FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Thirty-Nine: Dawn Richard
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WHEN it comes to most of the …
artists that I feature in my Modern Heroines feature, I include those who are fairly new and who I feel will be icons of the future. Dawn Richard is releasing her sixth studio album, Second Line, late next month (she is releasing it under the moniker of DAWN). I also feature artists who are established but might not be recognised and known to all. I would encourage people to pre-order Richard’s Second Line, as it is shaping up to be a cracking album! I will bring in a selection of interviews that reveal more about the tremendous New Orleans-born artist. I want to introduce a review of Dawn Richard’s previous album, 2019’s New Breed, as it is a terrific and hugely fascinating release:
“A trilogy of expansive albums plus a crop of intermediary releases and featured appearances did not deplete Dawn Richard's reserve. On New Breed, her first major release since Redemption, the label-defiant marvel again switches up her supporting co-producers and cooks up another half-hour of authoritative progressive pop. Cosmopolitan as ever and adaptive to each backdrop, whether it includes percolating Germanic synthesizers, elastic disco-funk basslines, or window-shaking drums, Richard also keeps her New Orleans hometown at the fore, honoring her Washitaw Nation heritage, indulging in flashbacks, and incorporating musical references that are either understated or happenstance. She rejects any expectation and tag that is not self-assigned. The title track contains a verse that begins with "F*ck the heels and dress" and ends with a dismissive "I'm the motherf*cking king, yeah," and later uses as punctuation a vintage soundbite from artistic antecedent Grace Jones. The lack of inhibition transfers into the several romantic escapades, like when her partner is urged to "Live flagrant, make people nervous," or to "Keep it comin' 'til I can't move." Although Richard is resolutely combatant, only strengthened by each being or systemic force in her way, she's not above writing about her envy and insecurity -- as an impenitent wanting "petty to win tonight" as she is when she's fighting for the upliftment of black women. Even when the subtle power of Richard's voice is diminished slightly by trouble or distress, it's advisable to be on the singer's side or out of the way”.
The first interview that I want to bring in is from FACT. They spoke to her in promotion of her second studio album, Goldenheart. After her group Diddy – Dirty Money disbanded in 2012, Richard worked with creative partner and manager, Andrew ‘Druski’ Scott - who co-wrote Goldenheart with her. It is the first in a trilogy of albums by Richard about love, loss, and redemption:
“Her vocals are spare, echoing slowly into blank space; the intonation of that line simultaneously communicates triumph, relief and shock. Once again, she sings about losing it all and the world around her begins to fill up with colour – first a kick drum’s thump and multi-tracked Richards, then glissando strings and fingersnaps – before the pace picks up, morphing from austerity to richly detailed soundscapes. From the possibility of loss, Richard builds and builds, crafting her own universe in the process. Welcome to the world of Blackheart.
To those unaccustomed to Richard’s take on R&B, a quick timeline: New Orleans native, daughter to the ex-frontman of ’70s soul band Chocolate Milk, shot into the starlight as a member of Diddy’s Making the Band girl group experiment Danity Kane, co-conspirator in Diddy’s short-lived and much loved Dirty Money, and now an independent artist very much navigating her own lane. Her debut album, 2013’s Goldenheart, found her fulfilling the promise of her previous mixtapes and EPs with wild ambition. Alongside musical collaborator Druski, she brought AOR, house and classical influences to her years of experience in R&B in a manner that rarely jarred, and felt epic in a way that many independent R&B records struggle to reach. There was also the fantasy and sci-fi element, from George R.R. Martin references (a song called ‘Warfaire’) to the album’s placement at the start of a narrative trilogy.
It’s fitting that Blackheart feels like the second instalment of a trilogy, the stage where a familiar world grows vaster and the author showcases wider emotional and thematic range. It’s The Empire Strikes Back to Goldenheart‘s A New Hope. It’s an album that emerges from a year of personal ruptures in Richard’s life – a professional split from Druski, the reunion and collapse of Danity Kane, family deaths and illnesses – and locates triumph within”.
It also feels like a less narratively structured album than Goldenheart was.
Mmhmm, absolutely! Blackheart is about the fall and like I said, when you’re falling you don’t really have the time to say, “okay everybody, I’m falling!” You’re trying to catch your breath, catch your life. And when you do that, there’s a sudden realisation of who you are, what you’re in and how to stay sane. There’s no narrator needed because you are speaking directly from your soul, and I’m glad everyone can see the stories we’re showing are real and we don’t have to force it. That’s beautiful, because sometimes it’s hard to get people on your wavelength and taking you seriously. Especially when you’re independent with no budget or money and wanting to relate a difficult story and keep it authentic and – honestly – cinematic.
It’s interesting that you use the term “cinematic”, because at times listening to the album is like watching a film go widescreen, like the possibilities are suddenly much vaster. It also emphasises character traits that you may not have displayed on Goldenheart, like the wry sense of humour on ‘Billie Jean’. It takes a lot of cojones to call your song ‘Billie Jean’, for instance.
