On Dessa and the Novartis Brand of Biomedical Engineering: Part 4
Examining the intersections of music, politics, the personal, and monopolized healthcare.
Note: You can read the first posting here, the second posting here, the third posting here, the fourth posting here, and the fifth posting here.
The following is the fourth post of a serialization of an essay concerning monopolized cancer therapy and the hip-hop artist, Dessa - among other things.
If you haven’t already, you can read the first posting here, the second posting here, and the third posting here. For those monopolized healthcare nerds out there, Part III and the forthcoming Part V are your jams. (I recommend reading them sequentially, since that’s what makes the most sense, but who am I to tell you what to do?) Enjoy!
V. I’m not so sure this is the good fight anymore
– Dessa, “Say When”1
I dreamt we had a daughter. She was about two years old when you brought her over to see me. You let her go and she waddled over to me to say hello and I pulled her up onto my knee. She had your smile, and your same wavy light brown hair. And she hugged me with her little arms and said, “I love you.” I spoke softly in her ear that I loved her too. And I held her close to me as I began to cry and you watched us from across the room. We were meeting in an impossibly blank white space, nothing but two chairs facing each other, so that I could hold our daughter on my lap for the first time.
Once, before this, we had been holding hands and arguing over domestic matters on the beach. Another time, for some reason you had invited me to a very special occasion in your life.
You looked so beautiful on your wedding day. And tall! My goodness, you seemed to have grown up, and certainly outgrown me. You never wore heels when we were together. I don’t know why I was there that day. I was certainly not needed, and indeed I had not felt necessary for quite some time. But I could not turn down the invitation, the opportunity to bear witness and to feel again, perhaps for the final time, that particular tenor of feeling and vibration in the air when you are around. To turn away from this momentous event in your life would have been, in some sense, a further act of betrayal on my part.
And so I had to be there, regardless of any pain it may have caused me, to show some good natured sign of a last vestige of devotion. Although the event certainly wasn’t about me, of course. It was your day. And a bright, slow, beautiful day it was. I had had no intimation of whether or not you truly expected me to accept the invitation. Once there, I tried to restrain myself from expecting any sort of special attention from you or your family. I was truly terrified of going in the first place. I thought it may be too much to bear. Better to keep you fixed in memory than to see you again as a living woman moving and progressing and loving and growing. As soon as you laid your eyes upon me I was sucked back into a breathless reality.
These dreams about my ex hit me every few months or so. And I wonder how constant they will remain, whether anything will ever abate them. In the same way that it is impossible, at least as all the horror movies tell us, to get rid of a ghost without being willing to burn down the very house in which it resides – no matter what changes in your life or how much time passes, if you aren’t willing to utterly dismantle yourself then there will always be a little part of you, and by extension the people once in your life, that will remain untouchable, the ghosts of your mind, of you.
Dessa had a stormy romantic relationship with a man for over ten years. This troubled relationship has informed a substantial portion of her writing efforts. “At twenty-two, being loved by him was one of the best feelings I’d ever had,” Dessa writes, “Now, single at thirty-six, and having traveled the world many times over, not too many feelings have compared.”2 She explains that no matter how many times she told herself that it wasn’t good for her to hold out for this man, she just couldn’t stop those same feelings from flaring up. And so she decided to use a bit of clever science to get rid of those feelings.
I won’t go into all of the particulars of how Dessa went about doing this – she has a wonderful TEDx talk where she explains it all and I encourage you to look it up. But suffice it to say she got access to an fMRI machine, had her brain scanned while looking at pictures of her ex, identified the areas of her brain that were associated with her feelings for him, and then used neural feedback therapy in order to reduce her unwanted feelings for this man.
This endeavor of hers blew my mind. I admired the tenacity of it. And I appreciated Dessa’s commitment to the understanding of love as a physical, biological entity, something placed at a discrete location inside our pink Rice Krispies Treat. But I also felt like it was a violation of sorts, a treading on the sacred grounds of the human mind. I knew that it was an act I could never entertain doing for myself.
As biological entities confined to a limited perception of time, we necessarily live in the moment. Our real-time physical perceptions are all we have to work with. In some sense, our day-to-day existence is a constant struggle against forces of death and tyranny, or at the very least, against boredom and general discontentedness. Just because I had a great day ten years ago doesn’t mean that it makes this bad day I’m having right now any better.
