The Design of Dawn Richard

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In October 2023, Dawn Richard made an EP called The Architect, a dance project that now exists in-between her two minimalist albums with Spencer Zahn. It’s a three-song arc that begins with “Your Love / Legend,” a throbbing, noisy, robotic lesson in desire and danger. A doomy, futuristic voice welcomes the listener in: “Old city status due to catastrophic weather, war, and civil unrest. Complete anarchy, what is left is BRUTAL.” The instruments swell and then contract, leaving us with Richard, synthesizers and a drum machine. “They say to be a Legend, you got to have strength, babe, but you took it from me when you left.” It’s a love song unfurling in the wake of misfortune, a kind of affection that must, indefinitely, exist within the context of what pain preceded it.

Hurricane Katrina was the first historical event that I remember living through and paying attention to. But, having grown up in the Midwest, I never understood just how critical that disaster was and how much it hurt the city of New Orleans. It was devastating, yet Katrina’s presence lingers through Richard’s discography—affirming her relationship with the city she was born in, having to communicate with tragedy. “It’ll always be with me, it’ll always be a part of my language and my messaging because it still, to this day, affects us so much,” she says. “19 years later, it still affects us. We still have to rebuild—not only the people who went through Katrina, but people who are still going through it now.”

She was born Dawn Angeliqué Richard in New Orleans, descending from a lineage of Louisiana Creole and Haitian ancestry. Her father, Frank, was the lead singer of a funk band called Chocolate Milk, while her mother ran a dancing school. As a teen, she performed in a local group called Realiti and, while she majoring in marine biology at the Nicholls State University, she worked as a cheerleader for the New Orleans Hornets basketball team—balancing labs with both stadium performances and recording music at a studio in the city’s West Bank. At 22, she wrote a record called Been a While under the name Dawn Angeliqué, and the songs are, as Richard calls it, about “a young girl trying to find her identity while trying to be in academia and find a band and a studio that would make sense in the process of it.” “I was a child that didn’t have the ability to truly live life enough to write really deep records,” she says.

Putting Her Home on the Main Stage

Something that fascinates me about Second Line is how that record establishes not only the lore of Dawn Richard, but the lore of a place like New Orleans and the history of Black women making dance music. She brings her attraction to movements like Detroit house and D.C. go-go to the forefront, allowing cultures to converge and shape songs like “Jacuzzi,” “Boomerang” and “Bussifame.” “It’s important to respect where the music and the sounds come from. I think we quickly forget the Frankie Knuckles, the Donna Summers, the Crystal Waters and the La Bouches—these artists who were a part of dance music and built the sound,” she says. “Ballroom culture, queer communities in New York City, Chicago—I think we often forget that the Black culture was the cultivators of that. And then, all of a sudden, it shifted into white DJs and that became the definition of electronic dance.”

In Louisiana especially, bounce music spawned from crunk and Jersey club but never had a, as Richard puts it, “shot at the main stage” or in conversations about genre. “It wasn’t until Juvenile with ‘Back That Azz Up,’ or when [Big] Freedia came along to work with Beyoncé [on ‘BREAK MY SOUL’], or when Drake decided to do [‘Nice For What’] that we then put bounce on the main stage. It almost took other people from different states to really give the credit to the culture when, really, bounce music in New Orleans carried radio play. Freedia has opened up a door, and I think we should let a lot of bounce artists come in because of it. And thank God for Freedia for being able to have that shine. They deserve that, but it’s one of those things where, when I started to design Second Line, if I talk about the importance of Black culture in dance music, I would be disrespectful if I did not include the Larry Heards, or what Chicago and what D.C. bounce music has been for dance music—and even disco and funk, for that matter. That was important to me, and that’s why Second Line has those influences. I feel like I wouldn’t be able to speak on the importance of Black women or Black culture in the genre if I did not have those sounds be a part of that album.

But Richard’s influences go even deeper than that. She was a Black girl who grew up listening to rock music, had pink and blue hair and liked anime. “That means I’m gonna be all the things,” she confirms. Her household would be filled with the sounds of Claude Debussy, the Nicholas Brothers and Mikhail Barynshnikov, but her very first concert was Green Day and her childhood favorites were the Cranberries, Björk and Kate Bush. Richard can’t talk about her come-up without mentioning the R&B, soul and funk spilling into Bourbon Street nightly, or the marching bands playing brass, or how, on certain days, she’d hear local Mardi Gras Indians chanting in the streets.

