Dawn Richard Will Find a Way to Be Heard
April 15, 2021
The singer and songwriter Dawn Richard’s career has endured numerous twists and turns. Her new album, “Second Line,” is her first for a label known largely for indie rock.Credit...Myles Loftin for The New York Times
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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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