If I were to die in some horrible way, murdered by a madman with a blunt knife, or devoured by a dark sea, then decades of a happy marriage would probably not be at the forefront of my mind in those final moments. I would likely feel pain, a great fear, and then a final resignation washing over me. Any abundance of happy memories before this unfortunate end would be, in a certain way, useless.
Now, this is not to say that all of life will be completely meaningless and unhappy if only its very end is hellish. It is not to say that for any happy memory to be worth anything we must have an entirely unbroken succession of flowers, sugar, peace, prosperity, and mind-altering sex. But it does mean that we are physical creatures subject to the immediate realities of the physical world. And we must tend to and be stewards of our memories so that the past experiences which make up our lives do not wither and die on the vine.
When I think of my own past, certain happy memories of important people in my life, I may be able to capture a semblance of what I felt when I was in the presence of those people, when I collaborated on a shared existence with someone, when the depth of someone else’s feeling was revealed to me. But these visceral feelings are fleeting. And as time moves on these memories become flashing photographs, perhaps able to bring forth a smile or to momentarily divert a train of thought, but the images no longer cause quite the same inner stirring as they did before.
In this way, the collection of moments that makes up our lives is under constant threat of decay. In order to avoid utter desolation, we must maintain a richness in our lives. And in order for our memories to have any vitality to them, they must be shared, discussed, thought about, and utilized, even as they inevitably degrade and alter with our recollection of them. Through this examination, our experiences may be able to have a life and longevity beyond ourselves.
Our memories are not separate from the physical world. They exist within the beautiful rat’s nest of neurons and axon terminals inside our skulls. When those bunches and strings of gray matter are gone, indeed the very capacity for our perception, then so are our memories. Don’t expect another jolt.
For me, atheism – and the impossibility of an afterlife, in the traditional sense, that accompanies it – is not an idea, not a concept, not a philosophy, not a prescribed set of rules for viewing the universe, not an absence of belief, not even a casual disinclination to examine religion – although atheism could certainly be all of those things. For me, atheism is part of my physical composition. At the level of my bones, I feel the weight of the physical world and I understand that this is all there is. There is no resistance within me in regards to this feeling. It is simply a matter of the bounds of my perception. It is of my nature.
And so, because my perceptions are limited and my time is finite, I take the cultivation of my memories seriously. You cannot relive them. And you only get so many. Every single experience we have is an opportunity to elucidate to someone else as closely as we can – though we never succeed in saying exactly what we mean – our own existence so that those experiences may cast themselves into a time beyond our own.
And so, unlike Dessa, I have a bodily resistance to denying or altering the physical manifestations of my memories and feelings. They may not always be nice. They may be more akin to a maleficent haunting ghost than to a static photograph. They may deposit regular stress-inducing, talking-in-your-sleep, waking-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night, heart-pounding, sweaty dreams. But just like that harried mother who chooses, or perhaps she has no choice, to cage and feed the malevolent monster Babadook in her basement rather than destroy it at the end of the movie, I’d rather make a shared life with these memories than burn the whole house to the ground.
And also, just by the way, fuck the rich corporate assholes who capitalize on pain and death by withholding life-saving medical treatments from people who can’t afford them. If there was a reason to want a world to actually exist beyond our physical realm, it would be so that those fuckers could rot in hell.
I got a motel room once I made it into Ashland, Oregon that night. It had been lightly snowing on the mountain pass just south of town as I made my drive over it. I hate driving in the snow. I’m afraid to live anywhere long-term that is subject to actual seasons – as opposed to most of California’s climate which vacillates somewhere between 65 and 100 degrees all year long.
It was at this same motel I booked, the Timbers Motel, where my ex and I had our first kiss five years before. I walked past the room where it happened on my way to settle in for the night. I can honestly say that that night we shared together was the most euphoric experience I have ever had. Euphoric in the sense that its dreamlike quality and intensity was quite unlike anything I had yet experienced and perhaps may never experience again. For months after it happened I would reminisce about that night and this would send my body and my mind flying back to those aching emotions, giving me a simulacrum of what it felt like in the moment. These years later, I can look back on it now and smile. I remember how much it affected me. I can bring back certain images. But I don’t feel what it felt like anymore. It is beyond my sensational grasp.
