Who is How To Dress Well?

“The record is a whole bunch of people, experiences, and places that I’ve left behind, either by choice or not by choice. People who have been stolen out of my life. I’ve had to abandon certain paths in my life to save myself [and to] save other people.” Tom Krell is explaining the meaning of Total Loss, his new album that aims to touch listeners with songs about love, suffering, and pain. If you follow Krell’s blog, you know that the project's earliest releases— “Ocean Floor For Everything,” “Cold Nites,” and “& It Was U”— were keen examples of how he weaves his deepest emotions about loss. True to those records, loss remains a defining theme on his sophomore effort.

Recording under the name How To Dress Well, his ethereal, contemporary sound is a reflection of varied influences, from Janet Jackson to experimental pianist György Ligeti. The 27-year-old’s style has developed dramatically since 2009, when he released seven EPs and several tracks of his bedroom recordings. Since then, How To Dress Well has been praised by critics for his stripped-down ballads and a falsetto that feels both warm, and strange. As an R&B singer who blends impossible worlds together, the results often blur the lines between haunting and gorgeous.

On Total Loss, How To Dress Well pushes his creative boundaries further. He projects his new music as cinematic, and hopes to engage listeners with his experiences. From the tranquil scene about flying peacefully in “Say My Name or Say Whatever” to listing names followed by I miss you on “Set It Right,” the album serves as an reminder that How To Dress Well isn’t your average lo-fi R&B. That’s why we had to find out more about the enigmatic character. So, who is How To Dress Well? We talked to him about moving to Europe, how Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope influenced him, the term "PBR&B," and scoring feature films to find out.

As told to Eric Diep (@E_Diep)

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How To Dress Well: “It’s beautiful, but it’s pretty boring. Pretty quiet. I just did kid shit. Also, like skied every once and awhile. That’s the only difference between Colorado and anywhere else. Denver has a bit of a metropolitan core, but it’s pretty much a small town vibe. Except the mountains are right next door. So there’s like a lot of outdoorsy opportunities. We didn’t do that shit that much.

“Both of my parents are from the Bronx. They were into outdoor stuff but not that much. We didn’t have the money to go skiing all the time and stuff. It’s pretty chill. American childhood. Average, whatever. For me, family shit was kind of crazy, so I was just trying to navigate my way. Keep my head above water. When I think about it.”

“I think it’s a paradox goal that I did a lot of my most important experimenting with music over there because I was feeling pretty stultified by the old land Europe. I was like, ‘I gotta find this place in my imagination and to really push frontiers.’"

How To Dress Well: “I came up to New York for four years. Then went to Germany for a year. After Germany, I went to Chicago where I’ve been for two years. At the end of May, I moved to Berlin for the last four months. I had an opportunity to be out there. I played some shows in Europe.

“It’s funny. When I was living in Germany for a full year. I realized that I am such an American. I really, really miss America. There are things about Berlin that you can’t capture anywhere else. Like real European things. Just the outdoor lifestyle. The public lifestyle. Everybody is out in the parks all the time drinking wine. Berlin is infinitely more relaxed than any city in North America. But, I also really missed the diversity of America. Just the newness of our country is super important to me. I don’t think people realize what it does to youth culture. When there are 300 year old buildings around you all the time. There’s a reason Rock-N-Roll music happened in America and not in Germany. I think it's because we live in a young world over here. There’s a possibly to do fresh new things in this country that I didn’t see as a possibly in Germany.

“I think it’s a paradox goal that I did a lot of my most important experimenting with music over there because I was feeling pretty stultified by the old land Europe. I was like, ‘I gotta find this place in my imagination and to really push frontiers.’"

How To Dress Well: “When I changed high schools, I never listened to any rock music at all. It just didn’t touch me at all. But I got to this new high school and the dudes that I was always cool with were into rock and punk and stuff. They were all in bands together. ‘Shit, ok. If I am going to be friends with the guys I want to be friends with, I have to learn to play guitar.

“One of them taught me how to do three power chords. I just took over their bands. My older brother was into a lot of black metal so I knew some of the names, then I did a crash course for myself and different kinds of heavy music that I was a little bit attracted to. Black metal and some emo stuff. Rites of Spring. This great Denver band called Planes Mistaken For Stars. So that was kind of the zone for my last two years of high school was playing in like hardcore and like emo. Doomy, metal-y bands. Then I got into experimental music when I was in college. That’s when it started being about experimental music.

