Musician Dessa on balancing the needs of body, art and business
Recorded music brought in $17 billion in revenue in 2023, up almost 8% from the year before, according to the end-of-year report from the Recording Industry Association of America.
That growth might cast an aura of stability onto the music business, but consider that streaming, not album sales, accounted for 84% of revenue last year, underscoring the changes in how the business makes its bucks. For some artists, it has been a jarring evolution.
Dessa is a writer and musician who has chatted with us in the past. She joined “Marketplace’s” Kai Ryssdal to talk about touring, the industry’s changing economics, and doing what she does for love as well as money. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Kai Ryssdal: We have a long-established relationship here on this program, you and I, and we’re friends on the socials and all that jazz. So I’m just gonna start with, you’ve been on the road a lot lately. How you holding up?
Dessa: You know, I think, like, where the spirit is willing, the knees can get weak. I mean, I’m good. I think there is a constant tension that just becomes more pronounced the longer you stay in the game with, like, what’s good for the art versus what’s good for the artist.
Ryssdal: Totally. But also, though, what’s good for the business, right?
Dessa: One hundred percent. I think probably those would represent the three interests that I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to balance. Like, what’s good for the meat machine that you live inside, and what’s good for the big ideas that you’re hoping to breathe life into and how are you going to pay for it? And also, how are you going to pay for it in a way that looks out for the woman that you’ll be in 10 years and 15 years, when you don’t have, you know, an indie pension to draw on?
Ryssdal: I was going to save this for later, but since you kind of got there, you’ve been doing this for a while. And, I mean, you’re not old by any means, but you’re no spring chicken anymore either.
Dessa: Agreed. You know, I wonder the extent to which this line of thinking presents itself in any life, irrespective of whether or not you’re in the arts. But like, how do you go about presenting yourself in a way that isn’t just sort of cosplaying the younger self?
Ryssdal: I think about that every day.
Dessa: Do you really?
Ryssdal: Every day. Listen to me on the radio and see if you don’t know what I mean.
Dessa: Do you think that you would if you weren’t on the radio?
Ryssdal: No, but there’s this weird, you know, I have this weird — my identity is bound up in my job, right?
Dessa: That must be strange, Kai.
Ryssdal: It is very strange. And I don’t know what listeners are going to make of this conversation, but I think about this especially when I get ready to talk to you because of the memoir you wrote, because of the interchanges and exchanges that we’ve had over the years, and how deeply thoughtful a person you are about the things you do. And that’s just not me. And I’m gobsmacked every time by how you can be so relentlessly thoughtful but also so completely productive. You know?
Dessa: Well, I mean, thanks, first of all. I do think that the productivity this year has been the hardest for me. It does feel like there’s a headwind. I’ve made stuff that I’m proud of, but I’m really, like, ringing the stone. And I think, in part, there’s a discomfort for me that by now I’m familiar with in the space between projects, before the new enthusiasm animates you and you’re ready to go. And I think living in the arts, for all of the life-affirming, nourishing parts of it, it does also really give license for a person to, like, lean into the external validation bits. Like I’ve been surprised and disappointed at how fully grown adults, myself very much included, are so sensitive to this currency of cartoon hearts that you can’t take to any counter for actual currency to spend in the real world. We are so socially sensitive.
Ryssdal: You had a piece in The New York Times a couple of months ago about losing your voice, which, for what I hope are obvious reasons, really resonated with me. Because my big fear is, I mean, like when I get a cold and my voice gets all gravelly, I’m all cranky on the radio and all cranky with my family, and it’s just, it completely messes me up and clearly it hit really hard for you. What was it like for you as a performer, singer, to not be able to do your thing?
Dessa: You know, I’ve gotten gravelly like you have, where I feel like I’m still behind a microphone, but I know that I’m not presenting my best work. I’m just so aware of not holding up my end of the bargain, like, people paid their money and this is not my best delivery. I hate that feeling. Then this last round was totally different. I was essentially, you know, voiceless. So instead of that sort of hoarse limping through it, it was just silent. And my first fears were professional: “Oh my gosh, am I gonna have to cancel this tour?” And then I think my second set of fears were more existential. I present myself to the world primarily through words. It’s the medium with which I am most comfortable. It’s the medium that I think also is slightly maybe overindexed and overrewarded because so many of our casual conversations happen with words. So if someone is a great dancer, they don’t get credit for that at the bodega. Do you know what I mean? And so I felt alone and pretty spun out.