After checking in to my room I immediately walked over to the nearby grocery store and bought a couple bottles of ginger mead, my favorite flavor from the local meaderies. I still knew a fair amount of people in town who I went to college with. Before I started my roadtrip I had texted a handful of them asking if they wanted to hang out and I told them that I would be in town the next couple days and again on my way back down after the concert in Portland. I ended up getting dinner with a friend of mine from high school who relocated to Ashland to go to college at Southern Oregon University and ended up staying there.
It’d been a couple years since we’d last seen each other. He had just moved back from New York City and was now working at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the costume department. He and I had also worked together at the Oregon Cabaret Theater, mostly as wait staff in their restaurant, though I also did tech work for them as needed. Over dinner, we both took turns complaining about the theater industry and why we felt so ambivalent about this career we had been working in since high school.
You see, theater people love the smell of their own shit. And the small community often suffers from the blinders that it puts on itself, operating under the delusion that it is engaged in a noble endeavor of uplifting humanity through its unique art form. Give me a goddamn break. While it pays lip-service to these lofty goals, the theater industry consistently falls far short of them. Let me break it all down for you.
A lot of people get drawn into theater for its artistic promise and for the kind of unregimented work that it lets you do. It gives you opportunities to be creative and to think on your feet. Every show comes with its own unique set of challenges and no day is ever exactly the same. You can tour across the country and even around the world, meeting many interesting people. My best experiences in the theater have come, not from the content of any particular show, but from the people I was working with – their backgrounds, perspectives, and stories.
Theater is its own culture and there is a sense of camaraderie between people who have worked in the industry for a long time. Theater professionals form impermanent but strong relationships based on a deep understanding of the nature of the work. People who have never met before will commiserate over the various idiosyncrasies of a particular venue that they’ve both worked at, complaining about the awkward greenroom location for a theater in Denver, or the antiquated fly-loft equipment at a place in Los Angeles, or the shitty attitude of a Technical Director at a concert hall in Chicago. Working in theater becomes its own weird lifestyle where everyone knows each other but not for long. For me, it’s the people that make it worth it. And it’s sad to see the good ones go. But that’s where my love for theater starts to wane.
Good theater, good art in general, should be transformative. It should speak to people from all walks of life. It should enliven and inform and entertain. It should express humanity in all its forms so that people can see beyond themselves. It should provide a language that people can carry with them. And it should have something important to say that relates to people’s lived experience and to the time in which a show is produced, with the exceptional works securing their relevance into the future. You know, all the great artsy-fartsy stuff that makes all the hard work worth it.
But here’s the thing. Theater doesn’t do any of this. Only on its best days does the world of theater have anything worth saying to people. And 364 out of 365 days in the year are bad days for theater. We’re not producing shows that critique structural societal ills. We’re producing vapid entertainment for old, rich, white retirees in diapers who happen to be season subscribers and who put the theater company in their wills. The business of theater, whether it is for-profit or non-profit, is overly reliant upon “money maker” shows at the expense of having the wherewithal to produce work with any substance to it.
Theater should be a great place to work. There should be ample opportunity for creative collaboration with individuals from all sorts of backgrounds. The work environment should be equitable and compassionate; a setting for mutual solidarity and teamwork built towards realizing a shared artistic goal. But theatre is not like this. There is just as much hierarchy found in theater as there is in any rigid corporate structure. The people in positions of power – producers, directors, managers, professors, seasoned designers – are very often not a diverse set of people, neither racially, politically, nor socioeconomically. Ridiculous cliques and rivalries often form between the “talent” – actors, singers, performers – and the technicians. People are expected to stay in their lane, or else. So much for a free and rewarding artistic work environment.
All of this wouldn’t matter so much if theater paid well. But it doesn’t. If you’re starting out, expect to see a lot of unpaid internships and three-month long summer contracts that only pay $1,000 total for working more than fulltime every week. Whether you’re a freelance designer, a performer, or a gigging technician, you’ve got to piece different jobs together and always be working on getting another show coming down the pipe just to make ends meet. It’s all about the hustle. I have seen many job postings asking for skilled carpenters and electricians that pay only the FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE OF $7.25 AN HOUR. Are you kidding me? Get the fuck on outta here with that bullshit. The litany of low-paying internships and small contract rates for budding designers, technicians, and performers effectively walls-off the entire industry from anyone with bills to pay who’s not getting help from mommy and daddy. Unpaid internships have a distorting effect on the entire entertainment economy, driving down wages across the board, particularly among nonunionized positions. The entire concept of an unpaid internship needs to be abolished. Interns perform labor just like the rest of us, so pay them.
