It's a Dawn Thing

In 2003, the rapper and entrepreneur Sean Combs—then operating under the nom de plume Diddy—launched the third iteration of “Making the Band,” a reality-competition series that had débuted in 2000. The show was predicated on the idea that it was possible to manufacture a musical group from parts, much as a person might, with time and focus, successfully assemble a sideboard from ikea. The first season was hosted by Lou Pearlman, the talent impresario behind the Backstreet Boys and ’NSync. (In 2008, Pearlman was imprisoned for overseeing one of the longest-running Ponzi schemes in American history, and died in federal custody in 2016.) Diddy took over for “Making the Band 2,” relentlessly testing the mettle of Da Band, a hip-hop group he’d put together through an arduous audition process. Between rehearsals, Diddy, usually wearing a tracksuit and sunglasses, assigned the group members character-building tasks, one of which involved walking from Manhattan to Brooklyn to get him a wedge of cheesecake from Junior’s. The group released one successful album, “Too Hot for TV,” in 2003. Diddy, eternally unsatisfied, dissolved Da Band in 2004.

 
For “Making the Band 3,” he set out to create what he called an “international female supergroup,” selecting nineteen promising young women to live with one another in a sprawling apartment in New York City. In the first episode, the music manager Johnny Wright, the choreographer Laurieann Gibson, and the vocal coach Doc Holliday welcomed the contestants. “A lot of you guys are here by the skin of your teeth,” Wright announced. “Puff didn’t really like anybody.” The drama of the show was based on the (flimsy) notion that harsh criticism is a more effective motivator than praise. The women were evaluated on their ability to sing, to dance, and to look enticing while doing both. Each week, Gibson would bark “Boom-kat boom-boom-kat!” as the women gyrated in a mirrored dance studio, attempting to master new choreography. Gibson often seemed offended by the results, and reminded the contestants that they were nothing special: “No time to play! There’s a batch full of new kittens ready to lick that milk!” She demanded expertise, self-sacrifice, and modesty. “A star is someone who is humbled by the opportunity,” she told a singer who’d expressed too much confidence (and was later booted for it). Diddy sometimes arrived for judgment day in a helicopter with a team of scurrying porters wearing red jumpsuits, who hurriedly collected his Louis Vuitton luggage.
 
Ultimately, Diddy begrudgingly created Danity Kane, a five-piece R. & B. girl group featuring Dawn Richard, Aubrey O’Day, Aundrea Fimbres, Shannon Bex, and D. Woods. Richard, a singer, songwriter, and dancer from New Orleans, was an early favorite on the show. She was the group’s least peacocking member, bringing a measured elegance to the proceedings. Danity Kane got its name from a superhero character that Richard had invented and illustrated. (Richard has also worked as an animator and, in 2020, became the first Black artist to serve as a creative consultant for Adult Swim, a popular nighttime programming block on Cartoon Network.)
 
Danity Kane released its self-titled début LP in 2006. The first single, “Show Stopper,” reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song is a dated artifact, but it is a supremely shiny and pleasurable one. “We in the car / We drive slow / We doin’ things that the girls don’t do,” the women coo. They seemed primed for global success, hitting the road as an opening act for Christina Aguilera. But the band was plagued by internal conflict, and after a second album was released, in 2008, O’Day and Woods left the group, and were soon followed by Bex and Fimbres. Richard, with the singer Kalenna Harper, formed Dirty Money, a duo that frequently provided backing vocals for Diddy. In 2013, Danity Kane briefly got back together, but the reunion didn’t last. Various configurations of the band have popped up since: O’Day, Bex, and Richard; O’Day and Richard. Today, Danity Kane, as we once knew her, seems gone for good.

 
This month, Richard, who is thirty-seven, will release “Second Line,” her sixth and best solo album. Richard’s solo career began in 2005, shortly before she joined Danity Kane, but it didn’t take off until 2013, when she was freed from her commitment to Diddy and started releasing idiosyncratic, genre-thwarting music. For “Second Line,” an electronic album, Richard signed with Merge Records, a storied independent label based in Durham, North Carolina. Merge was founded, in 1989, by Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, two members of the beloved indie-pop band Superchunk. The label has since released a number of critically adored rock records, including Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” Spoon’s “Kill the Moonlight,” and Arcade Fire’s “Funeral.” Merge’s aesthetic is scrappy but tuneful: its best-known acts write melodic yet spiritually rebellious songs that resist the Zeitgeist.
 