When I was singing in hardcore bands and sh*t, we’d record demos and send it in to labels, and they’d be like ‘This is cool, we don’t get a lot of demos from bands with girl singers.’ F**k y’all!

“I never took lessons. My mom was a self-proclaimed great singer—she’s good but she’s not that good. She was always like ‘You’re a great singer you should sing. As much as you want, as much as you can.’ In high school I had a really high-pitched voice until way late, like 19 or something. So when I was singing in hardcore bands and shit, we’d record demos and send it in to labels, and they’d be like ‘This is cool, we don’t get a lot of demos from bands with girl singers.’ Fuck y’all! I’d be screaming—I’d be screaming really high-pitched. And then I just wanted to keep pushing the voice.

“There’s something special about singing where it literally comes from within you. For me, when I sing I can tell when I’m impersonating and when I’m singing with my own voice, and it’s super daunting when you start singing with your own voice. It’s like you want to constantly shape it to show your influences or whatever, and I just kept paring those down, and being like I’m not going to sing like Singer X or Singer Y. I’m just going to try and sing with my own voice.

“One of the real breakthrough moments for me was actually when I was recording in this flat in Germany, because my roommate had to get up early all the time, and so I would sing really quiet. I just started doing these super-wistful recordings of harmonies—of vocal harmonies—where I was singing in just like[sings high pitched Ooo’s] in that volume, doing all these parts and stuff. I just really started to feel like that voice was coming out of me, and not getting cut off by like, sing more like X, sing more like Y.”

How To Dress Well: “I mean I’m into ‘80s and ‘90s stuff but to be fair I’m more into like 2000s and contemporary stuff too, just cause it’s more fresh in my mind. There’s some stuff from the ‘90s which I still go to all the time, like Babyface and Maxwell’s Unplugged record, and stuff like that.

"But on the other hand I’m much more of like a Memoirs of An Imperfect Angel guy than a Butterfly Mariah guy. I like her later stuff, especially that [Memoirs of An Imperfect Angel] record because she’s working with The-Dream and I think Tricky Stewart is the producer on that record too. I always post my favorite records of the year on my blog, and if you look at the shit that I’ve fallen in love with over the years it’s like equal doses The-Dream, SpaceGhostPurrp, and stuff like that, and Mount Eerie, and Oneohtrix Point Never. I’m not invested on the one hand in pop music and R&B, and on the other hand experimental music—I just love sentimental, affectively charged music in whatever shape.

”It might be some string quartet music one day, some Ligeti piano experimentation the next day, like “Hate You” on repeat like all day long. It’s just I love music for this sentimental charge it can have, this affective charge it has when it’s really real. Same thing for like “Fuck This Industry” by Waka Flocka [Flame], like when I put that on my headphones I’m like ‘fuck this song is so heavy-duty.’ It’s got a real emotional tenor to me that makes it art period. It’s just about trusting myself and being like I think I have good taste, I think I’m dialed in on something in music, which is something emotionally resonant to me. So if I hear it in whatever—if I hear it in Jimmy Eat World, I’m gonna be like ‘I love this song.’”

“I think [I’m influenced by ‘90s music] just cause that’s my backbone. As a little kid that’s all I listened to. It was like, why would I listen to whatever–I don’t even know what rock was popular. I was listening to “I Will Always Love You” single by Whitney. I think I was a little too young to be into grunge. Like it just didn’t touch me at all. At that time I was 5 and I was listening to Tevin Campbell. That just was what was up for me emotionally.

“I think that a lot of the ‘90s influenced stuff was just cause of when I was born and what my parents were listening to as well. My dad listens exclusively to free jazz and experimental jazz, and my mom listens to exclusively like, when I was a little boy it was always Smokey Robinson, and Janet and Michael Jackson, Paula Abdul. And this was the stuff that my mom was dancing and singing to in the house, so I just followed their lead on that shit. I mean my dad hates The Beatles. This is something that I remember at a very young age, him being like ‘Oh The Beatles suck.’”

How To Dress Well: “How To Dress Well as a name came in 2004. Because I was living with my friend Alex. A friend of ours would make a little short film and I had made a piece of music to go with it, which was like weird, quite inspired by the sound design of Eraserhead, the David Lynch movie. It was really trippy. Super-spaced out. Long-form piece. 30 minutes or something.