The shitty pay wouldn’t matter so much if the working conditions were great. But they’re not. Long hours, physically taxing labor, constant travel, late nights, frayed relationships, dangerous equipment, and having to deal with people who are treating their production of The Music Man like it’s the second coming of Aeschylus in order to justify the crew staying one more hour after the already 12 hours that have been put in that day, all make it not worth the little and inconsistent pay.
As Josh Loar writes in Current Affairs about the industry:
From Hollywood to the music industry, theater to video games, the people who make your entertainment do physically grueling work for exceedingly long hours, and the rate of burnout is high. The usual response to any complaints about working conditions is that our industry is “glamorous,” and that the sheer excitement of working in entertainment must surely offset any negative impacts. This mindset keeps us working such long hours that we can’t be present for birthdays, weddings, funerals, and other major life events—because the show must go on, right?
Theater also relegates certain kinds of shows to obscurity. If you want to keep making money then it is wise not to give stage time to certain voices. Theater is largely a business. It relies upon the support of rich donors and on producing mass-appeal spectacle. The playwright Karen Malpede, in Chris Hedges’ book Death of the Liberal Class, explains what happens when the theater becomes dependent on profit:
Without government support for funding innovation and the non-commercial, the theater began to institutionalize and to censor itself. The growing network of regional theaters became ever more reliant upon planning subscription seasons which would not offend any of their local donors, and the institutional theaters began to function more and more as social clubs for the wealthy and philanthropic.3
Theater is largely run by and for liberal interests, not everyday people. Theater does not produce shows which engender political activism, civil disobedience, or a distrust of U.S. exceptionalism. Theater does not provide a language with which to dismantle U.S. imperialism and all of its attendant evils. It does not cultivate a wherewithal to defy the totalitarian corporate stranglehold on our government. It does not give us a capacity to speak out against the bloated military industrial complex and the expansive carceral state – where the former deprives funding from our education system and the latter imprisons the resulting ill-educated and impoverished people of our country. Theater does not serve as a tool for radical organizing around class interests.
But theater could do these things if it had the moral fortitude to do so. Producing good, entertaining art and producing politically literate art are not mutually exclusive. Radical theater thrived during the New Deal era when artists were paid by the government through the Works Progress Administration, and during the anti-war movement of the 1960’s. Since then, theater has given way to spectacle and to empty, heartwarming liberal platitudes devoid of any language deemed too offensive or threatening to the current socioeconomic order. The theater industry should give financial support to emerging, transgressive voices. The industry should lobby for public funding in order to spread non-commercial work to as many people as possible. The industry should step outside of its bubble in order to forge relationships with forgotten, underrepresented, and invisible sectors of our population. Theater should be an instigator for radical grassroots organizing. Theater should be led by strong, bottom-up labor unions. Theater can do these things. If it doesn’t, it will wither away, losing its social utility as it retreats into itself, speaking only to dwindling liberal echo chambers; or worse, it will continue to serve as a tool for powerful interests and an opiate for the masses.
Theater would be an amazing realm in which to work if it lived up to its potential. If the shows had strong social utility and content which spoke truth to power, if the shows reached audiences who most needed to see them – not just my rich cousin Ryan and his partner Patrick who have season subscriptions to the San Francisco Opera – if the pay was consistently commensurate with the labor, and if snobby assholes stopped looking down on people for not valuing their dubious artistic output, then I’d start to get a kick out of it. Theater needs to get its house in order. Otherwise what’s the point of all the hassle and hunger?
I spent the next day visiting various places in Ashland that I missed from my time away. It had just snowed the day before I got into town and the sky had cleared up by the time I arrived. It was good to feel the crisp Oregon air again. I walked around my old university and tried to sneak into the music department’s practice rooms to play some piano. Lithia Park was bustling with families and joggers. I stopped by the local used book shop and ran into Dr. Chilton there at the cash register as he walked in and smiled at me. You remember Dr. Chilton, right? The loathsome psychiatrist from The Silence of the Lambs who Hannibal Lector is going to have for dinner at the end of the movie? Well the actor who played Dr. Chilton resides in Ashland and sometimes he acts at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We nodded to each other as I walked out the store.