Richard was an unusual signing for Merge, which does not typically dabble in mainstream pop, electronic music, or R. & B. “We are always deliberative when it comes to taking on new artists, because we are a small label,” McCaughan told me recently. “Dawn’s New Orleans roots and musical story to this point had me interested even before we heard what she was working on. Once we got an early version of ‘Second Line’ to hear, I kept coming back to it.” He continued, “Artists like Dawn are what have always driven Merge from the beginning, regardless of the style or genre of the music.”
 
Richard has said that “Second Line” represents a “movement to bring pioneering Black women in electronic music to the forefront.” The record contains musical elements that are particular to Richard’s home town, including references to Creole culture and to New Orleans bounce, a hip-hop style that originated in the late nineteen-eighties and is marked by gleeful, sometimes hypersexualized call-and-response vocals, which borrow both rhythm and spirit from the centuries-old chants of Mardi Gras Indians. (The album takes its title from a style of musical parade that was inspired by processions held by enslaved West Africans in Louisiana and that is still used to commemorate weddings, funerals, and other significant events.) “Second Line” is also explicitly inspired by Afrofuturism, an aesthetic that combines cultural touchstones of the African diaspora with elements of science fiction. (Aspects of Afrofuturism are also present on records by Parliament-Funkadelic, Afrika Bambaataa, and Sun Ra, and in the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others.) The results of all this intermingling are rich. “I am the genre,” Richard announces on “King Creole (Intro),” the album’s opening track.
 
King Creole is Richard’s alter ego, another visionary Black artist from the South who has found herself at a spiritual crossroads and is scouring the horizon for a path forward. Several of the tracks on “Second Line” include snippets of Richard in conversation with her mother, Debbie, posing the sorts of questions that people sometimes ask when they’re trying to make sense of circumstances that seem fundamentally inscrutable. (“How many times have you been in love?”) My favorite track on the album, “Mornin / Streetlights,” sees Richard at her most vulnerable. It’s a slow, groove-oriented jam about how love transforms us, whether we want it to or not. Eventually, the song dissolves into a kind of spectral electro-fever. “Every time you wake up, I want you to know that I’m the only girl you need,” she sings. “You gon’ remember this in the morning.”
 
At the start of “Jacuzzi,” Richard samples her mother saying, “I’m a Creole girl.” The song—a cocksure celebration of sex—features silken synthesizers and fidgety electronic beats, which give the track a vaguely surreal feel. But Richard remains human in her expressions of desire. “Keep it right there / Keep pulling my hair,” she sings, her voice soft. In these moments, Richard appears certain of the validity and the release of pleasure. On “FiveOhFour (A Lude),” a half-spoken interstitial piece that Richard produced, she manipulates her voice, transforming it into something deep, nearly robotic. “You heauxs is frugazy / And my floss is too wavy / I’m every time / And you maybe,” she declares.
 
It’s perhaps too easy to compare Richard to stars such as Janelle Monáe and Beyoncé, yet all three have written or performed hugely palatable pop songs while maintaining their own sound, adroitly mixing the unexpected and the familiar. Richard’s voice is dynamic and pliable, and “Second Line” can be both jubilant and pleasingly dark. On the throbbing, shadowy dance single “Bussifame,” Richard is boastful and daring: “Hopscotchin’ on you hoes, trick the watch the feet / They tell me slow down, bitch never me.” Richard has her eye on something that looks like the future, and she’s too close to it to stop now.
 
The Afrofuturist Sounds of Dawn Richard. By Amanda Petrusich.  The New Yorker April 19, 2021.

 

Dawn Richard is accustomed to being by herself. During the pandemic, she got used to being unable to seek inspiration in the typically vibrant streets of New Orleans — no catching a last-minute show at Preservation Hall, no detouring to pick up dessert at Pandora’s Snowballs. Instead, she went for long solo drives at night, where she’d listen to her favorite classical composers — Debussy, Chopin — and sit with the city’s emptiness.
 
