Dawn Richard’s "Honest" Is a Perfect Love Song
Last year, Fade to Mind head honcho Kingdom teased approximately one minute of his collaboration with Dawn Richard in a fiery Rinse FM mix. Around 30 minutes in, Richard’s voice appears like a sunbeam cutting through plumes of smoke. The mix only included the vocal track; it was unclear what the final product would be. The full song, “Honest,” has now arrived more than a year later. Looking back at that snippet, it’s clear that Richard’s inimitable voice could sound good over just about anything, be it caustic bass drums or the pulsating echo chamber of beats where “Honest” finally lives.
Because Richard’s voice contains mind-boggling multitudes, her singing extracts hidden complications from the common things we all think we know about. We hear love songs everyday, but Dawn will never sing about love the same way twice. “Honest” is about how love is more often purgatory than paradise. Roland Barthes once wrote that “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new,” and “Honest” is a testament to his theory.
It’s startling to encounter a song that swims in these contradictions so well, but “Honest” makes the world of love feel plastic, flexible. Richard chastises herself and her lover all in the same breath (“I wanna be over you/ Wanna be next to you”) while weaving in wry jokes and pithy observations (“Loving you was like smoking spliffs/ It’s a temporary high/ With side effects”). It’s all made better by Kingdom’s off-kilter, pillowy production, which recalls his best work for Kelela, with the effect of a massage chair in a hyperbaric chamber. “Honest” is a perfect love song because it doesn’t propose any answers, living instead at the border between ecstasy and anger, and it’s thrilling.
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