How To Dress Well Chats About His New Album, Care
Tom Krell launched How to Dress Well in 2009 with a series of EPs that threaded together R&B ambiance and synth-pop sensibilities. Since then, the globe-trotting producer has released four full-lengths, including 2016’s exquisite Care. In this excerpt from his recent appearance on RBMA Radio’s The Deepest Dish, Krell told host Leor Galil about re-orienting his songwriting, the influence of music blogs and working with dancehall producer Dre Skull.
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Care is your fourth album – how long were you working on the album?
\n\nI was working on the album, with real focus, for about two years – 18 months, two years. Some of the sounds on the record are really old sounds. There’s a song on the record called “Burning Up,” which… has been something that was floating around in a skeletal form, since 2010, and had actually a lyrical transformation across its different iterations.
\n\nI guess there’s some synecdoche between that change and then the general change in the vibe of Care, as opposed to some of my other records. The lyrics I had been written for that song, and its first few iterations were really cynical, really dark and depressive. The song is still quite sad: It’s a sad song about disillusion, and falling out of love. It just has less hubris about it now, it’s more just genuinely sad. Instead of being like, “Love is hard, face the facts.” It’s more like, “Damn, it’s a shame.”
There’s so much subterfuge in musical performance... I just started to get allergic to that.
Seems a little bit more direct. I was just reading a New York Times feature where you talk about being more direct in your music. What made you want to take that direction with this album?
\n\nYeah, it’s definitely a big theme for me, on this record. [A] big experiment, for me, in terms of my music in general. There’s a heap of factors. One thing is I remember about two and a half years ago, we had a club show, after the Pitchfork Festival, at Lincoln Hall in Chicago. At one point in the set, as a joke, as a bit – and it was so thrilling that I was like, “Whoa, this is important” – I asked the lighting designer to bring up all the lights in the room. House lights, the lights in the crowd, lights on stage, all of them. Turn off all the color gels, and we did a song in that extremely bare, naked context.
\n\nIt felt totally different than any other performance in my life, it was like, “Holy shit.” There’s something unmistakable about it, I was there performing, people were there listening. We were involved in this meaningful – not a transaction, in the whatever commercial sense of it – but in exchange of real trust.
\n\nIt was super thrilling. Then I came off stage, and I was like, “What was so cool about that?” Why did it feel so cool to be so unmistakable about it? There’s so much subterfuge in musical performance. In the last ten years, all of a sudden, every indie band with two hundred followers has a projector, and an LD [lighting director] they travel with and shit. They bring the tricks of stadium concerts to the tiny club in Louisville. I just started to get allergic to that, and that live performance was a big, transformative thing for me.
\n\nI think also just things I’ve been reading, in terms of the literature that I’ve been reading, and the films I’ve been attracted to and stuff. I’ve been feeling like there’s so much impressionistic art, and we live in a time that’s so ambiguous, and confusing, and I just wanted to do something really unmistakable.
\n\nHow do you translate that – the naked quality of that performance, and trying to be less ambiguous? How did that transition work, as far as the new material?
\n\nIt’s just an orientation, where if I felt like in my head, or my heart or whatever. “I’m dancing around something here: Stop what I’m doing, and try and figure out what I’m dancing around. Put that on the page, or put that on the track.” If I started producing something, and was like, “Well, that’s cool, let me just throw a ton of reverb on it.” I’d be like, “Wait a second, hold on, what does it sound like if it’s crystal clear?” If it’s not good enough, crystalline, to present, I don’t want it on the record.
I was thinking a lot about something that Oneohtrix Point Never, Dan [Lopatin] said, when he made R Plus Seven. He was like, “Yeah, everybody can throw gauzy synths on a record, like literally if you get a good reverb setting, you can make anything sound beautiful.” I just remember thinking, “Yeah, damn, what would it sound like to distill all of this super reverb drenched music, down to its elements?” Would it be tight, or would it be really lame? I felt like it was an experiment I want to indulge.
\n\nDid that change the music that you’d been working on, as you were stripping those layers back? Did it change the lyrics that you were writing, or your methodology for making music?
