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!
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 )
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 )
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?
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