In the early days of the singer, songwriter and producer’s career, all of her waking (and, actually, sleeping) moments were captured by the camera crew on “Making the Band 3,” the MTV reality show that brought her to national fame as a member of the Diddy-created R&B-pop girl group Danity Kane in 2005. It was a wild time, filled with cutthroat singing and dancing competitions, screaming matches in the studio, and the inherent drama of housing multiple people under the same roof and telling them, “Try to be famous.”
 
So it’s not a big surprise that she prefers a little peace and quiet now. She likes to record without anyone else in the studio. For much of the last decade, she has worked as an independent musician with few of the resources afforded to more connected artists. And as a result she has had one of the most unconventional, eccentric R&B careers in recent memory.
 
This didn’t happen as a point of principle, but as a necessity. “I didn’t wake up one day like, ‘Yeah, I want to be independent. Screw the industry,’” Richard, 37, said in a recent interview. “I was in the mainstream. I liked that money. I liked that help. It just didn’t believe in me. So I picked myself up, and I got really good at picking myself up.”
 
That’s changed — sort of. Adding another unexpected twist to a career full of them, Richard’s sixth solo album, “Second Line,” will be released April 30 on the storied North Carolina indie label Merge Records. Merge, founded in 1989 by members of the punk band Superchunk, is more typically associated with earnest and outré guitar bands like Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel and Waxahatchee.
 
“I was kind of like, ‘I don’t see a lot of Black on the roster,’” she said.
 
But she was convinced after meeting with the label at her manager’s suggestion, and realizing how many of its artists (Caribou, Destroyer) she loved. And the adventurousness of the broader Merge lineup syncs up nicely with “Second Line,” which channels R&B, electronic, house and bounce into a loose narrative about a synthetic android named King Creole navigating her way through art, love and the music industry.
 
Speaking over two video interviews from Los Angeles in the middle of a full-time relocation to New Orleans, Richard was enthusiastic when talking about her music — she illustrated several songs by spontaneously beatboxing the rhythm — and candid about the many ups and downs of her career.
 
“I have literally been rejected by everybody in this industry,” she said with a warm laugh, her bejeweled heart-shaped earrings flashing as she shook her head. “But those failures have really created this beast in me. I really don’t take no for an answer anymore.” Growing up, music hadn’t seemed like a career option — she won a college scholarship playing softball, and studied marine biology. Now she’s been a professional musician for nearly half her life, with no plans to slow down anytime soon.
 
The new album is named for the New Orleans tradition in which the leading section of a funeral parade — the first line — is followed by musicians and dancers improvising off the beat. “In New Orleans, when you hear a second line, you can walk outside and join in,” she said. “You don’t even know the person you’re celebrating; you’re just dancing because it feels like their legacy is big enough. That’s what this album is.”
 
Born in New Orleans, Richard grew up around the arts: Her mother was a dance instructor, and her father was the lead singer of the funk band Chocolate Milk. “Making the Band 3” culminated in the formation of Danity Kane, named after a drawing Richard made of an invented anime superhero. With hits like “Damaged,” its first two albums topped the Billboard charts, but the group’s creative output was heavily regimented, from the songs the members were told to sing to the outfits they were instructed to wear. It was also subject to the conventions of ’00s reality television, when explicit abuse and exploitation were rarely challenged by the broader culture.
 
“Now, you can’t just tell a woman on national television that she’s fat,” she said. “But that was what was said back then. And then when you don’t have a team or someone behind you, you have to tread very carefully.”
 
After Sean Combs decided to disband Danity Kane — a process that also largely played out on television — Richard remained signed to his Bad Boy Records label, and moved to Baltimore, where her family had relocated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. With nothing to do, she convinced Combs to let her record at his Manhattan studio, and started commuting by train to New York. Those songwriting efforts were eventually noticed, resulting in the formation of a new group with her boss and the singer Kalenna Harper: Diddy-Dirty Money, which released a single album, “Last Train to Paris.”
 
In 2012, after gradually losing interest, Combs broke up the group over email, and Richard successfully requested a release from her contract. (She and Combs remain in touch.) She met with multiple major labels, which all passed. Undeterred, she committed to going independent, and began working on a trilogy of concept albums with experimental electronic producers such as Andrew “Druski” Scott, Noisecastle III and Machinedrum.
 
