R&B singer Dawn Richard and multi-instrumentalist Spencer Zahn just released their second album, Quiet in a World Full of Noise. The record is an orchestral blend of intimate piano ballads and emotionally raw songwriting. Richard got her start as part of the pop group Danity Kane, while Zahn’s background is in jazz, classical, and experimental music.
The duo met when Richard was on tour with fellow musical artist Kimbra: “I was trying to save money as an independent artist, and she said, ‘I got somebody that'll play for you. He plays with me.’ … And I think the first time I worked with [Zahn], I was completely in love just with him as a person, but also musically.”
Eventually, the two joined forces on their 2018 track “Cyanotype.”
“I've often made a lot of music that's just instrumental music,” Zahn explains. “And so ‘Cyanotype’ was a song that I made without thinking of putting a vocalist on it, but then when Dawn heard it, she really wanted to sing on it, and it was beautiful. So we released it as a rework of the original, just as a single track. And then we decided to make a whole album together.”
On Quiet in a World Full of Noise, Richard and Zahn wanted to focus on the individual songs and lyricism.
Many of the new tracks emerged out of the pain and loss Richard has endured over the last two years. During that time, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, her father had two strokes after being diagnosed with lymphoma, and her cousin was murdered.
“What poured out of me became ‘Life and Numbers’ and records like that where [I] didn't even write them down,” Richard says. “It was literally like therapy. A purge. I would finish them broken down, crying, and then realize when I finished, ‘Do I even want to release this because it is just extremely reflective?’ And I think I'm so grateful that I was able to lyrically tap into, I think, a space I've never truly done before. This is about as honest as I've ever been.”
Richard says their track “Breathe Out” especially speaks to the experience of being a woman in the music industry: “It's telling everyone, ‘You can breathe. You can exhale now. You've held your breath for so long. You can actually have that moment of breath by yourself.’ And I hadn't had that.”
She continues, “We have to address as women the reality that it's just difficult in this industry. And I think people have different versions of what that is. For me, I went through homelessness. I went through [Hurricane] Katrina. There was [sic] a multitude of things that my journey in music has been very difficult, but it's also been very beautiful. And I wanted to speak to that honesty. That it has been a turbulent one, but I would never trade it. It has made me resilient. It has made me stronger for it, and I don't know who I would have been had I not had music.”
The new album started as a series of instrumentals, written as Zahn was going through a breakup in New York before relocating to LA. He wrote music for six months and decided to send the tunes to Richard.
“It happened in three stages. Basically, I started with these [solo] piano compositions,” Zahn explains. “Then, Dawn sang over everything. And then when I heard what she was singing about and her melodic content, I started arranging and producing around that, so adding some more instrumentation and building it out to help tell the story beyond just the piano and vocal.”
Listening back to emotionally charged tracks like “Life in Numbers” is cathartic for Richard.
“You're always taught [to] be strong as women, or even as men and people in general. They're like, ‘Hold this in. Be strong and do those things.’ But I feel the honesty and the vulnerability that I've been able to have in this has made me so much more of a human I love — a person I want to be. And so, yeah, it's hard, but I'm okay with that. I'm okay with whatever I feel in that. And I think even when we go on tour, that just to sing these things is going to be so difficult, but also needed.”
The album’s title track is about finding your own stillness, Richard says.
“Kids have a better way of finding their own moments of joy, but we [adults] get so caught up. And I think it's important: the stillness, the quiet, the substance, the things that [keep] you grounded. … I didn't know that's where we were going at that time, but I know that's what I was feeling. I was like, ‘God, I just want to be the quiet of everything, like, everybody be quiet,’ and it became the title of our album.”
Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn’s new album “Quiet in a World Full of Noise” was born from pain and loss. Credit: Clifford Usher.