Ryssdal: What was it like when you came back? When you could finally do it again?
Dessa: I would love to say, “And now I’m, like, this new woman, and I’m just like this Hallmark” — do you know what I mean? Like, “Every day is full of rays of sun.” But I think I felt glorious the first time I could sing again. Do you sing at all? Like, even just when you’re by yourself?
Ryssdal: In the shower and in the car.
Dessa: Yeah, when you, you know, if you’re working at the edge of your range, even just like singing along with the radio, there’s sometimes you sort of, like, send your voice up like an arrow, and you don’t know if it’s gonna hit its mark. And the first time I could trust the falcon of my voice to go out and come back as we practiced, that felt fantastic. And now, because I’m human, I habituate to glory, and Tuesday feels like Tuesday.
Ryssdal: So you’re a performer, you are a lyricist, you are a writer of books, you’ve got a new one coming out, which we’ll get to in a minute. Which one do you like best?
Dessa: I think that there are probably some days when I feel most comfortable in one of those forms. You know, people have, like, good hair days, where there’s just, like, sort of some series of unidentifiable variables. You slept on it right, you washed it two days ago, the dew point is 67 — for whatever reason, it worked when you woke up. I feel like there is some similar set of variables organically happening in my brain that some days I wake up and I’m like, “Oh, I’ve got language at my disposal,” like it’s a good word day for metaphor making on the fly. And on those days, it feels good to be on stage because I know that if a mic goes out, or if somebody says something funny or a bartender breaks a glass, I can maneuver quickly enough to incorporate that into the show.
Ryssdal: About the bartender … so your new book that’s coming out, I think we’re doing this interview too early, but it’s coming out November?
Dessa: Nov. 19, right.
Ryssdal: It’s called “Bury the Lede: A Cocktail Book.” You teamed up with a bartender, sort of instructor-sage-guy in Minneapolis, and Lazerbeak, your longtime partner, and you wrote a book about drinks that he had created based on your latest album, “Bury the Lede.” Do I have that right?
Dessa: You got it.
Ryssdal: Why? I mean, it’s a fun book and I really enjoyed it and I learned some things about cocktails. But why’d you go there?
Dessa: OK, so I think, as I mention in the book, you know, I am an enthusiastic collaborator with almost anybody who doesn’t do what I do, like working with other writers. I find myself, even though I wish I didn’t, I find myself getting like weird and territorial. But I love working with people who are really serious about their craft in a monomaniacal way that I can recognize, but it’s in a parallel lane, so that I have no ego threat. And I’d worked with Marco Zappia, who did the cocktail recipes in the book. I’d worked with him once in Minneapolis, and I just thought it would be kind of a cool add-on. You know, “Hey, could you put a drink together for this song? “And he came back and blew everybody’s mind. It was a show about science, and he had one, like, whiskey drink that was served in a syringe from which he’d removed the needle, you know, to render. Yeah, it was so cool. And he’d, like, dried out the hearts of beets in an effort to resonate with some of the themes about heartbreak in the show. And I thought, “Wow, this guy’s awesome. And I want to find some sort of excuse to, like, link my wagon to his star.” And so this was that opportunity.
Ryssdal: Just getting back to the business here for a second, what’s your biggest worry about the music business and how you play in it?
Dessa: I guess there are some off-the-hip answers that I talk about, like, how do we compensate creatives well in an era of streaming? But also, I want to make sure that my worries about the music industry aren’t born of an undue attachment to the way it happened to be when I found it. Like, things change all the time, and it’s definitely in an era of disruption. I think there’s a lot of concerns, you know, the idea that really large, multinational conglomerations seem really well positioned at the moment to turn a decent dollar, and it’s a lot harder for the songwriters to do so. Ah, but the trick is, of course, that the songwriters have a double bottom line. We want to write the song as much as we want the money for it, and that means we’ll work cheap, free, and sometimes even at a loss. So I have been romanced by, I think, you know, behavioral economics as much as the next person. But there is another currency at play here that renders the artist and the songwriter, I think, pretty easy to overwork and underpay.