“I was instantly taken aback by how talented she was, and how she gravitated towards the stranger beats,” Machinedrum said in an interview. “A lot of artists these days are sucked into social media; they seem like they’re not all there. But you could tell that she’s there to work.”
 
After nearly a decade of having her creativity dictated by others, tapping into this freedom was like uncorking a bottle. “I was a grown person who had never been able to say ‘I want to wear what I want to wear,’” she said. “So I just started doing what felt good. I had been rejected so much, I didn’t care if people got it. I just needed to get it out.”
 
While she received critical acclaim, there was a slight backhanded element to the praise for her post-girl group career. “It made me feel like maybe Danity Kane was a joke — like everything that I had done before had been seen as some bubble gum thing, and now I’m a legitimate artist,” she said. “I was mind boggled by that because I hadn’t changed anything; I just literally got an opportunity to write more.”
 
Over the next few years she worked incessantly on full-length records, loose singles, feature appearances, remixes and ornate music videos — most of it self-funded, which made it even more disappointing if it didn’t make the impact she had hoped for. Drained, Richard decamped to New Orleans for an extended period for the first time since she’d moved away. There, she reacquainted herself with the city’s creative rhythms, which had changed dramatically post-Katrina, and settled on translating that into her music. (Instead of dialing down her production values, she covertly audited a finance class at the University of New Orleans to better manage her funds.)
 
“You can take people outside of New Orleans, but you can’t take New Orleans out of them; no matter where we are, the culture lives inside of us,” said the jazz musician Trombone Shorty, who’s known Richard since childhood. “She wanted to add her taste and her style to what we already have here and move it forward, while at the same time respecting the culture and where it comes from.”
 
The summation of that work fed into her 2019 album “New Breed,” which she laced with samples from her father’s old band. For “Second Line,” she wanted to shift the focus to her mother, who underwent a knee surgery at the start of 2020. After Richard moved back home to help take care of her, the pandemic struck, and Richard suddenly found herself occupying a guest room in her parents’ home with an album that still needed to be finished.
 
But she adjusted, as she tends to do, linking up with local engineer Eric Heigle to complete the record while accepting the responsibilities that come with living with your parents. (Folding clothes and towels, which she recounted with relatable exasperation.) And her extended proximity to her family flowed back into the album: Her mother appears throughout as a kind of narrator, and Richard said their relationship reached a new, adult level through their many conversations for those recordings.
 
“Second Line” was made in close collaboration with the Los Angeles producer Ila Orbis, who performs much of the music. (“Sometimes you have to tone it down a bit” when working with other artists, he said, “but she allowed me to experiment as much as I wanted to.”) It also bears Richard’s first solo production credits, and her synth playing can be heard across the album.
 
“It took so long to get to production as a producer, because I had other things to figure out — how to build a set, pay the workers, master the album, get the clothes and the outfits, learn the eight-count, get the choreographer to teach the eight-count,” Richard said.
 
Her interests stretch outside music: She owns and oversees Papa Ted’s, a vegan food truck in New Orleans that she plans to expand into a brick-and-mortar restaurant; still an anime fan, she consults for Adult Swim; she acts, from time to time. Speaking about the future, Richard brought up the possibility of starting her own animation production studio, or even an awards show geared at independent artists. She also held out hope of fully reuniting Danity Kane.
 
“I just wanted to be seen as an artist — less ambitious, and more celebrated for the fact that as a Black woman, I was pushing something that wasn’t being pushed, at that time,” she said about the early reactions to her solo career. But ambition was not something she shied away from. “Radio Free,” the first song she recorded with Ila Orbis, opens with a dramatic synthesizer barrage before Richard begins singing tenderly to an artist who’s being swallowed up by the music industry’s predations. “Where do you go when the radio’s down?” she asks. “Who are you now, when no one’s around?”
 
Richard agreed that the song was partially directed at her younger self. She had played by the rules, and done what was asked of her, and it hadn’t worked out — twice, she emphasized. Asked what she wished she’d known at the onset, she was unequivocal: “I’m going to be frank with you: I’ve always known what I wanted — who I wanted to be. I think the only thing I would tell myself is ‘Commit to it.’ I would have found my freedom earlier and attacked it harder.”
 
