Breaking Through: revisiting the post-punk legacy of Bloomington’s Sally’s Dream

In 1983, four Bloomington musicians — Chrissie Dickinson, Cynthia Hammond, Jenny Davis, and Emily Jackson — bonded over their shared love for the music of Patti Smith, X, and The Clash. Together they formed Sally’s Dream, a post-punk band that went on to perform across the Midwest and later in Boston. Sally’s Dream earned strong reviews from the Indiana music press and shared stages with national acts like Fishbone, Romeo Void, and 10,000 Maniacs. The group wrote and recorded striking, original music, but aside from a few compilation appearances and homemade cassette releases, their work remained largely unheard. That changed last month with the release of Breaking Through — an anthology that brings together the band’s best recordings and marks the first full-length album ever released by Sally’s Dream.  The collection was assembled in memory of Chrissie Dickinson, the band’s guitarist and primary songwriter, who died in 2022. Outside of her work as a musician, Dickinson was an accomplished journalist, writing for the Chicago Reader, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Country Music Hall of Fame’s Journal of Country Music. This week on Cultural Manifesto, Cynthia Hammond, Jenny Davis, and Emily Jackson of Sally’s Dream will join host Kyle Long to talk about the band’s history.