While making his new album, Baby, singer/producer Dijon found inspiration in Thomas Pynchon’s beloved postmodern novel Gravity’s Rainbow. However, he had friends begging him to stop because it was causing him to spiral into “psychosis.”
“I was having a really hard time with the record,” Dijon recently told Pitchfork. “Like, psychosis-level s***.” One of his friends has to step in and urge him to put the book down. At least for a while. “You shouldn’t do that, it’s so paranoid,” Dijon remembered the friend telling him. “And he wasn’t wrong.”
The singer went on to describe experiences driving home from studio sessions, crying. He recalled listening to Anita Baker’s “Caught Up in the Rapture” and feeling sadness over the thought that he couldn’t achieve that level of art. “Music is so f***ed,” he contemplated, “and my music is so bad.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Dijon opened up a bit about his production process. “I love first-take s***,” he confessed. “You take all these sources and try one pass of just muting s***, and then it’s like: ‘That sounds good.’ Then we don’t touch it anymore. Once there was some sort of inspired thesis behind what was happening, and I knew it didn’t sound like much else, it was really more about completing the arc.”
Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon believed there was no way Dijon would “fail”
Pitchfork also spoke with Justin Vernon, founder of indie-rock band Bon Iver. Vernon and Dijon are close friends. Dijon was struggling with his art during the making of Baby, but his friend was very confident in him. “There’s no way this guy’s going to fail,” Vernon recalled thinking to himself. “He cares too much, and it has too much swagger.”
“What he’s doing is truly trying to reorganize the world in his vision,” Vernon went on to say. “You could tell that he was struggling with trying to find what it was, and it’s serious. When you’re working your whole life on something, it gets pretty scary. Also, it’s like, he’s got the kid on the way, he’s got this pressure. But it was never pressure to succeed. It was pressure to make something good.”
The post Dijon Reveals the Beloved Novel That Caused Him to Fall Into a ‘Psychosis’ appeared first on VICE.
