Musician Dessa reflects on new album, live radio and Latin heritage

Multi-hyphenate talent Dessa has had quite the year. Between releasing a new album, hosting public radio programs and going on tour, she found time during Hispanic Heritage Month to speak with MPR News arts reporter Jacob Aloi about her work, and how her Latina roots have influenced her music.  

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

‘Bury the Lede’ is your newest album. It’s the first in five years. How long has this process been, and why release it now? 

Dessa: This is the first full-length that I released. But to be honest, I’ve been releasing pretty consistently, you know, at least as consistently as you can during a pandemic, where all of every industry is shuttered.  

A lot of it is pretty fresh material. In the past couple of years working with Andy Thompson and Lazerbeak, my fellow Doom team member, lots of like, basement meetings in Andy’s studio, building this thing from the ground up in the past couple of years. 

I was listening to ‘Blush’ from the album and it gave me such nostalgia. It reminded me of a song that I would hear in a coming-of-age movie.

The line that stuck out to me was: ‘I can see the problem clearly, I can see the simple fact is, you like me in theory, and I like you back in practice.’

Oh, man. First of all, I’ll totally take it, coming-of-age movies. Yes, I think I’m just still as sensitive as your run-of-the-mill teenager. Like I’m just crazy sensitive. You know, hopefully, you learn to maneuver through the world more effectively as an adult. But, yeah, for that song — it is in some ways on the surface, I think there are a lot of features that you’d find in a standard love song. 

But I think there’s also the question right beneath the surface: How much can you or are you compromising in the interest of loving somebody? And that sounds like a heady philosophical question, but I think, in practice, we all have encountered that. Like, how different is too different … do they have to like me back exactly the same amount? I think there can be a tendency to self-edit, like, I want to be the version of me that you find most likable.  

I wrote [“Blush,”] the chorus anyway, you know, it was just kind of like a soaring big interval. I wrote that one sitting on a ferry in Puerto Rico writing, humming to myself alone in a seat, so it was kind of a coming-of-age, solo romantic trip.

I think the other obvious standout on the album is ‘Hurricane Party.’ Can you tell me a little bit about the song?  

“Hurricane Party” started with a Lazerbeak beat, and Lazerbeak always has his beats named by the time I received them in my email. So I think this one was called “crane gang.” And he goes, “Yo, I think you should write to crane gang.” 

I liked listening, and I don’t know what to write to it. And he nudged, he nudged a lot harder than he usually does. And it ended up, I think, being one of my favorites on the record. 

In short, the lyrics speak to the fact that I think it’s easy to feel like there is an existential threat looming on absolutely every quadrant of the horizon. And that’s certainly true. Now, when turning on the news, it is overwhelming heart-rending and demoralizing. And, yet, there have to be moments cut out of our day or our week to dance and to stay up late and to feel fully and unapologetically alive. And so that song is sort of a soundtrack for the hurricane party where you batten the hatches call your friends over and stock up on booze.  

You’ve hosted 1A, you hosted Science Friday, of course, you have your own podcast, Deeply Human. Tell me a little about what that experience has been like.  

Man, I will say that the transition from making a prerecorded product, working on a podcast where I get to interview people, edit it up to just pick the favorite bits and then assemble it, kind of creates a narrative in post after the conversation.

Switching from that format to live public radio. Oh my God, it astounds me that that’s a job that a person has. It feels like a hybrid between a conversationalist, which is what I’m more familiar with, and like an air traffic controller, I mean, it was just — yeah, it was, it was definitely the flexing and building of new muscles for me, stressful. 

It’s still Hispanic Heritage Month. And I think it’s fair to say you’re very proud of your Puerto Rican roots. What role have those roots, that culture, played?

You know, I think when I was growing up in Minneapolis, if somebody had asked me what my race was, I probably would have said Puerto Rican or would have said, mixed — Puerto Rican and white. We’re talking about race in a different way now, right? We’re differentiating race and ethnicity … so that’s a finer blade, which is appropriate. It's a finer blade and kind of a greater degree of magnification. I think that we're examining some of these issues.  

That said, I think that, you know that my mom has a great voice. My mom is one of four siblings, and so when she was growing up, they were like this little choir, they could do four-part harmony, Mamas and Papas.  

When I would go back to New York with my mom, where she was from, in the summers or whatever, when I was a kid, like watching them sing, watching them dance, we would go to this place called Spanish Camp, where all kinds of Spanish-speaking families would go to this kind of village of bungalows, and there would be salsa that was playing from speakers that were mounted on the light posts, essentially ... that wasn’t a huge part of my childhood, but it was an informative one.

I would say that the vocal musicality for me is a direct line from my mother, who has a phenomenal voice. So, the kind of singing and vocal expression — that’s from Mom.  

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