I went and sat at my favorite bar in Ashland, a place called Oberon’s, named after a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I enjoyed some people-watching at the bar, drank some more mead, and listened to live music. Oberon’s has live musicians playing nearly every night of the week. It was there, years before, that I happened upon the amazing folk-gypsy-blues-bluegrass-krustpunk band known as St. Cinder. It was a marvel to sit there and watch about ten motley musicians packed onto the tiny Oberon’s stage wailing on banjos, plickering mandolins, pounding a singular marching-band bass drum, blowing harmonicas, and screeching out clarinet solos to an infectiously wild audience. Check out Oberon’s if you’re ever passing through town. Last I checked, it’s always the same two bartenders, a young couple who look so darn cute working together. It’s a quintessential Ashland establishment.
got confused
if it was from or to that we were running– Dessa, “Fire Drills”4
It took me about three hours to get to Portland, a drive along Highway 5 that I have made many times now. The last time I’d been there for a concert was to see Your Heart Breaks and Kimya Dawson perform at Polaris Hall. Your Heart Breaks is the songwriting project of Clyde Petersen, who hails from the Seattle area. For that concert Petersen played a solo set along with Dawson. Between songs, I remember a single man in the crowd kept chanting, “Abolish ICE! Abolish ICE! Abolish ICE!” No one joined in on the chant. Clyde Petersen spoke approvingly into the mic, “200 percent.” And that ended the man’s yelling. I would expect nothing less from Portland. My date asked me why the man wanted to abolish ice. I guess that would seem like a strange demand if you weren’t familiar with our border patrol agency. But maybe that guy actually read somewhere that ice is bad for the environment or something.
Your Heart Breaks was touring in support of their recently released album Drone Butch Blues, a concept album of sorts centered on stories from the queer community. If you like indie-rock and want to hear some of the best songwriting the genre has to offer coming from the mind of a singular artist, then check out Clyde Petersen and Your Heart Breaks.
The venue that Dessa was playing at in Portland this time was the Aladdin Theater. I got there a couple hours before the show started, a bit earlier than I expected. I didn’t want to venture too far away from the venue so I walked around the immediate area looking for things to kill time with. There was an impressively large murder of crows painting the sky with themselves as I stepped into a nearby brewery. Inside it was just a big bearded bartender, a couple, and me. The décor of the place was odd, more akin to a hair salon than a typical brewery. I sat down with my beer and picked up a magazine I had never heard of before called n+1. If you’re into heady Brooklyn hipsters waxing philosophic about antifascism and identity politics then n+1 is your jam. The article I was skimming through was about the nature of Christian Evangelicalism in America. I finished my beer before I finished the lengthy article and walked back out into the murder of crows.
Right next door to the concert venue was a large piano shop. I thought maybe I could casually walk in, find a nice piano, and kill some time playing quietly until the show started. But as soon as I walked into the place I knew I had made a mistake. The entrance looked like a fancy hotel lobby, with a secretary sitting behind the front desk and a man in a nice suit jacket schmoozing with a young couple. The shop itself seemed to stretch for a whole block. I was made to feel like I couldn’t just browse around without an escort.
I told the woman at the front desk that I wanted to check out some pianos and she told me that the owner would be with me in a moment. The owner turned out to be the man in the suit jacket. As soon as I was with him I wanted to run out the front door but I felt trapped. He wasn’t being too pushy or trying to get me to walk out of the store that day with a $15,000 grand piano. He just kept asking me a lot of personal questions, like where I was from, why I was in town, why I was interested in a piano, and also sharing with me his whole life story. I lied and told him I was in the market for an electronic keyboard.
We walked across the shop to some models he thought would suit me. The place was expansive, with many different rooms for different types of pianos, and it had its own woodshop for fabrication and repair of piano parts. There were bizarre-looking bespoke pianos smaller than any piano I had seen before and enormous grand pianos priced at $50,000. The owner demonstrated to me some reasonably priced electronic models in their own separate room. I could tell that he wouldn’t be leaving me alone to play whatever I wanted to in peace.
Thankfully some new customers came in that distracted him just long enough for me to pluck out a few notes, try out a few different organ sounds on the keyboard, and then try to sneak away without him noticing. He caught up with me at the front door and gave me his business card, displaying it first as a digital copy on the screen of his phone and then with a slight of his hand wiping it off the screen and into my hand, like he had wanted to be a magician before he settled for the piano business. I thanked him and hurried out to get in line at the venue.