And having such a reverie of genius around her, it allowed Richard to grab creative control over her own journey and apply every inspiration to the art she makes. “One of the biggest things that I will say, too, is, though I never thought that I would be ostracized or talked negatively about for wanting to do that, I never thought that being a Black woman would mean it would stifle me from playing with my art,” she says. “I never thought, as a musician, that I would be told, ‘Yo, you’re a Black woman, so any music you make needs to be soul and R&B.’ Or that any music I make needs to be a derivative of R&B. I thought I would be able to do whatever I wanted, because I just loved the craft.”

In that sense, many have labeled Dawn Richard a “chameleon,” especially because the last two years of her career have included a poetry album, a dance project like The Architect and singles with rap artists like KAYTRANADA, Flying Lotus and Cakes da Killa. “What it shows me is I’m versatile in my craft,” she says. “In dance, I didn’t go and say, ‘Oh, I want to learn hip-hop and I’m only going to learn hip-hop.’ No, through my dance school, I had to learn tap, jazz, ballet, gymnastics, all of it. Did I have a concentration? Absolutely. But I had to, in order to get my certificate, learn all of it. Just like college, you have to take all your core classes. For me, it is important that, if I say I’m a musician and I am in this art, I want to know how far I can stretch myself. What would I have been if I would not have taken the risk to bend? If I never would have done that poetry project [On Imagination] with Ebonie [Smith], I would not have had the opportunity to dance with Alvin Ailey—which was a dream of mine and for my mother since we could think. Alvin Ailey was a staple for Black women and Black dancers.”

But “chameleon” is a term that only further distresses the way that Black women and queer artists are constantly boxed in with their music. Richard wagers that journalists and editors need to “really open their eyes to the way in which they choose to write about an artist.” “If someone is alternative, or if a Black artist is a bit off-kilter or to the left of a genre, that artist is ‘different,’” she explains. “‘Put R&B behind it.’ They’ve done it with SZA and myself, Fousheé—calling it alternative R&B rather than stating it’s alternative music. I think, because of the soul and the choice of melodic vocal arrangements, we tend to get pigeonholed. If we take the visual out of it, it shouldn’t matter what we look like. If the intentionality behind the music is a certain thing, we should be able to be that.” Richard tells me a story about her girl-group days—about how being a Black girl in a predominantly multiracial musical act affected her. “I’d write a record and, when my group sang it, it was a pop song,” she says. “When I sang it, it was an R&B record.” You could see that trend even in the 2010s, the way that a Fifth Harmony song became two different songs when Normani and Camila Cabello sang it.

Richard brings up how Doja Cat and the Weeknd make pop records but predominantly get nominated in R&B categories at the Grammys. “I use those names because, at that level they’re being questioned about, they’re being questioned about where they belong.” At the DIY level, Black artists are constantly pigeonholed. But does that matter? “Fuck no,” Richard says. “We just keep on keeping on. Though I felt it, I’ve never felt that it mattered. If you look at Lady Gaga, she’s been able to literally dabble in everything and no one’s ever questioned it. She did a country album, a dance album and won all the awards for it. She has done jazz with Tony Bennett. I mean, she has really stretched herself quite beautifully and we never blinked. We were like, ‘Yes, we received it.’ I think that’s a beautiful testament to, if you allow an artist to just be, the possibilities can be endless. If you step away for a second and see the possibilities of what an artist can be, you might be surprised. André 3000 doing an incredible flute album: You can make fun of it all you want, but he wanted something—he felt compelled to do it, and it came out beautifully. And whether people like it or not, it just shows how damn talented he is.”

She continues, “Pharrell is another one. If you would have told me that Pharrell would be the leading voice of the Minions and work with animation… Is it surprising? No, because he is amazing at building sound. He is amazing at understanding visual concepts. Is it shocking that he will then go to Louis Vuitton and do it? No. That’s not a chameleon to me. That’s a true artist—someone who understands their craft and can build their craft to be multiple things. That’s someone who is really understanding their major and thriving and they’re graduating summa cum laude.”

Finding Her Sweet Spot

This autumn, Richard and Spencer Zahn released their second album together: Quiet in a World Full of Noise. It’s some of the very best work she’s ever made. “It healed me in such a way that we didn’t even realize we were on to something there,” she says. “And now, we have what we have.” But it hasn’t always worked out that way. Richard has written albums fully acapalla and imagined with no music. Other times, she’ll work with a producer and put touches on their bare-bones arrangements. She calls herself “convertible” in the presence of others. “I never really put myself on them, I’m very much a flexible artist.” When she made Redemption with Machinedrum, they never met in person. Instead, he’d send her tracks and, by the next day, she’d send them back. They did that until there was enough material to assemble a record and their chemistry flourished. On new breed in 2019, she did a lot of self-producing and dedicated so much of that record to sampling her father’s music. Later, she’d collaborate with a “young cat who just had all the talent in the world” named Ila Orbis to make Second Line, working at a Motel Six on some of the most inventive dance music of her career.