“I didn’t sit down one day and say, ‘What are some band names that I’d like to try?’ And had the white board and was like, ‘How To Dress Well? No. Maybe. Wolf something? No. Ok. How To Dress Well it is.’ It was just like a contingent thing.”

“I was moving it from tape to iTunes to send to the friend. I was like, ‘Yo, what should I call this? What should I call my artist name?’ We just bought these books at a used bookstore. One was called How To Photograph Woman Beautifully and the other was called How To Dress Well. He was like, ‘Call it how to photograph woman beautifully.’ I was like, ‘Nah, that’s too weird. What’s the other one called?’ So I just put it in my iTunes to know where all my songs are. Everything I put into iTunes then on went under How To Dress Well. Anything I dropped from a 4-track to a 8-track to the computer was called ‘How To Dress Well.’ And it just stuck.

“I didn’t sit down one day and say, ‘What are some band names that I’d like to try?’ And had the white board and was like, ‘How To Dress Well? No. Maybe. Wolf something? No. Ok. How To Dress Well it is.’ It was just like a contingent thing.”

How To Dress Well: “I didn’t start putting stuff out as How To Dress Well until 2009. I was making tons of songs. And I make a song and I’d be like, ‘It just sounds like I’m trying to make a song by X or whatever. This just sounds like I am trying to sound like The-Dream. Or I am trying to sound like Animal Collective.’ I was not keen in to putting out it until the stuff I was releasing. ‘Ok, this feels true. True to me.’ That’s when I started putting the shit out. When I could say like, ‘This is a contribution.’

“I was feeling super fertile creatively. I think it came from a conversation with my friend. I want to set myself almost arbitrary formal constraint. Six EPs in six months and just see what else I can produce. I ended up doing seven in six months. When the attention started coming, after the first or second one, I was like, ‘Should I hold this stuff and do a record?’ I was like, ‘No. I just want to get my name out there.’ Let it be known that I am doing this. Not to sound like a dick or whatever, I’m doing this and nobody else is. I’m not looking to get rich off this. I’m looking to have it be known that I made something beautiful and special. So it’s just like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s just send it all out.’

“Around the same time, I was getting offers to do a record. The reason why I went with this company called Lefse Records was because they were like, ‘Keep releasing. Do whatever you want. And we’ll just put out whatever you decide.’ Whereas other labels were like, ‘Ok, you can’t release anything else. We are gonna go into the studio and we are going to re-record. You are going to work with this person. And we are going to polish some of them.’ I was like, ‘No, no, no.’ I have to follow this vision out.

“They were hands off enough. I’m not working with them anymore. They don’t have the infrastructure that I thought this new record deserved to get it out to the right amount of people and the right amount of ears. With the right push, but yeah, they were like, ‘We like what you are on, so keep going.’”

How To Dress Well: “He’s done. He’s not making any music anymore. It’s just one person. When we were together in New York, hanging out, and then he moved to Germany for a little bit, and then he went to Japan for a minute. He was going to try and get into experimental music scenes there. He’s kind of a like a really fickle guy and he had a turn of heart and he was like ‘I wanna go to architecture school, fuck it. I’m done with music I don’t care anymore.’

“There was was like a lot of stuff where he was going to work on it and he didn’t, but I still put his name on it because I didn’t want to like—we were working on something together. He didn’t contribute to any of the songs on Love Remains.

“I had no plans [for me and Cokc Dokc to be a duo]. I was just fucking around. He had a real ear for heavy, power-electronic noise shit, and then I just became more and more invested in making music that’s above all else beautiful. And so I just moved away from doing super aggressive noise. Like banging your head on the speaker noise shit. Maybe I’ll do that again in the future, I don’t know. It’s just not where I’m at right now. It’s just much more sensitive and sentimental.”

How To Dress Well: “Cinematic means in this sense I think—people use that adjective like—it’s not often the case that pop music or music in like a pop form, deals with really complicated emotional situations in a way that cinema has become really, really adept at. Like if we didn’t have movies, maybe someone would call it poetic. Cause poetry is the ability to synthesize—the infinity if poetry is that Ican say something like ‘the sun is the sea.’ The sun isn’t the sea. But like it can say it, and then you have all these ambiguous feelings and shit.

