From Bad Boy to Merge Records, Dawn Richard Reflects on Her One-of-a-Kind Career

In 2020, when the pandemic led those who could afford it to retreat into sloth, Dawn Richard did an extremely Dawn Richard thing: She made moves. Several. The 37-year-old used lessons from her expansive career—which includes a star turn on MTV’s Making the Band, time as a founding member of girl group Danity Kane, her Dirty Money electropop revolution, and the decade she’s spent devising a sound of her own—to inform her business decisions. First she upgraded one of her side-hustles, Papa Ted’s, from a vegan food-truck to a “vegan sensory experience” organized around collaborations with juiceries, chefs, artists, and DJs in her hometown of New Orleans. By the end of the year, she had tripled Papa Ted’s revenue. Then she launched a new partnership with Adult Swim aimed at bringing in more queer and Black animators into its ranks.

All the while, she kept one boot firmly planted in music. After releasing solo records through an imprint of her own and in collaboration with various small labels, she recently signed with indie rock institution Merge Records, making her the only artist to have shared a label home with both Diddy and Destroyer.

In April, Merge will release Richard’s Second Line: An Electro Revival, an album she hopes will redefine her native city in the public’s imagination. “When people think of New Orleans, they think of the past, of jazz or R&B or soul,” she says. Now they can also think of Richard’s genre experiments—nebulas of rhythm-first, luxuriantly bass-y production brought to Earth by her storytelling. Richard wants to correct the record on something else, too: that Black women can move the needle in electronic music, as they do elsewhere. “I want to fucking break that taboo all the way,” she says. “My first entrance into the music industry was with [Danity Kane], a multi-racial girl group signed to a hip-hop label. Then I joined [Dirty Money], a group that was electropop soul built from Ibiza. If that ain’t unconventional, I don’t know what is.”

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