Easy Listening

I've always been a secret singer. I walk around late at night reveling in desolate streets and hum melodies to myself. The melodies fall somewhere between spirituals, the blues and Mariah Carey, but I’ve never been able to properly translate my hymns to listenable music. Fortunately, I have Tom Krell and his project How To Dress Well, winner of the “why didn’t someone do this already” honors for mixing R&B, leftfield beats, hazy production and degraded sound quality with some of the more irresistibly sweet vocal melodies to come out of underground music recently.

A mysterious artist, Krell gets up on a recent morning to discuss how he came upon this style, his composition strategies, sampling and how Generation Y has a deeper musical well to draw from because they grew up with the Internet.

After a long journey experimenting with multiple genres, Krell started How To Dress Well in October 2009. “I used to make a lot of different kinds of songs, ranging from cheesy acoustic guitar songs to droney noise stuff. I moved abroad from New York to Germany and the first song I made in this vein was called ‘Endless Rain,’” he explains. “I was remembering riding in the car with my dad when I was very young and singing along with the song the sample is from. We got to a stoplight and he said, ‘You’re a really good singer’ and I was just so stoked on it. I was listening to that song, being a little nostalgic, and it got to the piano break and I sampled it.”

How To Dress Well plays on this sort of personalized nostalgia, yet it’s oddly poignant to those that gobbled up early ’90s R&B before discovering indie music, going through college listening to Black Dice and then growing older and deciding pop music really does rule all. All of those phases come into play throughout How To Dress Well’s seven free EPs released on his blog. Love Remains, a re-recorded best-of collection from his work thus far, will be released Sept. 21.

“There’s no rational decision-making process by which I move from one melody to another,” he says. “It’s unconscious. I’ll be walking around during the day and get a melody stuck in my head. I’ve had one stuck in my head for 10 days now!” Krell sings a beautiful faux R. Kelly loop. “Today I finally started to make a song of it.”

Many think Krell is merely muddying up samples into a frothy bed and howling his sweet nothings over the top, but it’s far more exploratory than that. To him, whatever compositional strategy serves the melody will make the finished product.

“I don’t sample very much, actually,” he notes. “Most of my stuff starts from banging on the desk or ground wherever I’m working to put a beat down. Either that, or I’ll start to record a simple melody or harmony. Then, I’ll cut it up, loop it, stretch it out or put it in different sequences. There’s no straightforward method.”

“Can’t See My Own Face” and “Suicide Dream 2,” two tracks off How To Dress Well’s Can’t See My Own Face: The Eternal EP (and re-recorded for his debut album), are great places to dive into his unique sound. The former rides a white noise loop where rhythms are created out of airy textures left by vacant microphones. His vocals and a sparse slow jam synth part add R&B elements to create syrupy sex music for the Downtown set. “Suicide Dream 2” is far more aeriform. The production sounds like you’re hearing a song emanating from the center of an industrial city while going in and out of a nap inside a cloud 20,000 feet above ground.

“I like this idea of moving from super sweet to gaseous,” he explains. “I don’t think it comes from changing the nature of the sounds, but it’s more the layering of the sounds. I sing a really sweet melody and then, if I sing it again over it, it gets a lot of hiccups and differences between the two tracks. I build from there.”

So, why has Krell’s unconscious experimentation hooked the ears of so many? From big music magazines to the smallest blogs, a diverse series of music critics have openly loved and championed the How To Dress Well catalog to the point where future expectations are pretty high. Those of us in our mid-to-late twenties are betting Krell will continue to grow with us and mash our lifetime of musical fads into radical pop music.

“They listened to the radio, but the Internet has expanded the things we’ve been open to sonically,” he concludes. “It’s pretty dramatic. A lot of the stuff we listen to now that we feel is more or less pop music is actually pretty radical music. I think it’s really cool that the stuff we listened to when we were five can be filtered by the harsh noise we listened to in college.”