\n\nIn a way it changed the lyrics I was writing. I was just oriented towards being as close to the bone as possible. Even on this record, where I still write really weird lyrics, obviously, and even to my mind, even where this record goes poetic, it goes so with real clarity. It’s not just some congregate, some random amalgam of words, that I’m like, “That sounds pretty.” It’s like even if there’s a poetic image, like image of the wild energy of a dog barking, or something like that. That’s an unmistakable image, it’s not like an “against poetry,” or an “against impressionistic” writing method.
\n\nIt’s more like a holistic orientation towards everything. In terms of the sounds I was generating, I just started to pay a lot more attention. I think that a lot of the songs on this record are more like groups of little micro songs, little sweets. On this record, when it soars, it feels like it really soars. When it gets close, it feels so in the ear, and so naked. That’s what I wanted to win, and I feel like I won through the directness. It allows you to do more dynamic transitions, if you can really move from clear, day lit sounds, to really heavy, murky, dark sounds.
With that in mind, let’s talk about one particular song off Care. Is there any one that is striking you at this moment?
\n\nThe second song on the record, it’s called “Salt Song.” It, to me, feels like a really good statement of the whole upshot of the record. I mean statement in the metaphorical sense. Lyrically, it’s really direct, it’s about wanting to learn to care for myself, I became fascinated with this image of becoming my own best mother, or father. Becoming my own best brother, or sister, it’s a song about that, and about trying to come up with a concept of happiness that doesn’t feel cheap to me. Over the course of the song, in the verses I was writing, I learn more and more about what happiness means. Even though there’s a melodic refrain, the words to the choruses change in subtle ways, over the course of the entire song.
\n\nIn the middle of the song, I recount a dream that I had. I had started writing the song, I went to sleep: I had a dream, that I was an old man, with long, gray hair. I entered this house – it was empty, but it didn’t feel barren – and I entered this room, and there was a little boy sitting on the ground in a bed of flowers, like four years old. I was like, “Holy shit, it’s me?” I was like, “Hey, how’s it going?” He’s like, “Hey, what’s your name?” I was like, “My name’s Tom.” He’s like, “My name’s Tom.” I was like, “Yeah, we have the same name. You’re just a little bit smaller.” I actually sing that story of that dream before the penultimate section of the song.
Watch a 2013 RBMA lecture with Dre Skull here
Then the song goes into a long ambient suite and then comes out just fucking rocking at the end, really triumphal. It’s a long song with a lot of different sequences, really rollicking rock song. Additionally I was helped by the famous dancehall producer Dre Skull: He helped me produce this one, which I think a lot of people are like, “What? Dre Skull produced this rolling rock song? What a trip.” But he just was so helpful in terms of the whole energy of the song across the six minutes. It’s my favorite song on the record right now. I was just thinking about it this morning. I really love it, I’m extremely proud of it.
\n\nTake me back to the beginning. What inspired you to actually start recording and more importantly I guess releasing, putting your music out into the public eye?
\n\nThe beginning is I’m 14: I’m just completely lost and failed out of high school, and started at this weird college preparatory academy where I was going to go for a year so that I could maybe finish high school. The people that I first gravitated towards there were making music and recording music. I was like, “Okay cool, this is what I want to do.” It was therapeutic. Flash forward to 2009, and I’ve been making music many days a week for my entire life. I had a handful of songs that I was listening to that I had made and I was like, “Whoa, these don’t feel like other people’s songs.” Up to that point – it would be like, “This is a Belle and Sebastian song,” or “This is an Animal Collective song,” or “This is a Black Dice song” or whatever.
\n\nFor the first time ever I was like, “Huh, these feel really cool. Okay, I’ll gather them, find a picture on Tumblr, and put them on my Blogspot.” Then all of a sudden – I don’t even really know the channels that it went through to get to people – I think Friendship Bracelet was the first blog that ever posted about it. I think that the powers that be were just watching his blog, and all of a sudden people were paying attention to my music.
\n\nDid you ever talk to Friendship Bracelet about how your music got into his hands from your Blogspot?
