Modelling the sound of sorrow

How To Dress Well’s new album Total Loss is infused with singer and songwriter Tom Krell’s grief for a friend who died, says Ed Power

TOM KRELL has just recorded a different break-up album. Two years ago, the Colorado native (stage name How To Dress Well), lost a close friend. The young man died in his sleep. Krell has tried to make sense of it. You can hear him work through the grief on How To Dress Well’s stunning album Total Loss.

“In many ways, Total Loss is a record about how to live,” he says. “Following that experience [his friend’s death], my thoughts became incredibly focused. I wanted to be sweeter and kinder and to show more love to friends and family. Before that, I was pretty blindly on autopilot. I received a massive wake-up call.”

Krell sings in a Prince-style falsetto and swaddles his music in a lush, urban groove. His music is R’n’B, but as a middle-class white kid from Denver, Krell is on the margins of the genre. Steeped in angst, he has as much in common with Beyonce or Rihanna as Morrissey has with Iron Maiden. “I don’t like to get too caught up in categories,” he says. “For me, that is not a very engaging subject. I think it is of interest to people in the industry. Whether anyone else cares, I’m not sure. I don’t like to think about it.”

A few years ago, Krell would have been in a category of one: a purveyor of urban music shot through with indie-kid pain. Today, he is one among several. Together with Toronto’s The Weeknd and sometime Odd Future member, Frank Ocean, the music press is championing him as a leader of the so-called ‘avant-garde’ R’n’B scene.

This is his moment in the spotlight but he is not comfortable with it. He can seem downright hostile about it. In interviews he has castigated supposed ‘fellow travellers’ as composers of glorified ‘urban outfitters music’. He is too polite to go there today, but he is sniffy about being pigeon-holed. A loner by inclination, belonging to a ‘scene’ horrifies him.

“I prefer to look at bigger issues, deeper issues,” he says. “The business side of it — that whole categorisation element? It’s not a subject I want to get too hung up on.”

Krell may demur, but it is undeniable that interesting stuff is happening at the fringes of R’n’B and that this has shone a spotlight on How To Dress Well. He has received lots of internet buzz, with Total Loss hailed as one of 2012’s outstanding records. With Radiohead’s Thom Yorke among his growing circle of fans, the singer has had to take a one-year sabbatical from college to concentrate on touring.

Krell regards himself as artist first and entertainer second, and isn’t above waxing pretentious. In his defence, he is studying for a PhD in philosophy. The occasional moment of grandiloquence is probably inevitable. One thing’s for sure — he isn’t putting on a pose. His love for philosophy seems as deep-rooted as his passion for music. He is sincere when he says that discovering Camus and Voltaire, as an adolescent, was as big a deal as hearing Nirvana for the first time.

“When I was a teenager, philosophy was so exciting for me,” he says. “It is the most worthwhile thing you can do with your brain, without a doubt. I want to know how to ‘live right’, as it were. Philosophy is absolutely the best way to do that.” Still, there is little point trawling his lyrics for philosophical insights. He works hard at keeping the disciplines separate. He is in no way a singing philosopher.

“I don’t have a musical relationship with philosophy — or a philosophical relationship with music, for that matter,” he says. “They are different expressions of my creativity. With each, I try to do serious exploration of the self. I mean, sure, they’re similar in so far as they both come from me. Ultimately, they are very different practices. It’s like finding out someone collects tea cups. Does your tea-cups obsession have anything to do with some other facet of your life? I am not sure it does.”

Krell’s parents were middle class and liberal. He hints at a less than contented childhood. Perhaps one of the reasons he found solace in philosophy and music was that he’d known dark times and had to process them.

“I knew friends and family who were cut out of society for different reasons — disability, mental instability. Things that made it challenging for them to live an everyday life.

“The problem is that if you react to what you see, in a depressive manner, you aren’t going to be able to function in your day-to-day existence very well. So you put it into your music. It’s a good way to deal with it, instead of slipping into a depression,” he says.

A full-time academic until last year, Krell embraces a nomadic lifestyle. Total Loss was written in Berlin, recorded in Chicago and finished in London. He loves to stay footloose and enjoys not knowing where he will be six months from now (in 2006 he considered taking his masters degree at UCD).

“It is a privileged way to live,” he says. “A lot of my friends, who are also academics, are in the same position. It’s fantastic. You go to Berlin for a fellowship. Then, take a teaching job in New York. And so on. Yes, it’s hectic and precarious. But, ultimately, it’s a pretty cool way to be. I have lived in some fantastic places: Chicago, Nashville, Berlin, where it’s extremely chilled. On that front, I can’t really complain.”

*Total Loss is out now.