Photograph by Matthew Shaver
Dessa performing
Dessa's flight from JFK lands 37 minutes late. The rapper, author, and record executive is dropping into her hometown on a Thursday afternoon, having just finished the first leg of her latest music tour. And while I’ve arranged to pick her up from the airport, the traffic is so bad in the arrival lanes at Terminal 2 that I have to head out on foot, leaving my husband in the car, triple-parked. When I finally retrieve Dessa, she obligingly folds herself into the backseat of my Toyota Corolla, which I had (optimistically) described to her in a text as “a little banged up.”
“Let me go here, so you can see me better,” Dessa says, as she splays her long limbs over the collection of water jugs and rugs in the back. She lets her compact backpack take up the roomier part of the seat. In her gray T-shirt, she’s almost camouflaged against the car’s upholstery, if not for her shock of bleached blond hair.
Dessa, who currently splits her time between Minneapolis and Manhattan, is here on business for 48 hours, more or less. Tomorrow morning, she’ll be shooting a promo video and guest staffing the Minnesota Orchestra box office to drum up sales for a two-night October gig at Orchestra Hall. She also needs to hit the DMV to renew her driver’s license. But first, maybe for sanity’s sake, she’d like to stop somewhere a little more comforting.
“How about Kowalski’s on Hennepin?” Dessa asks. “Is that OK?”
These brief homecomings demand that Dessa balance her attachments: to her crew of friends and collaborators in the Doomtree collective; and to her pursuit of grander, solo opportunities. She’s 37 years old: This is the time for her to shoot her shot.
“I’ve done all the sleeping on a floor that I want to do for my entire life,” Dessa says. “And for someone else’s life. And that person’s neighbor’s life. It’s hard on your knees. It’s not good for your nervous system. It’s not good for your back. It’s not good for your liver.” As she says this, she idly twists one of the silver rings on her left hand.
Photo courtesy of Dessa
Dessa with sign for My Own Devices book
Dessa with her new memoir, My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love.
In addition to touring behind her new album, Chime, Dessa is just starting to promote a new memoir, My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love (out this month on Dutton). The book details her life with Doomtree and her tempestuous on-and-off relationship with fellow rapper P.O.S. (He’s referred to as “X” throughout the book.) The material feels vulnerable in a slightly different way from her (also emotionally honest) music. Here, the memories have been laid out on the page, with no backing beats or hooks to draw the reader’s attention away from the words.
“It’s gonna be embarrassing but it also makes for rad art,” Dessa says, as we finally hit Lake Street. “If I knew how to write a memoir that only made me look cool, I might have done that.”
Photo courtesy of Jason Squires/WireImage
Dessa and P.O.S.
Dessa performs with P.O.S., her longtime Doomtree collaborator and on/off partner, at 2011’s Kanrocksas Music Festival in Kansas City, Kansas.
But then before you can get to the juicy bits, you have to read about all the other topics that Dessa has pulled into the text: scientific and anthropological case studies that she wields as metaphors for the events of her life. “I don’t like exhibitionistic or confessional art that tells secrets for the sake of telling secrets,” Dessa explains. “Sometimes I do include scientific research, not as a palate cleanser but maybe as an alternate lens to investigate intimate stuff.”
In her former life—that is, the years between college and full-time music touring—Dessa worked as a restaurant server and medical technical writer. And she brings a conversational fluency to the book’s detours into behaviorism, troubleshooting pacemakers, and the ambulatory function of toes. More interesting still is the chapter where Dessa writes about using fMRI and neurofeedback technology to reprogram her romantic feelings for her ex.
In this way, the book feels like its own kind of brain scan, each page a time capture of all the thoughts running through Dessa’s mind. It’s a busy place, a river system of consciousness, thick with rivulets. While the Toyota creeps west toward Uptown, our conversation hops streams to nature versus nurture, whether salamanders can consume milk (they cannot!), and the contextual aspect to recycling. “When I hang out with activists,” Dessa says, “I’ll walk farther with my empty, stupid water bottle to look for the appropriate recycling container!”
Eventually, though, the conversation circles back to home. You could say Minneapolis is home for Dessa, but in a very real way, Dessa concedes, it’s totally not. In New York, she’s been able to make the connections that could rev up her national career: meet-ups with Lin-Manuel Miranda, cabaret act Amanda Palmer, and Sam Stoloff, the literary agent who got her a book deal. And while Minneapolis remains Dessa’s hometown, it’s hard to feel comfortable when she’ll be heading back out in a tour van so soon. Or as she puts it, “I was on an escalator the other day and I was like, I’m homesick. And I thought, for what?”
Dessa grew up in Minneapolis, at 44th Street and 44th Avenue South. But her parents have long since moved on: her mother to a sustainable cattle ranch in Wisconsin (she hosts a podcast on “regenerative farming”), and her father now splits his time between Florida and Faribault, Minnesota. “You haven’t had a home for years,” Dessa continues. “Where would you go? Back to the house you grew up in, so you could knock on the door, introduce yourself to the strangers there, and go to your old bedroom? I don’t have a place for that feeling anymore.”
Having arrived at the Kowalski’s on Hennepin Avenue, my husband steps out to grab a kombucha. But Dessa lingers an extra moment to finish her thought.
“I’m still sorting it out but I’m thinking of buying a vase.” She says “vase” with the elevated vowel: vahse. “This isn’t gonna solve it but I’m gonna try it. I’m gonna bring this vase with me on tour and I’m gonna put a fucking flower in it so it feels like a homey thing. You know what I mean? Like this is where I am.”
And then Dessa unfolds herself from the backseat and exits the car, backpack slung over a shoulder. For her sake, I hope this Kowalski’s sells flowers.
