URB: Yeah.
DESSA: I love Converse shoes. If they want me to do an endorsement I’m down. [Laughs]. For real. If Swiffer wants me to do an endorsement, I think I should say no because I have a really dirty apartment and that’s gonna look like I’m totally full of shit. So if there were an endorsement opportunity, I hope that I treat it like I do the rest of my career and try to find a genuine way to handle it. And if that meant saying no, I would say no.
URB: Can we expect an official release from The Boy Sopranos in the future?
DESSA: I started making rap music years ago and somewhere along the way I tried to do a couple acapella tracks that layered my own voice in harmony. And I called that layering The Boy Sopranos. So there’s two tracks on the new album, A Badly Broken Code, that are Boy Sopranos tracks, which means it’s mostly just my voice layered in harmony. When I perform those tracks I usually hire singers to help me sing it because I can’t do it all at once. So The Boy Sopranos is a rotating cast of female singers who have agreed, graciously, to join me on-stage to help present that acapella material. So there are technically two songs on the new record by The Boy Sopranos.
URB: Oh okay.
DESSA: You know what I mean?
URB: Yeah I had seen some of the videos online and-
DESSA: I wanted to try to brand it differently so that people weren’t like, “Ah this isn’t rap music! I hate this! It’s church music!” But now everybody is really confused [laughs].
URB: If you could collaborate with any artist or group, who would it be?
DESSA: I don’t really know my all-time answer, but right now it’s definitely Florence of Florence and the Machine. She’s this really badass English chick. I just found out about her a month ago which is probably why I’m so gung ho, ’cause she’s a recent discovery. But she’s really cool. She has a lot of layered vocals too, and really unusual sounding minor-key harmonies. It’s some cool stuff. And I’m kind of hoping that she’ll read this somewhere and then call me [laughs].
URB: What’s next on the horizon?
DESSA: Tomorrow is Tallahassee. And most of my horizons are pretty close at this point ’cause I’m just trying to make sure I get to the right city at the right time. But in the back seat of the tour van, I have been slowly picking away at that new collection for A Perfect Burn. And then, P.O.S. has really instilled in me the importance of making more music. There’s no time to sit back and be self-congratulatory about a recent release. You gotta keep hauling ass. And I can’t wait another five years ’til the next release [laughs]. So I bought a keyboard in Arizona on this tour. I put it on Twitter and I asked, “Hey does anybody have a cheap keyboard that I could pick up somewhere along the way?” And this rapper in Arizona named Spit Suicide… I put him on the list and he gave me a Casio keyboard. And I’m trying to learn how to play that badly while I’m on tour ’cause I want the next [release] to have instrumentation on it. So that’s my kind of short-term horizon. Tallahassee. Write a book. Learn to play piano.
URB: Any plans for another Doomtree full length?
DESSA: We are always talking about it and then it happens on completely sporadic occasions [laughs]. Yes, there are plans and I have no idea when those plans will come into fruition.
URB: Anything thing else you’d like to share with us?
DESSA: If people are interested in checking out the progress of the tour, they can log onto our website Doomtree.net. Otherwise with any luck I’ll see them in their town.
i like soooo much!