\n\nYeah, he lived with some girls in Brooklyn or something that knew me and that had seen me post it on my personal Facebook. They were like, “Yo, check this out.” Then he posted it: He hit me up on email, then, yeah, it just went from there. That was literally when there were blogs, so there were dope places to discover music on the Internet instead of just nightmarish commercial ad-peddlers. Then it ran that circuit, you know what I mean? It was on Visitation Rites, it was on Rose Quartz, and all the dope-ass blogs where I was visiting these sites daily to discover new music. It was a cool time actually: 2010 was a lit time for music.
Independent music is so important. It’s more important now than, I think, ever.
You talk about creating something that you identify as distinctly yours for the first time. What made it sound like nothing else out there? What made it feel like nothing else out there?
\n\nI’m not entirely sure. I think that for me, I just always knew that I had a special melodic sensibility that was missing in a lot of the music that I was listening to at the time, and I was also really interested in making some kind of bridge between The-Dream and Music for Airports, something between Terius Nash. I was like, “Oh shit, I did it. I don’t think anybody else has ever done this.” I was like, “Damn, cool.” I just sent it out, and people were like, “Whoa, cool.” I was like, “Whoa, cool.” They were like, “Yeah, cool.” I was like, “Oh, sick.” That’s how it all started.
\n\nFrom there you signed with Lefse, correct?
\n\nYou don’t really sign with Lefse. They were like, “Hey, we want to make ten thousand copies of your record. Is that cool?” I was like, “Sure, but what’s the trick?” They were like, “No trick, we’ll just pay you.” I was like, “Oh, great.” Then Tri Angle picked up that record, and did it in the United Kingdom and Europe and Asia. I was like, “Wait a second, my record just came out worldwide. What?” Then from there I started speaking with Domino: Even before they were officially putting out my records, they were super supportive.
\n\nI try not to miss an opportunity to say this, but I’m on an independent label. It’s so important. Independent music is so important. It’s more important now than, I think, ever, as more and more major label A&Rs are just completely pimping, ripping off and exploiting the labor of independent musicians. Domino was invested in me, in terms of the money, emotion, time, care, and attention, even before they were looking to make a single dollar off me. They care about music.
\n\nThat’s why it’s lit to be on an independent label. They have money to do cool video projects and marketing budgets, but they also just are... I know everybody in every office worldwide at Domino. They’re into music. They’re not commerce-oriented primarily, and they support real art. I love everyone at Domino. They’re like the family. It’s so cool.
\n\nYou have Domino among the bigger indie labels. It really does have this wide array of artists and sounds. You don’t get the sense that they are interested in one specific thing, but more in the people that are creating it. What made you want to make that connection before you knew everyone in there?
Watch a 2016 RBMA lecture with Dev Hynes here
I mean Domino’s a label that I’ve always had a huge amount of respect for. Unlike some of the other big indies, they’re not elitist, pretentious hipsters. Like you said, they put out artists and they stick with artists through careers. They just had the Blood Orange album come out. Dev Hynes had a lot of twists and turns in his career before he arrived at this magical place. He’s a friend, and so I know there are some moments which he wasn’t quite sure what he should be doing with himself. But because they stuck with him, now they’ve got a beautiful thing – beautiful record, tour and everything. When a label has a track record of putting out great music and weird music, also having number one records, it’s just a no-brainer.
\n\nI’ve known you as a Chicago musician for the entirety of your public career. You recently moved partially to LA. Tell me about that transition.
\n\nIt’s funny, you know, my first record came out September 2010. I had just moved to Chicago the week it came out from Berlin, where I was living for a few years prior to that. Then right when I landed in Chicago I started touring heavy and traveling a lot for music. I think in the last five years I spent probably in total a year in Chicago. I recently relocated to Los Angeles just because I’ve been really enjoying it out there. I spent most of the winter out there and I was like, “Wait a second, I’m not depressed.” Also I do a lot of songwriting and stuff for other people, and there’s just a real community of people making music out there. It’s kind of dope right now.
\n\nGiven this – not quite newfound relationship, but this new setting of roots down in LA – what’s your relationship to Chicago now?
