Diving Deep into Dessa, the Triple Treat

This isn’t the first time I’ve squeed about Dessa Wander, a rapper, musician, poet, and writer from the Twin Cities, Minnesota. I was introduced to her music thanks to fanvids. She’s multimodal!

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Her most recent record was released twice: once as rap/pop CHIME and once backed by the Minnesota Orchestra as SOUND THE BELLS.

I’ve listened to both at least 50 times. It’s hard to choose a favorite track, but today it’s Five Out of Six.

( Rap & Orchestral Versions Within )

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Since she’s toured the world on her own and with the Doomtree Collective, Dessa turns out to be a great travel writer. Check out this London adventure with LJ Rich, who’s a synesthete

( 130 word taste )

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Dessa is not only great at song lyrics — she’s swell at prose, including technical writing.

My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love

This is her 2019 memoir as an essay collection. I deeply enjoyed listening to her narrate the audio version in her deep and melodic voice. She’s the child of committed environmental hippies, so I learned about growing up on the land in Minnesota. She spent 10 years in love with that one guy who really was bad for her.

print at libraries - audio - ebook - bookshare

She knew it wasn’t the best use of her time, and she managed to get her lovesickness imaged via a functional fMRI. This served as a great news hook — the search engines have pages on this story. Second best to reading the book, here’s her TED talk. (Meta aside: she learned about fMRI imaging of love by watching an earlier TED talk by Nancy Kanwisher.)

( TED talk embed with pro captions )

Given I love Dessa, who else should I be listening to?