Just as in San Francisco, I was the first one at the doors. I brought Dessa’s book again in case she would be at the merch table this time. An older man stood next to me in line and told me that he’d been living in Portland for most of his life. He said that the Aladdin Theater used to be a porno movie house back in the 70’s. I peeked in the windows and saw the technicians and ushers all dressed in black getting the house ready for opening.
As it was getting dark and cold the piano shop owner walked by and spotted me in line. He told me that the shop was closed but that I was welcome to wait inside where it was warm until the venue opened up. I thanked him but said that wouldn’t be necessary. It seemed like a very odd offer to give to someone he had just met. He also said that he owned the Aladdin Theater building and that he could get me free tickets to future shows. I thanked him again and said I would certainly hit him up if I was in town again. But it still felt like a really weird way to try to sell a piano to someone.
As the doors opened up I made my way to the front of the stage. The venue did indeed look like an old converted movie theater. There was a balcony and floor seating, with a sizeable area up front where the seats had been taken out for standing room only. For a good twenty minutes I was the only one occupying the empty space in front of the stage as everyone else was busy picking out seats. A man came up to me and remarked on this fact. I told him that I always liked to be as close to the stage as possible for a performance. He told me that he had been going to see all of Dessa’s shows on this West Coast tour. He had flown from California to get to the Seattle show the night before. I told him I had gone to the San Francisco show as well. He said that he had chatted a bit with Dessa at one of the venues and requested that she play her newest single, “Good For You,” which had been neglected from her previous stops on the tour.
The set that night was basically the same as the one in San Francisco, but for the addition of the aforementioned fan-requested single. Monakr opened first, then Dessa came out dressed in a cloak and started out with “Ride,” she read a couple of her poems throughout the set, and then the string quartet, made up of different musicians this time, set up and finished out the show.
After the song “Fire Drills,” which is an anthemic calling out of rape-culture and an examination of what it sometimes means to be a woman in society, Dessa stopped to talk to the audience. She explained why she wrote the song and what her specific intentions were for it. She said that she didn’t want to paint every man with the same castigating broad strokes, but rather to give an account of her experience to people who would otherwise not understand her point of view. The whole audience had shouted along with the line: “I think a woman’s worth, I think that she deserves, a better line of work than motherfuckin’ vigilance!”5 Dessa said that she notices all the men in the audience singing along to the song’s every word and how things like that, demonstrations of support and appreciation, matter to people and set an example of solidarity.
Dessa closed the show with “Fighting Fish,” perhaps her most straight-up hip-hop song and the one which introduced me to her in the first place, as well as “Dixon’s Girl,” a cut from her first full-length album and another crowd favorite.
It looked again like she wouldn’t be making her way out to sign merch this time. So I stood outside for a bit to see if anyone would serendipitously invite me out for some drinks again. But I didn’t want to hang around too long or else the piano shop owner may have spirited me away back to his house where he keeps the best models for himself. I needed to get back on the road anyway because I had work the day after tomorrow and I didn’t want to drive all the way from Portland back down to the California Central Coast in just one day. So I headed back to Ashland and spent the night sleeping in my car instead of paying for a motel room again.
I fell asleep wishing that one of my friends had offered me a place to stay the night, wishing that Dessa could tour the West Coast more often, wishing that it wasn’t so damn cold, and hoping that I wouldn’t have another stress dream about my ex that night.
I also thought about wanting to go see the entire Doomtree crew play in their native Minneapolis. Of course, a few months after this West Coast tour, Covid-19 would put a stop to all touring for the foreseeable future, impacting the artists who make their living from live entertainment, and putting me out of a job entirely.
Thank you for reading part 4 of this essay. You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. In the next installment, there will be more analysis of Novartis’ leukemia therapy and our nightmarish capitalist quagmire we find ourselves in. Stay tuned!
Dessa, lyricist, "Say When," performed by Dessa, by Dessa and Andy Thompson, produced by Lazerbeak and Paper Tiger, on Chime, Doomtree Records, 2018, compact disc.
Dessa, "Up on Two Wheels," in My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love (New York, NY: Dutton, 2018), 2.
Chris Hedges, "Dismantling the Liberal Class," in Death of the Liberal Class (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2010), 97.
Dessa, lyricist, "Fire Drills," performed by Dessa, by Andy Thompson, produced by Lazerbeak, on Chime, Doomtree Records, 2018, compact disc.
Dessa, "Fire Drills."