Blood Orange: “I think the great joys of all forms of art are the different ways it can be a friend to you"

Dev Hynes picks up the call from Paris, having wrapped a listening party for his new album, Essex Honey, the night before. The soft-spoken artist says people thought it was ‘alright’. Reviews of the record which have since come out suggest it’s a little better than that.

Known to most as Blood Orange, Hynes has built a career as one of the most celebrated musicians of the 15-or-so years, weaving together woozy pop, R&B, surf rock, electronic, the avant-garde and the everything else.

Even if you haven’t heard the name, you’ve probably heard the sound. Just look at the CV. He’s worked on music for Paul McCartney, Harry Styles, Blondie and Mac Miller, to list a few.

His own projects meanwhile, are masterful documents of memory, intimacy, and identity. On Essex Honey, as the title alludes, Hynes turns backwards and inwards, exploring grief and his youth in Essex.

“It started happening quite naturally,” he says. “I actually name projects super far in advance. I had the name Essex Honey six or so years ago. Usually, with names, it’s based on phonetics, or even the aesthetic of looking at the words. But then my life tends to go that way anyway.

“Since then, there was a pandemic. I think with everyone in the world, it was such a jump when you came out the other end. My mom got sick and passed away, so I was back in Essex a lot. All these things happened and kept informing this idea of memory. At the same time, I wanted it to be a love letter to music.”

Much of Essex Honey is about using music to work through grief.

“I think the great joys of all forms of art are the different ways it can be a friend to you. You can use it as a form of distraction and silliness. It could also be like a person talking to you. Listening to Sufjan Stevens or something, it can be deep.

“There’s all these different ways it can be effective. It’s something that I wanted to think about and do. With all of these solid, deep emotional points you can be in, within that, there’re so many tiny ones you experience. You can experience joy in grief. You can experience sadness. You can experience all these different things. That was real. And I wanted to put real into the album.”

The song ‘Thinking Clean’ exemplifies this search for clarity amid sadness.

“That one is about looking at the person you are before you’re poisoned by the surroundings.” Hynes explains. “I’m trying to oscillate between that version and the present version that is maybe in the depths of grief. I wanted to show both sides of that.”

Hynes adds that the album repeatedly returns to the theme of vision.

Blood Orange.

CREATIVE PROCESS

“It happened naturally, but it makes sense looking back. It’s this idea of ‘something’s gone’. You’re not seeing it properly at all. Your vision’s blurry. Something’s changed, but you don’t know what.

“I am interested in this idea of the unreliable narrator, because no one can reliably narrate their life. I know my life inside out, but I also am now looking at it from this hazy memory, and rebuilding things from that.”

Though the songs delve inward, Hynes’ creative process reaches outward.

Collaborations are central to how he makes music, and Essex Honey features an array of guests, from pop superstars to actors and authors.

“A lot of people are friends who are around me,” Hynes says. “So when I am working on music, a lot of them are in the room, passing through or coming by. And I open the doors to them. If they’re my friend, I usually just trust them wholeheartedly.

“I’m always curious about what they can add to a situation. It comes from a place of curiosity. I’m just curious about what another brain can pick up and run from something I made.”

One notable contributor is writer Zadie Smith, who provides backing vocals on the track ‘Vivid Light.’

“She’s a friend of mine,” Hynes says. “She used to live very close to me in New York when she was teaching at NYU. We’d talk a lot and have great conversations. She was visiting NY at the time and wanted to hear what I was working on, and I just kind of shoved a mic in her face. She sings a lot in her life and she’s so good. I wanted to shove her in.”

Hynes applies the same ethos to others, even if they’re full-time musicians like Lorde and Caroline Polachek.

“Caroline I’ve known and worked with forever now,” he says. “She’s someone who’s so safe to me. I know what she’s gonna do and come up with. I know it’s gonna take it somewhere crazy, every time.

“Lorde, she’s very special. We live quite close and I love always talking and sharing ideas. And yeah, I learn things from all these people. Ella (Lorde) for example, she’s so good at pop. She has such a good pop brain, and prides herself on that too. That’s always so interesting to me, because I do not.

“I will make the intro 30 seconds, and to me it sounds great. But there’s ways of thinking. It’s always interesting, with collaborators, to hear how they think.”

Musically, Essex Honey is one of Hynes’s more stripped-back records, decorated by piano and cello.

“The cello kind of happened by accident, but made a lot of sense, because it was the first instrument I learned. It initially happened because of [Danish cellist] Cæcilie Trier. I’d send her these prompts before the music was written, and she created these little improvisations, and I would then add cello to them, cut them up, and rewrite and create these little duets and things.

“It ended up becoming an anchor for the album. Piano ended up happening a lot, because I was doing a lot more scoring work and writing on piano. Things naturally started moving towards that direction.”
Field recordings, the art of whipping out your voice notes app whenever the vibe is right, are another leitmotif of Hynes’ discography. They’re littered throughout Essex Honey.

THE BEATLES

“‘[The recording on] ‘The Last Of England’ is the last Christmas my family spent with my mother. My sister, my mother and I were having a conversation about The Beatles.

“I have a common thing that I’m always throwing at people, which is that the biggest people in different fields are underrated. And I was bringing to the table that The Beatles were underrated. It’s almost like the thing that takes them to that place becomes commodified.”

And is Blood Orange underrated?

“I dunno actually,” Hynes laughs. “Probably. I think it’s fine. Every creative output in the world will never get back what is put out, which I think is the joy or the switch of creation. That’s what it is. As a fan and consumer, I’m not giving back what is given to me. I’m listening to an album and thinking it’s great, then turning it off. And it’s three years of someone’s life.

“I was talking to a friend recently, and we had a funny moment where we were trying to think of things that are just ‘rated’. And in doing this list, we realised that it’s not what you wanna be. You don’t want your world rating to be exact.”

• Essex Honey is out now.