5 things you should know about How To Dress Well

Chicago-based singer/songwriter and producer Tom Krell is How To Dress Well, who’s blessed with a killer falsetto and has released three albums of hushed and sensual, yet sorrowful electronic soul/abstract R&B with an autobiographical bent. While he soaked in his Tokyo hotel-room tub ahead of a show for Red Bull Sound Select in Los Angeles on February 25, he gave us the lowdown on serious thinking, pseudonyms and Bruce Springsteen.

The How To Dress Well handle doesn’t mean anything at all.

It never occurred to me that it was an alias, or that it was a weird-sounding name. I needed a name when I was organising some tunes I’d recorded and I asked my friend Alex. He said, ‘Call it How To Dress Well’. He’d bought two kitschy used books that day – one was How To Photograph Women Beautifully and the other was How To Dress Well. I thought the first one was a bit misogynistic. I grew up in the era of rappers, so I never once thought that Puff Daddy was the guy’s name. And we never really get to choose our names anyway, so...

He’s often been slung into the avant R&B-pop category alongside Frank Ocean and The Weeknd. Some of that he rates highly, some… not so much.

I don’t think of myself as in league with any subset of my contemporaries, any more than I think of Waka Flocka and J. Cole as the same thing because they both rap. I’m humbled to be mentioned alongside people like Frank Ocean, because he’s such an innovator and a really sweet guy, and Kanye, just because he’s a god. But The Weeknd is a disgusting piece of sh*t; he’s a misogynist and a coward. I think his music is basically really sh*tty pornography – it’s like The Weeknd and frat culture are on the exact same page.

Just because he always sings in the first person doesn’t mean there’s nothing more to HTDW than what you hear.

I don’t think I’ve ever sung ‘I’ and not meant me, but there are different ways to use that word. I’m not a confessional songwriter in the sense of being at a coffee shop, telling you my life story. It’s much more ambiguous and universal than that. One of the things I’ve learned in my songwriting process is how much stuff there is from other people at the core of whatever it is that’s supposed to be me. I get little glimpses of where I might be at in my life beyond this largely opaque vision of myself as a person in the world.

He’s a fan of Bruce Springsteen, in particular of Nebraska.

The first song on my current record is an acoustic guitar ballad, so it’s not that surprising. I like Nebraska because it makes me think about my brothers, who are both real working-class guys and it makes me feel close to them. I like to consume Bruce Springsteen’s music even if I don’t make Bruce Springsteen music myself, but I do take influence from him in terms of his ethos. Nebraska is extremely stripped-down, beautiful tales about life in America, and about how to live and die in America in a way that’s authentic, even though it feels like that’s impossible.

As a philosophy graduate who’s been enrolled in a PhD programme since 2010, he values thinking pretty highly.

I’m interested in the history of philosophy – in metaphysics, epistemology, logic from around 1799 to 1842 and philosophical anthropology. My whole project is about what meaning is, metaphysically. I don’t really care about academic philosophy and I never talk about it, because it’s utterly f*cking banal, but I like the wonderment of thought. I have extreme respect for the dignity of thought and, to my mind, that’s the supreme value of life.

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Life consists not in holding good cards, but in playing well those you hold. keep your friends close,but your enemies closer.