\n\nWell I’ve never really had roots down anywhere, which is something I don’t really understand entirely, but I’ve been just super transient basically my entire life. I lived in New York, I lived in Cologne, I lived in Berlin. I was in Paris for a little bit, was in London for the making of Total Loss for about ten weeks. Now I’ve been in LA for six months or something. I still have an apartment here in Chicago, it’s good to be back right now, today. Leaving tomorrow night after the show, in the middle of the night to go play our first shows ever in Michigan, which I’m kind of stoked about, playing Grand Rapids and Detroit. Chicago is like always a beautiful place to be. Especially obviously in the summer, it’s like a godsend. The energy is so good here in the summer because everybody’s just like, “Uh, get me out of that winter hellhole.” Yeah, it’s a lovely, lovely city, one of the greats.
Working on music and working on academic stuff affects me as a person, but they don’t really affect each other directly.
Considering you’ve lived in so many places and you travel frequently for your job, what makes Chicago distinct besides the great summers? What makes it appeal to you in particular?
\n\nI mean what makes it appeal to me in particular is something more from like the residential side. When people come here and they’re like, “Yeah I’m just passing through or coming on vacation.” I don’t really know what you do in Chicago on vacation. I know what it’s like to wake up in Chicago, walk down the boulevards in Logan Square, get coffee. Take the bus over to the lake go swimming, that’s a wave, that’s a really solid vibe. It’s just extremely lush and beautiful here in the summer. I think that, like, as with anywhere, what makes this place work for you or not work for you are the people there. I just have really good people here so.
\n\nWith that in mind, what’s your creative community? Who do you bounce ideas off of here?
\n\nI actually don’t have a lot of creative-community homies here. I do have a select group, like my friend David Ashley, I think he’s like probably the best unsigned rapper working. He’s just a brilliant writer and poet, and just has a completely special vision. I’ve done some work over the last few years with, like, Chance [The Rapper] and those guys. But they bounce around twice as much as I do, they’re never here. My community in Chicago is more like people that I’ve known for a long time who have randomly ended up here.
\n\nWhat brought you here in the first place?
\n\nI came here in 2010 on the heels of a Masters Degree in Philosophy, which I did in New York and finished in Germany. I came here to start a PhD in Philosophy.
\n\nIf I recall, you’re still working on your dissertation?
\n\nWhen you do a PhD for leisure it’s a different timeline than if you’re doing it to pursue a career in academia. If it was the only thing I was doing I’d be done with it by the end of the year, but evidently it’s not the only thing I’m doing. It’s more about self-enrichment than anything else – trying to make my brain grow and make my brain really smart.
\n\nLearning for pleasure is a tremendous thing and being able to do that in an academic setting must be great. How does that affect your musical work?
\n\nI don’t really think it does exactly. Working on music affects me as a person, working on academic stuff affects me as a person, but they don’t really affect each other directly. Obviously they both pass through me as a prism or whatever, and they’re both about really precisely articulating, like, what I value in this life and like – which is what the fuck this life on earth is supposed to look like.
\n\nDo you feel like you’ve gotten a better hold on what life on earth is supposed to look like?
\n\nNot really. I know what it looks like, I know what it looks like. I know what this looks like, but that’s not what it is. I know what it’s supposed to look like in certain situations, and I know what it looks like when it fails to live up to the paradigm. It’s not just like a game where you look for answers per se.
\n\nIs there a song of yours that you would like to go out on that’s a good goodbye?
A goodbye tune? How about we send everybody out with the newest single from Care, which is called “Can’t You Tell”? It’s a song about fucking, and it’s a real fun romp, but it’s also a song about care. I wanted to write a song that was about sex that was also about consent, but not about consent as something like a transactional agreement over a single act – say intercourse. Rather consent as more like an ethos.
\n\nSo it’s a sex song, but it’s not only about paying attention to someone’s gestures but also listening to the words they say. And consent isn’t just about a “yes” to an act, it’s also about matching someone on the level of their values, on the level of what gives them pleasure, physically, and even spiritually, and intellectually. It’s like a comprehensive sex song that doesn’t separate like physical, muscular sex from tenderness and care, but tries to do it all at once.