I want to be clear that I wasn’t trying to take him on, what Michael did was brilliant! Michael talked about her so brilliantly that there remains this idea of what a Billie Jean is. I’ve encountered a lot of [Billie Jeans] in this industry… We’ll call her a hoe, a tramp, a stripper, a reality TV show groupie. And what I’ve realised that there is a thin line between the whore and the artist starving and willing to do whatever to make it on her label, or what the tennis player will do for their agent, or the football player will do for that deal. Instead of calling her a hoe, I called her Billie Jean. I’m like… intrigued and impressed at the maneuvering behind the woman matching the Billie Jean idea. She’s making it. It’s a feminist take on who people call the hoes and video girls of the world or whatever they may be – by the end of the record I’ve become her. I had to do what she did just to get a number one record. Am I Billie Jean? We’re all on the borderline of doing something to get where we need to get. I didn’t want to come at it negatively, so there’s that lightheartedness you mentioned.
Do you consider Blackheart a feminist album?
Yeah. But listen, before you write that down, let me go back. People throw that term around so strongly these days that I want to be careful in the way I state this: I am just a woman. I’m a woman that has stood by her brand and this independent push for a very long time. A lot of my other records have taken a feminist approach because I feel like there are not enough of us out there having the voice that we should have, and when we speak, we’re ridiculed. A lot. I’m not here to call myself a feminist, but what I love about our brand is that as a woman, I’m able to put out an album that never antagonises the woman, only lifts her. And what we’re trying to do is beyond than just being a woman or the colour of your skin – there is no gender, no colour and no genre to this music. It is universal. Blackheart is not a feminist album – the movement that we’re doing is a feminist act”.
I am not going to go into depth with all of her albums but, as her sophomore release came eight years after Been a While (an ironic title in hindsight!), it was worth exploration. In 2019, Richard spoke with London in Stereo about her development and ideas behind New Breed:
“There is a new movement of people coming. It’s with creatives, it’s with artists, it’s with women. We are no longer silenced by the things we felt we had to be,” Dawn Richard asserts over the phone from LAX. Now under the moniker of DAWN (FKA D∆WN), the American artist, who as we speak is about to wrap up a tour with her old US chart-topping group Danity Kane, rattles answers out at a frenetic pace. This is a woman with passion and cynical know-how that’s indebted as much to her upbringing in New Orleans as it is to her switch from pop star to independent solo artist…
“You know, as a black woman,” she says, reflecting on her early career, “I’ve had to pander and I’ve had to be quiet. We listened because we were afraid to lose our jobs. I realised that that woman was someone I was never going to be: someone who I wasn’t raised to be.”
DAWN is talking about the message at the core of her forthcoming record, new breed. The album, which arrives three years after the conclusion of her solo album trilogy, is an uncompromising calling card for honouring the true self.
“This new album really speaks to the history behind why I chose to be an indie artist even though it was a really hard run,” DAWN explains. “I was told, ‘If you just do this and just be like this then you can have the career you want.’ But that just wasn’t me. I owe that all to the foundation of where I come from.”
The submissive nature of the pop industry she discusses sits at odds with the spirit of New Orleans. “Where I come from, the Mardi Gras Indian, the woman, the queen, the kings, they are proud people – we are proud people. This album speaks to who I was and who I am now. This album speaks to every girl, every man, every gay, every person who’s ever felt they’re new – they’re a new breed of person – and they’re refusing to be unapologetic for being exactly the fuck themselves.”
With new breed, DAWN has found a way to channel this outlook. The title track, at points carrying remnants of New Orleans bounce, is full of proud proclamations dotted over hulky polyrhythms – “I am a lion, I am a woman,” she sings. At the end of the carnivalesque ‘dreams and converse’, Richard introduces Mardi Gras field recordings. It’s the first of many spoken-word vignettes that bind the old New Orleans with the new: the resilient, musical city, and the modern electronic sounds Richard so boldly experiments with.
When the subject is broached about whether the music industry is finally catching up with female producers like herself, she says it is, but slowly. “With goldenheart in 2013 I was doing alternative underground stuff at a time when people weren’t really celebrating a girl without a label. In 2015 everyone was like, ‘Oh [FKA] Twigs, SZA, Kelela…we get it.’ Don’t forget, I was blessed [in Danity Kane] to be part of something that was a hit but I want people to catch up a little faster.” She mentions Janelle Monáe. “We’re only just catching up with her as a beautiful brown girl who’s doing something that isn’t just R&B.” Richard wants to “champion” these women, “especially chocolatey brown girls doing great things in electronic music”.
I will round off soon but, as Dawn Richard is such an accomplished and strong artist that many people have not heard, I wanted to take a slight diversion from the path of the promising newcomer and throw some light on one of the most remarkable songwriters and vocalists on the scene. I want to finish by quoting from a PITCHFORK interview. They spoke with Dawn Richard/DAWN about signing with the Merge label for her new album, Second Line; what lessons she learned from her early career, and how she has been keeping busy during lockdown:
“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.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.”
How did you link up with Merge?
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”.
Even though Dawn Richard has been in the industry for many years and has established a huge fanbase, she is not only an artist who has passed some people by and remains hidden; I think she will also be an icon of the future. I wanted to include her in Modern Heroines as she has already influenced many artists but, as she keeps releasing music, she will compel and shape so many others! Keep an eye out for Second Line and the next chapter from an artist who…
IS a genuine superstar.