My music is about complex, intense, ambiguous, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes disturbing affective situations. I don’t see anybody else doing pop music that’s doing that.

“My music is about complex, intense, ambiguous, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes disturbing affective situations. I don’t see anybody else doing pop music that’s doing that. A lot of the music that I love is doing that. This new Antony [and the Johnsons] single “Cut the World” is just like this amazing, beautiful piece of music. Mount Eerie is making to me the closest thing to ‘sound films.’ These songs are voyages, and they’re so full of images, and different emotions, and so much feeling. I said yes to that question, ‘Is your music cinematic?’ because yes, I want the songs to be kinds of voyages with really complicated, emotional payloads.

“I wouldn't want to score Videodrome, but I would score Dead Ringers, or maybe a new film of [David Cronenberg], because he’s moved into kind of a more dramatic register. I guess not so much with Cosmopolis, but with the History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and then the Freud movie. They’re all kind of in a dramatic register that’s less sci-fi, if sci-fi at all. I would love to work on that.

I also really like the idea of doing longer form music. Like preparing a more or less seamless 130 minutes of music. Sounds. Really like dialing in my spirit and coming up with sounds and textures which trace the same effect that the film is tracing. That just sounds like too much fun to me.

But then this guy Bruno Dumont is just one of my favorite living artists. His films are super, super on the one hand really subtle, and supple, and on the other hand really fucking crazy and violent. This contrast produces such an emotional shock, that like, I’m just moved to tears by every single one of his movies. A final scene in his movie called Humanity, which is like a big name for a movie that actually pays off, like you’re watching it and you’re like ‘fuck this shit is so real, so true.’

The final scene is insane! This guy just hovers off the ground for no reason. He’s just looking out and then just hovers eight-inches off the ground, unexplained. It produces this ambiguous feeling. Just thinking about it right now I’ve got goosebumps. I’m completely moved. So if I could work with someone like him, and contribute in some way to a work of art that’s moving on that level, it’d be an absolute dream come true.

I also really like the idea of doing longer form music. Like preparing a more or less seamless 130 minutes of music. Sounds. Really like dialing in my spirit and coming up with sounds and textures which trace the same effect that the film is tracing. That just sounds like too much fun to me.

How To Dress Well: "The record for me is a whole bunch of people, experiences, places that I’ve left behind either by choice or not by choice. People who’ve been stolen out of my life. I’ve had to abandon certain paths in my life to save myself, save other people. Loss is a feature of our lives as humans. The human condition is to be finite, thrown into this elemental flux where our bodies are constantly decaying and we’re progressing every day towards our own death. You never know if it’s tomorrow or in 30 years. If you’re lucky you get to live long enough, and sadly if you live long enough, you end up seeing everyone you love fall into the ground.

“One way of reading that is you’re fucked either way. Another way of reading it is that loss is what makes things meaningful. If your infant child were to no longer be an infant child some day, it wouldn’t be that special. You’d just be like ‘I have an infant child,’ but you’re like ‘Aw fuck it, I have this now, and I will not have it forever.’ Loss is what makes things have the meaning that they have. I learned a lot about this when I lost a friend of mine, and I was all of a sudden I was just like ‘Fuck I do not value people in my life enough. I do not value my friends enough.’ And it took that loss for me, to go through that loss, to learn this kind of lesson, and that’s kind of what the record is about, and why it’s called Total Loss.

I learned a lot about this when I lost a friend of mine, and I was all of a sudden I was just like ‘F**k I do not value people in my life enough. I do not value my friends enough.’ And it took that loss for me, to go through that loss, to learn this kind of lesson, and that’s kind of what the record is about, and why it’s called Total Loss.

“Imagine attuning yourself or developing an ethical attitude, where you looked at the world, and thought to yourself, ‘This could all disappear.’ I feel like that attention, that prayer of the soul, would bring you to a relationship with the world where you just loved everything. You’d have this totally different sensitivity, and the kinds of emotions you would experience would be so different. If you go through loss you’re not going to just be happy. You’re going to have this weird—again I’m repeating myself but these are the themes I’m thinking of—this ambiguous emotional state where you’re not going to just be happy that you’re with someone you love, you’re both going to be happy, and there’s going to be this registration of the fact that’s it’s temporary, it’s finite. You will lose this person or they will lose you. The natural course will follow.

