Tomorrow, Dessa – the rapper, singer, and writer who’s also a member of the Minneapolis-based hip-hop collective Doomtree – will be releasing a new song called ‘Talking Business’. Showcasing her lyrical dexterity as well as her knack for inventive storytelling, the cinematic track was produced by Paper Tiger, Andy Thompson, and Lazerbeak and marks the fifth instalment of her IDES singles series, which sees her sharing new music on the 15th of each month. ‘Talking Business’ arrives with a lyric video by Matthew Levine, which you can check out exclusively below ahead of its official release.
“I wanted to make a song that unfolded like a little film where the plot was revealed in a series of objects and still images,” Dessa explains. “I envisioned lipstick on the filter of a cigarette, a wig discarded in a hotel bathtub—all the action implied, just off-screen. I tinkered with the idea for years, but never quite got it running until I heard the beat from Michael Piroli—slinky and smoky with a little menace. To try to build a story in a flash of snapshots, I wrote the song without using any verbs. So the song unfurls with just a list, really: an inventory of telling items and a few frames of character frozen in a single moment. (And, for the ‘word nerdz’ eager to bust me—terms like ‘talk’ are used here as verbal nouns and the -ing words, like ‘missing’, are actually gerunds, a type of noun.)”
Previously in the IDES series, Dessa shared the tracks ‘Rome’, ‘Bombs Away’, ‘Life On Land’, and ‘Terry Gross’. Her most recent solo album, Chime, came out in 2018.