“‘Second Line,’ to me, is that freedom,” she continued. “And I want to have that conversation because maybe somebody doesn’t relate to it through the music industry — they relate to it through their queerness, or they’re stifled in their job. They feel like the world has turned them off. But just because the radio doesn’t play, it doesn’t mean you can’t be heard.”
 
Dawn Richard Will Find a Way to Be Heard.  By Jeremy Gordon. The New York Times,
April 15, 2021
 

In 2020, when the pandemic led those who could afford it to retreat into sloth, Dawn Richard did an extremely Dawn Richard thing: She made moves. Several. The 37-year-old used lessons from her expansive career—which includes a star turn on MTV’s Making the Band, time as a founding member of girl group Danity Kane, her Dirty Money electropop revolution, and the decade she’s spent devising a sound of her own—to inform her business decisions. First she upgraded one of her side-hustles, Papa Ted’s, from a vegan food-truck to a “vegan sensory experience” organized around collaborations with juiceries, chefs, artists, and DJs in her hometown of New Orleans. By the end of the year, she had tripled Papa Ted’s revenue. Then she launched a new partnership with Adult Swim aimed at bringing in more queer and Black animators into its ranks.

 All the while, she kept one boot firmly planted in music. After releasing solo records through an imprint of her own and in collaboration with various small labels, she recently signed with indie rock institution Merge Records, making her the only artist to have shared a label home with both Diddy and Destroyer.

 In April, Merge will release Richard’s Second Line: An Electro Revival, an album she hopes will redefine her native city in the public’s imagination. “When people think of New Orleans, they think of the past, of jazz or R&B or soul,” she says. Now they can also think of Richard’s genre experiments—nebulas of rhythm-first, luxuriantly bass-y production brought to Earth by her storytelling. Richard wants to correct the record on something else, too: that Black women can move the needle in electronic music, as they do elsewhere. “I want to fucking break that taboo all the way,” she says. “My first entrance into the music industry was with [Danity Kane], a multi-racial girl group signed to a hip-hop label. Then I joined [Dirty Money], a group that was electropop soul built from Ibiza. If that ain’t unconventional, I don’t know what is.”

 Speaking over the phone from New Orleans, Richard is warm and unreserved as she assesses her own trajectory, looks towards healing from music industry trauma, and parses out lessons from the distinct eras of her career.

 Pitchfork: You were raised by a father who is also a musician. What did his experiences teach you about the industry?

Dawn Richard: I didn’t learn a positive picture of it. With my mom owning a dancing school and my dad being an artist, you would think that I’d be like, “Yes, career path made. Let’s go.” But they were both traumatized horribly by the industry. My dad was an incredible artist. He was with RCA and Allen Toussaint, but money was stolen from him. He was in a group [Chocolate Milk] and that group did not make it.

 Getting his master’s in music theory and becoming an educator really is what sustained him. My mom loved dance, but her real money came from her being an elementary educator in reading comprehension. Art, to them, was more of a passion. It was never something that they painted for us to be a career. Before I could walk, I had tights on and danced. As soon as I could sing, my dad threw me in a choir. But I never thought, Yes, a career could come from this.

 Pitchfork : When you started out in the 2000s, there was a whole lot less transparency than there is today, even with the relative access that you had through your family.

 Dawn Richard : There was no social media at the time, so I went through the same journey as my father where you signed away your child, your bloodline, and everything else with it to try to get a shot. When we got into Making the Band, we had to sign a contract just to stand in the line, and that contract bled over. If you made the band then you just sold your soul. But for a kid coming from nothing, I was already aware that my soul was probably being sold. I think it saved me that my dad didn’t paint it beautifully. He painted the truth of it, so I understood it wasn’t going to be a picnic.

 Pitchfork : You were like, “This industry is wicked and corrupt and I still want to make a way for myself.” You didn’t come in with any illusions?

 Dawn Richard : By the time I was a senior in high school I was making more than my mom was as a teacher and I just could never fathom that.

 Pitchfork : Over the years, you’ve identified people like Björk and Imogen Heap as musical inspirations. Was there anyone you looked to as a model for what you wanted your career to look like?

