Dawn Richard Documents Her Mother's Dreams

Dawn Richard's new album Second Line: An Electro Revival is a layered take on electronic dance music; it offers immediate, club-friendly pleasures while also inviting more deliberate contemplation. Her fluency in the production techniques and rhythmic and tonal nuances of numerous styles — pop-house, footwork, bounce, electro-R&B, hip-hop and plenty else — free her up to experiment assuredly and shape the music around an epic narrative.

At the center of it are two characters: the protagonist King Creole, a half-android, half-human, self-determining survivor — who mirrors how Richard sees herself moving through a music industry that's perpetually underestimated and misinterpreted her as a many-sided Southern, Black woman — and the warmly uninhibited voice of her real-life mother, Debbie Richard, a Creole-born, former dance instructor and language arts teacher casually cast in the role of narrator.

When Dawn dropped her album on April 30, NPR Music threw a live Listening Party on YouTube. Mother and daughter were both in attendance, participating side by side from their kitchen in their first-ever public conversation together. I served as host and the chat room livened up the proceedings with a steady stream of slyly expressed and movingly sincere appreciation.

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