“The closest thing I believe in, to like religion, is through this experience. You have an intuition of the fact that everything is finite. If you don’t think things are finite, the world just looks grey. If you start to really see that things are going to, that this moment is totally singular and special, the world just starts to shimmer in a totally different way. So that’s like, the zone. That’s why the record has this weird emotional tenor where like, some songs are quite sad, other songs are quite joyous. And then other songs are somehow indiscernible both at once. That’s the whole zone. So it’s not exactly about a loss that I experienced, but rather an insight about a loss that I had, through loss, through losing people, and that insight has become a way of life in my mind.”

How To Dress Well: “I did the same thing with Love Remains. I just love the way that this works, musically. Love Remains starts with this clip from Safe by Todd Haynes—another filmmaker I would kill to work with. It’s Julianne Moore saying like she’s saying she’s going through an intense depression in the film, and her husband’s like ‘So how’s it going? Did you talk to a doctor?’ She’s like ‘Yeah, everything’s fine. He just told me to eat less dairy.’ And you’re like ‘eat less dairy? You’re fucking breaking down.’ It’s this impossibility to deal with her depression, and the way depression keeps you locked in it. I use that scene to kind of cast a pall over the record of Love Remains.

“This scene, I thought about putting it first, but to me it comes better a little bit into the record, because it’s not the whole record. But it’s a moment in this record, a really important emotional station of this record, just the thought that like you have this experience of loss, that’s it’s really tempting to just get fucked up, and try and forget about it. And that works to a certain degree, the problem is you can get high as fuck, and then you’re going to come down to the fucking world and then you’re going to have to face it again. And then every time you have to go you have to fly higher, be more alone. That’s just not a livable life.

“This scene is from a movie called Streetwise, which is about kids in Seattle. It was made in the 70s. This kid’s like 10 or 11, his name is Rat. He’s just got insight that like it’s crazy. Most people even on their deathbed don’t have these life insights. So it’s just a real inspiration for me. It’s also quite a sad thing to see this troubled kid have to have learned these lessons in such a hard way. And that movie was like such a huge inspiration for me, but also to this guy called Harmony Korine, a director who I’m super, super into. It’s just something that has resonated with me emotionally since the first time I saw it and every time I go back to it I’m like ‘Damn, this is really, really real.’”

How To Dress Well: “The main thing I took from her is sort of this self-trust, self-care, emotional honesty thing. Velvet Rope is an amazing example. She set such an example for trusting yourself, and following that intuition wherever it takes you. She could’ve made an entire record of “Together Again”’s—eleven of those. But she made a fucking sprawling masterpiece with a song from every genre, and it works. Because you see her discerning taste in every single track, and every single track, and every single choice, every musical instrument. Some songs her voice is all distorted, and in other songs it’s so close to the mic that it sounds like she’s singing in your ear—you can hear her lip-smacking and shit. It’s a total statement, This is me kind of record. And I like writing different kinds of songs.

Velvet Rope to me became a shining light of how to make an album that’s totally true to yourself, and is about taking proper care of yourself, and paying attention to your spirit, and trusting that it’ll all hang together even if there’s all different kinds of vibes on the record.

“Total Loss is a bunch of different kinds of songs on it. I was like, ‘Shit, how do I make this record?’ Do I pick one and stick with it and write all those? No, that would be truncating this sense I have that all these songs are special and valuable. And so that album [Velvet Rope] to me became a shining light of how to make an album that’s totally true to yourself, and is about taking proper care of yourself, and paying attention to your spirit, and trusting that it’ll all hang together even if there’s all different kinds of vibes on the record. And for me, “Together Again” is infinitely more special because it’s this little gem on that otherwise very different record. If it were a whole record of “Together Again”’s, I’d probably love the song but I don’t know if in the same way.

“I’ve loved the Velvet Rope since it came out. It’s been one of my favorite records for many years. I think when I started working on Total Loss and seeing like shit, this fits together for me in the same way that I felt like the Velvet Rope fit together. And I kind of learned over the course of making my record, and really attentively listening to Janet’s record, that it had more of an influence on me that I had even realized. So like, it’s really funny to learn through making a record that I’ve had this record playing in the back of my mind for a decade. I mean there’s some shit on the Velvet Rope that’s absolutely next-level—still today. Untouchable.”