 Dawn Richard : The reason I even got hip to Björk was because I was fascinated with [video director] Chris Cunningham. I loved his trajectory because he moved based off of what felt good for him. And once he got bored, he shifted. And every time he shifted, it was so ahead of everyone else. I always wanted to be that kind of artist. There was never a musician that I was like, “That’s the end all, be all.” I love Björk and Imogen Heap, but I never looked at musical artists that way because I always felt like they were still stifled.

 Coming from where I come from, we’re limited. Even though New Orleans is a musical hub, it is still a very limited view of what a Black girl can be here. The closest person to pop culture here was Britney Spears, from Kentwood, Louisiana. Now, you can go online. We didn’t have that. My grandmother had a PhD in library science, so I lived in a library. When I fell in love with an artist, I enveloped myself. That’s how my music developed. My entire independent career flourished because of living in a library and research that I did in theology, mythology, and understanding the dynamics of art.

 Pitchfork : As a working artist who finds a balance between being creatively fulfilled and being able to support yourself financially, what are some of the biggest lessons from your early career?

 Dawn Richard : During the Bad Boy times, we didn’t have social media to tell us, “Black girls are not in right now.” In our hearts, we knew we were doing something that was a hit. But we had no clue whether it would work or not. But what I’m learning more and more is that tech takes away from that a bit. You can dictate your moves based off all the trends now. Five songs on Billboard sound the same because they understand what’s happening on TikTok. I think there’s brilliance in that, but I also would prefer us to utilize the unknown as a catalyst. Even Puff, that’s what makes him great in the sense of marketing: He looks at what’s popping. If we had social media, he might not have even done Dirty Money. He would’ve looked at the trends and said, “Oh, nuh-uh.”

 On the flip side, I feel like if we would’ve came out now, we would’ve done well. Maybe we would have had Black Twitter fight for us a little bit. Black women are so vocal now and we’re tearing down ceilings by the second. I feel like Dirty Money would’ve survived and Danity Kane would’ve survived, too. So it’s a double-edged sword. I’m appreciative of what I was able to do without social media, but as an indie artist, social media and tech has saved me.

 Pitchfork : Tell me more about that.

 Dawn Richard : I don’t have a mainstream machine behind me. It’s up to social media, it’s up to algorithms, it’s up to numbers. I have to be able to understand the trends to even know where to maneuver to get to my own fan base. I have to know how to maneuver to be able to live and eat as an independent artist, because financially that’s the only way we survive. We have a small family [of fans], and that small family is the only thing funding us.

 Pitchfork : When you transitioned from Bad Boy into your independent career, you had to learn not just every part of your art but of your business, too. How did you teach yourself?

 Dawn Richard : Every day research, every day failing and getting up and trying it again. Most artists get to think about just their art. They are told, “Go to a studio with this incredible top line writer and get this hit, and then you just sing it and you get on the charts.” I didn’t have that luxury. I know a lot of independent artists who don’t.

 Once my art is polished, I still have to run the four miles, still have to make sure I sing live, still have to make sure I’m giving you a visual that is on par with mainstream artists. Because if it’s not, people are going to say, “This looks like a flop.” Then once that’s finished, I have to figure out how to finance it. I was my own PR, my own booker, my own everything. I had to be great in my art, but also then I had to learn how to build my structure. How do I finance a tour? How do I route a tour?

 The hardest thing about being [an independent] artist is how to invest in yourself but get return. You’re not doing stadiums. You’re doing 1,000 to 2,000-seater theaters. Most of the time, that’s going to pay you no more than five grand. You got to figure out how to pay all your people in the venue, and you want to make sure your show is great. I never did shows with just a DJ. I had dancers. I was trying to give people a stadium show—because that’s what they were used to seeing from me—but with a short budget. I did not sleep, but I learned how to do creatively incredible things.

 Pitchfork : There is, of course, a whole lot of freedom and creativity that makes the independent route worth it. But I have always wondered whether it’s an isolating experience.

 Dawn Richard : Do I miss the funding? Hell yes. Do I miss getting up and just having to hit my mark? Yes. I was very grateful for the money and being able to be a part of something that felt bigger than me. But I also know that I was called “bitch” more times than my own name. I know that I never slept, so much so that I don’t know how to sleep well now. I know that I worked so hard that I was hospitalized maybe two or three times.