But for Quiet in a World Full of Noise, Richard was writing stories that would form into poems that then became music. “Sometimes, it’s one word or one sentence and that is the whole song,” she says. “I’m never afraid of doing that type of structure.” “Diets” is only 13 lines long, while the eight-line “To Remove” came from Richard’s attempt at making a song that sounds like kidneys being drained by using vocal layering—a portrait dedicated to her father, whose lymphoma has spurred renal complications. “I thought it would be great if we could purge the pain that he has gone through, to remove all the waste that he’s had in his life,” she says. “What if life itself were kidneys and we could remove the toxicity to come out clean? Originally, it was just a story about wanting my father to be able to have good kidneys and then realizing, shit, life is like kidneys. You can filter it all day, but at the end, sometimes you’ve gotta be able to remove the waste. That came from that, and Spencer was like, ‘Jesus, we need to put that down.’”

“To Remove” is just a few sentences long, but it’s profound—because the concept of it is the truth, that we can’t always remove what troubles us. Richard wants every song to push a boundary, even if it’s her just doing spoken word on top of one of Zahn’s holistic beds of anchoring, minimalistic keys and string. They’re springboards for each other, and Richard never loses her identity in the spaces that Zahn nurtures for her—in the 20-minute pieces of collaged sounds he builds.

“How powerful is it to have that trust, knowing that somebody like Spencer isn’t going to push back on your ideas?” I ask Richard. “How integral to the sound does that become?” “It’s huge,” she replies. “The hope is that you can, as an artist, find that compatibility, that relationship that works so well that you come out of it being like ‘Damn, not only did you pass, but you soared.’ I don’t know why the universe has been good to me, but I am so grateful that I’ve had incredible relationships with the producers and the musicians that I’ve worked with, and maybe that speaks to me not always having it that good. Maybe, because it was really crazy coming in and that was rough—trying to get respect when you’re on a television show, you’re manufactured. Those producers don’t believe you can write. You’re a product of your environment and, to come out of the mainstream and have nothing and still develop these beautiful relationships with these producers that say, ‘No, we value your input’ and then I say, ‘No, I value yours,’ that has been so rewarding.”

Pigments, the first record she made with Zahn in 2022, is one of her highest-scoring albums, critically. It’s a feat that still shocks Richard two years later. “No one would think we would be musically compatible,” she admits. “We come from completely different walks of life, completely different genres. And I love that. By some way, shape or form, we bring our arts together and create something so unique and so beautifully calm and inspiring that it speaks to, again, putting your trust in each other musically, being craftsmen in your art and being willing to be humble enough to respect the other’s vision of what they see and find the balance.” That’s not an easy feat, but it’s a rewarding one if you can find a sweet spot. For Dawn Richard, she’s been in that sweet spot for about 12 years. Every project she makes compliments the ones that preceded it.

Musicality in Movements

While Second Line and Quiet in a World Full of Noise exist, sonically, on separate ends of the spectrum, they are bound together by movement. Richard doesn’t make a record without “seeing the color first” and seeing the way it moves. And, in the case of Quiet, the movement is stillness. “Sometimes, it’s literally a sway. It’s a shoulder, it’s a bow of the head. It’s laying prostrate. It’s all dance,” she says. Pigments even had an accompanying dance film done by NOCA, the performance school in New Orleans. A quietness and ease exists on Quiet, too, and it can be interpreted into a dance. “That’s why some of the records don’t even have tempo—they move organically. That is modern and contemporary dance at its core.” Richard likens songs like “Traditions” and “Diets” and “Breath Out” to the Graham technique, a concept with a unique dramatic expression and floorwork—specific poses entered into and lingered within.

Similarly, The Architect and Second Line—and even the KAYTRANADA song “Hold On”—are, at their cores, embodiments of Martha Graham’s pedagogy just done in faster choices. “A dancer doesn’t always need to dance for it to be about the dance in the music,” Richard says. “Each song doesn’t require movement, but that does not mean it is not from a dancer’s lens. That’s what happens with my projects and how I choose to move with music. There is no song and no project that I do that does not have movement as a part of the process. I will not make a record if I can’t see the movement.”

