is. I recognize that I am new here, and my star is just beginning to rise. I have a lot to learn.”
As a woman in country music, a genre that’s historically been dominated by men, Dasha embarks on an impossible task: As the culture bends further towards conservatism, she may be punished by some for embracing her sexuality so openly and proudly. But that same confidence is also what will help her sell records.
“I kind of push the limits a bit on what I’m talking about, how I say it, what I wear on stage, and how I talk in interviews,” she says. “I just like keeping it very real, because I don’t think women have enough role models that keep it fucking real all the time.”
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Plus, there’s still plenty of time for her to move the needle—and Dasha is playing the long game. “I think I’m going to make a lot of changes in this industry when I have enough power and a way to do so,” she says. “I love this industry so much. I respect everybody who’s in it, and I want to be a part of it. It’s almost like making friends on the enemy line—so you can really pounce when you need to pounce.”
These days, Dasha resides in Nashville, Tennessee. She’d moved to the country music hub in 2018 to attend Belmont University, a private Christian school which is also the alma mater of big bro Bardo. She dropped out during COVID to begin pursuing music full time, but her love for the city stuck. It’s now where she calls home, where she’s bought her first house and built a community that knew her Before, when she was “genuinely out there paying my rent by scooping horseshit up.”
Some elements of her life before “Austin” still exist, though she notes with an almost imperceptible hint of melancholy that they’re beginning to dry up. There’s a double-edged sword to fame, a fact which she’s well-aware of. Her closest brush with the cost of celebrity happened in Germany. “‘Austin’ did three times what it did in the US in Europe,” she says. During one of her trips abroad, she was chased to her bus—an intense moment that opened her eyes to just how vulnerable she is. “That was the first time I felt kind of overwhelmed by how much I was getting recognized.”
The incident hasn’t deterred her, however. As with her Stagecoach performance, she almost expected it. When I ask about ambitions, she rattles off an extensive list of goals laid out more like a to-do list than dreams or aspirations. They include acting in movies and TV (she’s a former theater kid, of course), a club anthem collaboration with a DJ, and an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Later this summer, she’ll embark on her Welcome to Dashville tour.
“I make music not just to fund my life and to be a little country star,” she says. “I’m ready to take this as far as it can take me.”
As for the haters? “You can say whatever the hell you want, your comments are only going to boost my algorithm, so shout out.”
The post Dasha Isn’t Here to Be ‘a Little Country Music Star’ appeared first on Glamour.
