Guest: Dorian Slay — pop artist, leukemia survivor, witch Connect with Dorian: Spotify | Apple Music | Instagram | YouTube
🎵 New album: In My Villain Era — available May 1, 2026 on all major streaming platforms
Topics covered: Surviving acute myeloid leukemia and two near-death experiences, bone marrow transplant from a perfect-match donor in Wales, the ghost of a little girl named Jocelyn, witchcraft as a lifeline, making Ascension as a ritual of return, gaslighting and reclaiming your narrative, embracing your villain era, Beltane as a release date, upcoming music and LA plans
🎵 Music credit: Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by ArkawaUsed with permission. More at arkawamusic.com🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.
THE VILLAIN WHO CAME BACK TO LIFE
There’s a moment in this week’s conversation where Josh — who performs as Dorian Slay — is describing the second time he died. He’s wandering a hospital hallway with a little girl in a Dorothy costume named Jocelyn, annoyed that the floor they’re on is boring and suggesting they check out the mental ward instead. He has an IV pole. He does not yet know he is dead.
That is who Josh is. Even in death, he was looking for a better party.
I met Josh when I first moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains, when I wandered into a witchcraft class he was teaching — protection spells — and we became fast friends. So when he told me he was recording music, it landed as exactly right. Everything about Josh is a spell.
The Road to Ascension
Josh was living in Houston when he got sick. What felt like the flu turned out to be acute myeloid leukemia. By the time a neighbor found him, unresponsive on the floor, his hemoglobin was 1.8. He was airlifted, pronounced dead, placed in a medical coma. His soul, by his account and his partner’s, remained very much present in the apartment — crying in front of the mirror, not because he was dead, but because his skin was breaking out.
First word out of intubation: Starbucks.
The bone marrow transplant that followed brought its own near-death experience, its own ghost (ruby slippers in a cabinet, tags still on, dust an inch thick), and the slow work of relearning to walk. Twice. His debut album Ascension emerged from all of it — ethereal, witchy, released on a full moon in August 2025.
Enter the Villain
In My Villain Era, arriving May 1st on Beltane, was forged in the aftermath of a relationship that left him questioning his own perception of reality.
“I’m at a point now where I’m okay with being the villain in somebody’s story,” he told me. “They’re a clown in mine.”
So many of us navigating midlife, the dissolution of relationships, the slow work of reclaiming our own narrative, have had to find our way to exactly that place — the moment you stop trying to control someone else’s version of you and return to your own knowing. Josh got there and made a dance album about it.
The sound has evolved from the atmospheric shimmer of Ascension into something more cinematic — what he describes as what you’d get if Lady Gaga and The Weeknd had a gay baby. The songs include Villain, Spite, Misbehaving, and Peanut Butter and Jelly, which is about being dirty in the kitchen and which his mother has not yet fully heard.
Songs Are Spells
When I asked whether he’d ever used actual spell language in his lyrics, he laughed and said songs and spells aren’t so different. Both are intentional. Both call something forward. Both carry a frequency that lands in the body before the mind catches up.
Ascension was a spell for return. In My Villain Era is a spell for liberation.
Near the end of our conversation, he said: “Coming back from the dead twice really changes your outlook. Life is precious. Never take it for granted. Always tell the people you love that you love them.”
And then: “I know that doesn’t sound very villain of me.”
It doesn’t, Josh. But I think that’s the whole point.
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