Richard’s concentration in dance school was contemporary, but she has always been a lover of hip-hop. And, when she was studying the medium, hip-hop wasn’t really being taught in classes. Even her mother’s dance school didn’t see it as an actual, learnable genre. “So, my mom made it a point to make sure that that was for her dancing school,” Richard says. They would compete at Starpower in Orlando and schools nationwide—predominantly white dance schools, specifically—helped bring popularity to the hip-hop genre. “What was ironic about that,” Richard continues, “is they made the genre big in dance, and it became something to be taught because the white dancing schools love it so much that, then, they made it something that we could compete in.”

But, every year at Starpower, no Black dance troupes ever won the hip-hop competitions, because, as Richard contends, “technique had to be there” as well. “The white girls knew how to put the contemporary and ballet moves into the dance, whatever they thought hip-hop was supposed to look like.” But that isn’t hip-hop dancing, because hip-hop dancing is not about technique; it’s about a “movement that is enriched in a lifestyle.” It became a class that people wanted to take—a process as important to the DNA of dance as modern or tap—because non-Black people loved embodying the essence of it.

A Warrior’s Walk

It’s been only three years since Hurricane Ida ripped through the Gulf Coast and parts of Venezuela, Colombia, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Richard believes that a project like The Architect is for not just the victims of Katrina, but for anyone “who knows what loss is” and “what the storms do,” both physically and spiritually. “There are storms that I am dealing with, through Katrina and then the aftermaths of that in real life,” she says. “My cousin being murdered, or my dad being diagnosed with cancer. There are multiple storms that are constantly growing.” For Richard in her art, it’s crucial for her to tell her story of her city. “It is crucial for me to always hold my city to my chest, to my breast, because it is the reason I’ve been able to survive this industry, survive my career—because of the city I come from and the family I come from.”

The high-point of The Architect, however, is “Babe Ruth”—a song that lives in so many different worlds that it’s practically its own microcosm of cosmic R&B. It’s glitchy, harmonious and confident; Richard herself speaks more languages than just her own, boasting through lines about being the “home run hitter, originator, the juice” and the song title’s double-meaning, comparing herself to the Sultan of Swat and the candy bar. “I keep the sweet tooth fed, give Michelin head, I deserve the bread,” she raps. “Keep you full, big-bellied, enough said.” It’s this braggadocious rollercoaster of epic, firecracker instrumentation—soul, house, alt-rock and hip-hop turned into a masterful exorcism of dense, hypnotic and colorful club euphoria.

Baseball has been a part of Richard’s life for years—she was a softball player once upon a time, performing so well at catcher that she nabbed a full-ride to college for it. Her dream was to play for the U.S. national team in the Olympics, and most of her greatest relationships began through softball. Playing off of her journey through the sport and the cultural perception of it, being tongue-in-cheek and intentional with the verbiage and display, fed into her taste for layers, innuendos and nuance. “It’s always there for those who want to pick apart records, pick apart intentionality—those who want to dig a little deeper,” Richard says. She’s held a longtime affinity for Jackie Robinson but Babe Ruth, however, became her muse on The Architect because she wanted to “push the concept of what we view as successful and great” and subvert a listener’s expectations by weaving her Black womanhood into an iconic concept of an “all-around player.”

But “Babe Ruth,” too, is a continuation of a warrior theme that’s been present in Richard’s music since her 2015 album Blackheart—an innate rendering of the cards she’s been dealt. “I feel like I have to fight twice as hard and I have to move in a certain way,” she admits. “And, sometimes, it isn’t just to the world—it’s my personal choice to constantly be better, do better, and build my own lane and my own world for myself. With ‘Babe Ruth,’ even just the way in which the sounds move together, it’s an intentionality to say, ‘Hey, this is a lane that I’ve built myself and whether you see it, understand it, or whether you want to give me my flowers or not, this lane will still be paved.’” “Babe Ruth” and Richard’s choice of cadence, delivery and attitude is a personal point—a declaration that nobody needs the world to view them as “the greatest” so long as they view themselves as that. It walks in confidence, in boldness.

And that’s been Richard’s M.O. in all of her music. “Everything you think you thought you knew about me as an artist, forget it,” she says. “Everything you thought you knew about the way a structure of a sound is designed, throw it out the window. When you get me, you’re going to get something that you probably weren’t even thinking you needed but I hope, by the end of it, you were like, ‘I needed that.’” That’s the point of her music, to say “I did not expect that and I didn’t even know that would work, but it somehow does.” Perhaps that’s the design of not just “Babe Ruth,” but of Dawn Richard. “When you’re looking for someone that doesn’t necessarily follow the rules but, somehow, makes it work. I can be that for you; this song can be that for you.”