 When I think about that, even though independence may seem isolated, I would [encourage] artists who want to try it to try it. As an independent artist, I’ve had more people believe in me [at Merge] than they ever believed in me [at a major label]. This team that I have now is the first time I’ve ever felt believed in or loved in this way as an artist. It is rougher, and there are days I want to quit. But I’ll take it.

 Pitchfork : How did you link up with Merge?

 Dawn Richard :

I had gotten over finding a team because I felt like I had gotten so good at being alone. But [my new manager] got me a job with Lincoln doing some branding work, and I thought I’d give it a try. And man, I’m so happy I did. He said, “I think we should talk to Merge.” Immediately I saw Caribou, I saw the indie rock roster, and I was like, “Hell yes. No one would think I’d go there but I feel like I fit so well.”

 When you’re a Black woman pushing a lane that isn’t familiar to people, or it’s multiple genres, you’re [pegged as] “alternative R&B” immediately. That’s all they’re going to give you. For eight years, I’ve been saying Black women exist in electronic, but were never on any charts, we’re never getting any awards or nominations. With this album I wanted to be unapologetically going for it, just saying, “Yeah, girls from the South can do this music. If we do this right, we’ll open up a floodgate for other Black girls to feel that they have a lane here.” And Merge understood that.

 Pitchfork :

What do you get from Merge that you weren’t getting on your own?

 Dawn Richard :

The biggest thing that any independent artist can get is relationships. I can be as great as I can be, but if I don’t get a co-sign, nobody’s touching me. I had a good fan base, but I never had major labels or big artists say, “Dawn, be a feature on my album,” or “I want to work with that girl Dawn.” Once Puff left, everyone left. I literally went from doing the AMAs, SNL, all of that, to scrounging, like, Dawn, figure it out.

 What makes me wet is when a label is like, “I want to support you and get you the dopest PR agency that works for you. I want to get you the coolest experience where you can talk face-to-face with Apple and Spotify and tell your story.” All I’ll ever want is an opportunity. I got in the [Making the Band] line to get an opportunity. I don’t need to be coddled. I want to work hard. As an independent artist, I’ve never had the ability to perform on a nationally televised show or play festivals like Coachella because I don’t have the relationships. Cold-calling Jimmy Fallon and saying, “Please put me on your show,” it’s just not going to work. Merge offers belief in me. Once someone believes enough to put their name on the line, then it’s up to you to make sure that they don’t fucking regret it.

 Pitchfork : To go from running everything yourself to now being in a position where you’re getting feedback from a label, how much of that is an adjustment?

 Dawn Richard :

None. I came from a boss [Diddy] who told me every day to fix my shit. We were on national television being told we looked like shit. Literally. We were made to run around in a park as a joke for seven miles and then told to dance while looking like shit. So critique me, because that’s all I know. What I love about Merge is that it’s a completely different world. So their ear and their target is going to be a little bit different than mine. It would be smart of me to listen. If you’re listening to yourself only, good luck.

 Pitchfork : You’ve got your hands in one zillion things. There’s the music and Papa Ted’s. And you’re also working with Adult Swim, and you mentioned doing branding work for Lincoln. How do you balance all these income-generating projects with being an artist?

 Dawn Richard :

It’s purposeful. I told myself, especially the last two years, that every move I make, it will be to serve the message. I want to make sure that I’m an artist that not only lives through her music but the art is in life. The reason I can do all of these things is because they all are in the same world. And it also makes my music honest. It makes it so much easier for me to just do what I love. That’s what Björk was to me. When you just think of that type of artist, every move that they made, from their installations to when they do performances, you’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense. That’s them.” I want to be that kind of artist. It’s my own world, an ecosystem. People can see it and go, “That’s a Dawn thing.”

  From Bad Boy to Merge Records, Dawn Richard Reflects on Her One-of-a-Kind Career. By Rawiya Kameir. Pitchfork, February 16, 2021.

 

Dawn Richard Talks Danity Kane, Diddy, Second Line & More.  #TheFreshMovement​​ interviews the iconic Dawn Richard. We spoke about her trials and tribulations with being in Danity Kane, her experience in the music business, Dirty Money, Bussifame & more.

 The Fresh Movement,   March 7, 2021. 

Music Videos 

Pilot

Jacuzzi

Bussifame

Mornin  / Streetlights

Dawn Richard Channel  on YouTube