idialedyournumber dials up the Dalhousie Gazette

By: Jack Wolkove and Mia Phillips

On stage, Jessie Everill screams into her microphone, guitar in hand and band behind her. Her punk-inspired sound reverberates from the speakers into the crowd. 

Offstage, Everill is soft-spoken, slightly awkward and anxious. 

If you haven’t been to one of her shows, you may not suspect her superstar second self. There’s a lot about Everill that might elude a first impression. She’s a songwriter, business school dropout, Nova Scotia Community College music production student and creative force behind the band idialedyournumber. 

Everill was 13 when she began making music in her bedroom. Back then, a song usually took her anywhere from one to six hours to complete. She used Discord to promote her work. 

“When more people started listening to the project, they would ask me, ‘When are you playing live?’” said Everill. “I was like ‘I really want to, but I don’t know how.’”

At 18, per the request of her growing audience, she booked a local all-ages venue, RadStorm, for her first show. 

On Mar. 31, 2024, Everill uploaded her music video “Bunny Goes to Business School” to YouTube; as of March 2026, it has almost 300,000 views. The song’s online popularity exposed Everill’s project, idialedyournumber, to a whole new scale of success. 

The music video, inspired by Harmony Korine’s 1997 film Gummo, follows Everill, in pink bunny ears, around Halifax and appears to be shot on a camera made before Everill was born.

Everill’s choice to film the video in a vintage digital style stems from her affinity for old technology. Her website is styled like an old MySpace page, and serves as a digital ode to an obsolete version of the internet. She holds on to childhood memories of her mom’s old iMac and the digital camera gifted to her when she was born. 

“I really love the quality of [old technology], because it’s both nostalgic and I think it looks better,” said Everill. “I hate new technology.” 

She blames modern-day bloatware, spyware and “bullshit” for her disdain. 

While Everill prefers old technology, her new album looks ahead.

“It’s about personal growth,” she said. “[It’s] saying goodbye to my teenage self and entering this new era.”

To mark the metamorphosis, she’s traded in youthful T-shirts for button-ups and pencil skirts. While she’s no longer in business school, her exit from teenagehood is corporate-coded.

“I like to mix improper with proper,” said Everill. “Office attire, but I’m yelling and screaming into a microphone.”

She’s also outgrown the bedroom she once made music in. Now, she’s in a studio with collaborator and local producer Richard Fry and spends twice as much time working on a track. The result is cleaner, high-quality audio.

Last year, she released her sophomore album, Mourning Glow, and embarked on her first international tour. Her Barcelona show was “one of the best experiences of [her] life, hands down.” 

 For this project, however, roadblocks litter a potential tour route. 

“One, I can’t afford it. Two, I do not want to be there [the United States],” said Everill.

Grants from government-funded organizations helped pay for Everill’s tour last year. With a new album on the way, Everill’s concerned she can’t afford another tour in light of Premier Tim Houston’s recent provincial budget announcement, which included cuts to arts funding.

She received a $3,000 provincial grant to help fund her new album, but the organizations she works with are at risk of losing their funding.

“It is a horrible time to be an artist,” Everill said. “The thing about art is that I can’t function properly if I don’t do it. I’ve got to keep going.”