A Choreographed Exhale

In our conversation, Richard briefly cites the stories of Perseus and Pegasus, how the former represents the triumph of man and the latter symbolizes imagination, thirst and unity. There’s a connection there, in the convergence of the physical and the spiritual—a harmonic thread shared between “our grounded selves and our higher aspirations.” That is the crux of Richard’s art, a lightness pulled from the jaws of trauma.

And yet, there is a sense of gratitude, patience and reward in all of her responses—an energy that parallels how she tells her stories in ways that anyone can understand. “I know prayer got me out of my pain, I loved myself when nobody felt the same” goes a couplet on “Quiet in a World Full of Noise”; “I got rid of all the people who weren’t good for me,” she sings on “Diets.” Richard shoots it straight, always widening the focus. “It becomes easy to realize that I’m not the only person with a sword,” she says. “Everybody has swords, everybody’s fighting. And these songs relate to the concept of what that is.” Like The Architect and Blackheart, Quiet in a World Full of Noise is a cinematic, warrior’s journey—an ecosystem Richard has created in her mind. “What I realize is,” she concludes,” I’m not the only one slaying the dragons. I don’t know anything else but the fight. I make music for people who need to feel believed in, because I have to believe that, too.”

There is a song on Quiet in a World Full of Noise called “Traditions.” It doesn’t overstay its welcome, pacing delicately through a minimally arranged piano, acoustic bass and sustain. Richard’s whispers warmly: “My baby don’t go nowhere without his Carolina blues. He’s a mama’s body, she a Tar Heel fan, too. You call it superstitious, I call it traditions.” Zahn’s instrumental sounds like it wouldn’t be out of place on a Jon Brion soundtrack, and it cushions Richard’s voice intimately. Where “Babe Ruth” is the kind of song that belongs in a museum, “Traditions” inhales and exhales like the growing world around us. You could get lost in its softness—and maybe we all should. It’s the kind of song that, entering 2024, I didn’t know I needed. Now, as we all careen towards 2025 and try to dispel whatever loss awaits us, it’s a song that I can’t live without.

Richard has cited everybody from Peter Gabriel to Enya as a reference point in her long, fabled career. She’s a student of music, rhapsodizing about Prince (“He played every instrument. Every band that came from him had his sound. He could write for a woman, he could write for a man. He was doing albums every second. He was so full and, whether you loved it or not, he didn’t care. He needed to get that out. That’s somebody that is so beyond”) and Bjӧrk (“She does an album and it’s all strings. The next one is all flutes. The next one is built around mushrooms. The next one is virtual reality. The levels of ‘I’m gonna do what moves me,’ you cannot take that from an artist. If anything, you can just say, ‘My God, let them move. Let them work’”) with such a reverence that you can’t help but buy into whatever embodiments she’s chasing. Richard makes variables feel like a fantasy, as she lives different lives across the work she makes. Maybe she’s surviving; maybe she’s archiving. It’s all pageantry that makes understanding the world through her eyes all the more tranquil and thoughtful.

What Dawn Richard said earlier about Pharrell—about him being someone who understands his craft and can build it to be multiple things—I would say that about her. She’s a curator who’s always questioning the messaging of her own art and whether or not it will heal or move those of us who enter into it. She sings about sadness but ends her verses in hope, building an algorithm that champions clarity in the wake of disarming confusion. Her albums are not just albums, they’re costumes, titles, choreography—concepts designed sensibly enough that, when they see the world, the impact and importance of them are felt ten-fold.

There is a cord that stretches between every single song she makes, no matter who she makes it with—a weightlessness. The traditions she’s singing about on Quiet in a World Full of Noise are the traditions she was singing about on Second Line three years ago. Not every artist has to be that way, but Richard feeds off of being able to sit down and ask, “How intentional and purposeful can I make this? How much of this can be beautifully packaged?” “There is a respect that I have for the listener,” she says. “If you’re going to take the time to listen to me, I’ma for damn sure make sure that, when you listen to it, you get the experience that you paid for or the experience that you need. I really love this thing, man. I gave up a lot to do this, even when it didn’t love me back.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

COVER STORY: The Design of Dawn Richard

Putting Her Home on the Main Stage

Finding Her Sweet Spot

Musicality in Movements

A Warrior’s Walk

A Choreographed Exhale