DAWN (formerly Dawn Richard) is back with another visual experience — this time for her new song “Cali Sun.”
via Rolling Stone:
Richard believes her latest album will bring her trilogy to an exuberant close. “The inspiration is New Orleans and Mardi Gras Indians,” she notes of her hometown. “Everything we do in life, bad or good, we dance out of it – this is the Second Line,” she adds, referring to the NOLA parade tradition. “Redemption is about understanding myself and not worrying about my relationship with the industry.”
But “Cali Sun” returns to the narrative that has inspired Richard since the beginning of her solo career. “‘Cali Sun’ is again the story of the dreamer,” she says of the Machinedrum-produced track. “That first dream that you had, there’s a sense of bigness when you’re walking into it. Dreams rise like the sun and set like the sun: One minute it is high and bright, the next minute you might lose it.”
To infuse the resulting track with both scale and fragility, she drew from the full-throttle wing of Chicago dance music known as footwork. “That sound, 160 BPM – you hear it and you want to dance,” she says. Those fast cadences against the Afro-Cuban beats, the marching band drums? What you get is high impact: vulnerability mixed with aggression.”
Richard labels the track’s video – premiering on Rolling Stone today – an “animated experience.” “I was looking at iTunes, and I thought it was great that they have a visualizer for your music,” she explains. “Instead of having the same one they’ve had forever on iTunes, I put together a specific visualizer [for ‘Cali Sun’] with Rob Coin. I’m excited to go back to animation: I started in animation with my own comics and drawing, and even the Danity Kane name came from a character I created in high school.”
Get into the video below.
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