How To Dress Well: "I’m not offended, it’s just tacky. Nothing worse than tacky motherfuckers. I don’t care. I’m honored to be put in the same group with people that I vibe with, but then like, at the end of the day, the real truth of things is in the details. If you put our records side-by-side, me and whoever, like you’re just not going to heard the same sounds, period.

Nothing I’m doing is about trend-hopping, and I think that you can hear that if you hear just a single second of any of my songs.

"I really love “Adorn” by Miguel. But I’ve heard Miguel do interviews, and he and I are coming at this from totally different angles. Very, very different musical backbones, approaches. I saw this live video of him where he’s got this dude wailing on electric guitar—it was at [MoMA] PS 1, it was at the warm-up—and I was just like ‘damn.’ I go out on the road with super mellow piano and violin, and he goes out with like ‘Waaaoohhhh.’ Okay we’re coming at this from totally different angles.

"I don’t feel pigeon-holed by anything. I was around before people started grouping me in with other artists who now are around, and I just have to trust that I’ll be around after. Nothing I’m doing is about trend-hopping, and I think that you can hear that if you hear just a single second of any of my songs. Also, just a part of me—I feel like people must be disappointed sometimes when they’re feel like ‘Oh this guy sounds like The Weeknd,’ and they put it on and they’re like ‘Oh this is like really fucking heavy, emotionally heavy shit.’

There’s way more diversity than that term suggests. There are some blogs or Tumblrs that are just Frank Ocean, How To Dress Well, and I’m like, what kind of form of life is this where this all makes sense alongside each other?

"I wanted something to throw on the iTunes playlist for tonight’s party, and this guy’s got like, swelling strings and he’s like singing about not knowing who he is and shit. For me I have some songs that make sense in that context, but then I also fit my songs more in a—just to continue this playlist metaphor—my shit is more like “When Can I See You Again” Babyface and “My Lady’s Story” by Antony than The Weeknd.

"Channel Orange is the record it is, but that stuff belongs alongside Stevie and not like some guy who’s combining noise elements and avant-garde composition. There’s way more diversity than that term suggests. There are some blogs or Tumblrs that are just Frank Ocean, How To Dress Well, and I’m like, what kind of form of life is this where this all makes sense alongside each other? That’s cool—I vibe with people putting together different things."

How To Dress Well: "For me, R&B is going in two different directions. One one hand, there’s going—and I don’t mean to say a ‘good’ direction and a ‘bad’ direction, cause I really fuck with “Don’t Wake Me Up” by Chris Brown, cause that shit is like tacky as fuck. It’s a cornball song. R&B is going in that like, David Guetta direction on one hand, and like, this Jeremih mixtape which isn’t getting any attention is a fucking masterpiece.

"I’ve never heard a record like it. It’s so good. And like who knows what this next Dream record could be like. I think it could be absolutely wild, cause 1977 is like on some other shit. But then, for me like I’m really inspired right now by slower songs, and more somber tones. I have this playlist where it’s called “Inspire,” where I throw shit there that I think is going to influence my next record. What is it called? It’s by Johan Johansson, he’s an avant-garde composer.

"Let me pull up the playlist. [scans playlist on cell phone] I’m super moved by this guy called Ezekiel Honig, he makes crazy, beautiful music. It’s called “The Sun’s Gone Dim.” The title’s too long to share the whole thing. But it’s the final sequence in this five-part composition called IBM 1401: A Users Manual by Johan Johansson. I put this in a playlist alongside “Angel’s Cry” by Mariah, and a song I’ve been listening to every morning for the past four weeks, “I Look To You” by Whitney Houston.

"I never listened to this shit before in my life ever, but this dude Elliott Smith, listening to that for the first time ever and being really moved it. I have no idea where my shit’s going to go next. Just cause like, I follow whatever I feel like is really hitting my heart. It’s hard to know, but like, music I think is on the verge of like—there are synthesis, possible synthesis on the horizon, which could completely transform what we think about genre and music in general.

"I think I just have to continue to be true to myself—that’s all one can do as an artist. Artists start a trend, and people expect you to follow it up, but you didn’t start the trend, you were making your sounds. The trend is not me—the sounds I made are what I endorse and stand behind. By in large, the naming of the trend is like a commercial, journalistic gesture, that’s meant to be able to tag the content. But the content is always shifting and always weirder than the genre suggests. I just have to like, not think about that stuff and keep following my shit. Following myself."