Bill Phelps
Dessa with shiny shirt looking at camera sideways.
Dessa: poet as well as recording artist.
Since the Minnesota-based performer Dessa released her debut EP False Hopes in 2005, she’s been busy. In addition to her four solo albums, she’s also released several EPs, two collections of poetry, and a 2018 memoir. She’s given a TED Talk that’s racked up more than two million views, performed with the Minnesota Orchestra, hosted the BBC podcast Deeply Human, and was even tapped by Lin Manuel-Miranda to perform the track “Congratulations” for 2016’s The Hamilton Mixtape.
As is clear from this slate of projects, Dessa never has trouble finding the right creative outlet to express herself.
“When an idea first occurs to me, usually I can kinda classify it in the air,” she says in a Zoom interview with Isthmus. “It’s like, ‘Why is this rad? Okay cool, I think I know what bucket to put it in.’”
The artist is about as multi-hyphenate as they come. She wears a variety of creative hats: singer, rapper, writer, poet, public speaker and podcast host. She sees them all falling under the umbrella of language arts.
“They’re all different pursuits obviously, but they really all do rest foundationally on using language,” she says. “Hopefully using language to persuade people intellectually and move them emotionally, too.”
Dessa is also a longtime member of the Minnesota indie hip-hop collective Doomtree, a group currently consisting of seven members, which she describes as a group of friends and artists who make music together. As the years passed and Doomtree’s output continued to grow, the collective eventually established its own label. Since then, all Dessa’s solo music has been released by Doomtree Records.
In the beginning of 2021, Dessa found a new approach to releasing music for her project Ides. She remembers being inspired by the streaming release schedule during the pandemic, eagerly waiting for the next episode of her favorite Netflix show to drop. In using the same approach with her music, Dessa hoped to engage with fans in a new way.
“I would so look forward to an installment of a familiar thing. And I thought that could be a cool way to release music now,” she says. “I liked the idea of a bright spot on the calendar.”
In collaboration with her producer and fellow Doomtree member Lazerbeak, Dessa released a new song on the 15th of every month for the first half of the year, giving fans a fixed date to anticipate new music. Eventually, the tracks were compiled onto an EP, Ides.
Across seven tracks, Ides showcases Dessa’s signature lyrical prowess and her ability to craft sharp, candid storytelling, from the anthemic “Bombs Away” to the kinetic “Terry Gross.”
In the past three months alone, she’s not only dropped the poppy anthem “Blush” but also released a book of poetry. Writing Tits on the Moon — a collection of 12 poems and an essay published this month — stems from Dessa’s experience with faulty equipment onstage. When someone would trip over a cord onstage, she says, “There’s a lousy moment of dead air, and it was helpful for me to have some poems on hand to eat up the silence.” She decided to release her poetry after fans started asking where they could find the poems. Ultimately, she hopes readers will connect to her poetry in their own way.
“I try to just trust that if it’s well-crafted, it will ring the bells in the reader that it’s supposed to,” she says.
As she prepares for a five-city string of performances playing with Open Mike Eagle and Nur-D this fall, including a stop in Madison at the Majestic Theatre on October 25 — Dessa hopes that fans leave the show feeling a sense of connection.
“I’m not a religious person, but I think some moments in artistic performance are the closest I get to a church experience where I feel a sense of palpable community,” she says. “As many moments as we can create like that collectively, I think, is the measure of our success.”
