Season of the Wild Flower: An Interview with Dionne Farris

Wednesday, July 23, 2008, 7:45 p.m.: The threat of rain looms over Manhattan. A car pulls up to The Cutting Room on West 24th Street, minutes before the clouds open. The driver slides the car into a parking spot outside the venue and whisks through the entrance, trailing a suitcase on wheels behind her. She is set to perform at 8:00 p.m. A crowd of about 50 people waits in the lounge outside the main performance space. A 20-something year old man wonders aloud if “the performer” has arrived yet. Does he know that “the performer” is standing but seven feet away from him, well within earshot? People might not recognize “the performer” since she’s been out of the public eye for ten years, but they most certainly remember her name: Dionne Farris.

For the better part of a decade, listeners have wondered, “Whatever happened to Dionne Farris?” It’s a valid enough question, especially for those who kept Farris’ Wild Seed–Wild Flower (1994) album in heavy rotation. Until now, three songs have served as something of an epitaph to the creatively fertile but tumultuous phase of Dionne Farris’ ascent to world renown: “Tennessee”, her Grammy Award-winning hit with Arrested Development; “I Know”, her Top Five solo pop hit that played by the hour on Top 40 radio for a good 13 months between 1994 and 1995; and “Hopeless”, a track of equal career-defining importance off the Love Jones (1997) soundtrack that found Farris a home on the R&B stations that chose not to play “I Know.” Free of the short-sighted vision of a major record label – the kind that once told Farris she wasn’t a “black” artist – the singer/songwriter/mother/road manager/label executive has returned to recording and performing, this time on her own terms. Re-energized with a new album, Signs of Life, and her own record label, Free and Clear, Dionne Farris is ready to sing again … and talk.

Planting the Seeds

Atlanta, circa 1993: Dionne Farris sits forward in a rocking chair on her porch. Farris has decided to leave Arrested Development, the group that rose to international prominence with “Tennessee”, a #1 R&B hit, and a Top 10 album, 3 Years, 5 Months, and 2 Days In the Life Of … (1992). Farris joined Arrested Development with drummer Rasadon after the two moved to Atlanta from New Jersey, where Farris grew up. An irreparable chasm has grown between the two. Their engagement is off. Farris wants out of the relationship and out of Arrested Development.

Photographer Sandra Hendricks was there to capture the pensive mood that consumed Dionne Farris on that afternoon so many years ago. Nearly 15 years later, Farris recalls exactly what she was thinking in that chair while Hendricks took photographs. “I remember looking out going, ‘Wow. This is all starting yet a part of my life is falling apart. He’s not lining up’. We were starting to come apart. Fame started to process him and he was feeling special. I left Arrested Development because I was like, ‘This is what you guys do. Do your thing. I’m ready to go solo anyway. So have at it, enjoy, I’ll see you later.'” A photo from that session became the cover image for her debut, Wild Seed-Wild Flower while the unworkable situation with Arrested Development figured into the album’s title. “I kept saying, I’m in the garden and you’re trying to pull me out because you think I’m a weed but I’m a wild flower.” [Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Wild Seed (1980) inspired the first part of the album’s title.]

Under the reign of Don Ienner, Columbia Records released Wild Seed-Wild Flower in early 1994. From the hybrid of musical styles to Farris’ close-cropped hair, the label tested the artist’s resolve and convictions on a number of issues. When executives saw that Farris selected the image of herself on the rocking chair for the cover of the CD booklet, the following conversation between the label and artist ensued:

Columbia Records: “You look like a little boy. You’re such a pretty girl, why do you want to look like that?”

Dionne Farris: “I want people to get passed what I look like. I really want them to hear the music.”

Columbia Records: “Well they can still hear the music if you look a little pretty.”

Dionne Farris: “I got some pretty pictures inside.”

Columbia Records: “Okay, if you want to look like a boy … “

The label’s obvious displeasure with the photo no doubt contributed, in part, to an unfortunate graphical error on the first 100,000 pressings of the disc. Because of the way the photo had been cut out from the original image, Farris’ eye looked swollen or, as Farris suggests, it was if she’d boxed a round with Mike Tyson. (Her eye was later corrected on subsequent pressings.)

The one place where Columbia interfered the least was the song selection and the overall sound of the album. Co-produced by Dionne Farris with Randy Jackson, (who headed A&R at Columbia), and Michael Simanga (Farris’ manager at the time), Wild Seed-Wild Flower was a compelling mixture of rock and R&B. Except for “I Know” and a cover of The Beatles’ “Blackbird”, Farris wrote or co-wrote every track on the album. Her guiding maxim was to invoke thought in the minds of listeners. Her philosophical musings shaped “Reality” while the lyrics to “Stop to Think” explored crack cocaine and addiction — from the drug’s point of view. She documented her departure from Arrested Development on “11th Hour” and merged the sensual with the soulful on the exceptional rocker “Passion.” Track for track, Farris’ vocal talent was a gripping force and Wild Seed-Wild Flower became one of the most highly acclaimed releases of 1994. Writing for Rolling Stone, Cheo H. Coker noted that Farris had crafted “a soul-stirring tapestry of gospel, juke-joint blues, Take 6-style a cappellas, hip-hop scratching, and blissful funkadelic metal” (26 JAN ’94). Though Wild Seed-Wild Flower impressed critics, Farris’ audience was as diverse as her music and promoting the album became a challenge for the label. “I was an anomaly”, Farris states, a situation the label was evidently unequipped to capitalize on. She recalls:

“At the beginning, they were like, ‘We don’t know what to do’ and they really didn’t know what to do. I did a lot of touring and I did a lot of college tours. I was on tour with Dave Matthews. When I went to the black colleges, they were like, ‘Well we can’t play ‘I Know’ because it’s not our format but we love the ’11th Hour’. Can we play that?’ I had no jurisdiction to say ‘yes’. ‘I Know’ was the first single and I was like, ‘That’s cool, but you guys (the label) got to remember that I came from Arrested Development. That’s a very diverse crowd’. ‘I Know’ is a very pop-oriented song and what I suggested was why don’t we take the ’11th Hour’, which is about my whole departure from Arrested Development, and service that crowd with that song? They’re like, ‘That’s not how it works’. I had no say-so in the matter. What I said to them was, ‘Well maybe we can get everybody in the same room. We might not get them through the same door: we got ‘I Know’ over here, let’s go and do the ’11th Hour’ at the back door side entrance. Don’t do a video, service it to black college radio … whatever it’s got to be so it’s not taking away frombut adding to.”

Columbia didn’t respond favorably to Farris’ creative marketing and replied with a flimsy “We-don’t-do-two-singles” excuse. Farris further explains her frustration in working with the label, “You start feeling like, ‘Why me? Am I difficult?’ No, record companies are difficult, especially if (the music) is not able to fit into the guidelines that they’re playing in. You’re in a bad place unless you’re going to get on the R&B train.”

Development Arrested

Photo: Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo

Development Arrested

Three years later, a movie called Love Jones gave Farris a first-class luxury ride on that R&B train. Though Columbia resisted working any song off Wild Seed-Wild Flower for R&B-formatted radio stations, their focus shifted 180-degrees when Farris recorded “Hopeless” for the film’s soundtrack. Written by Van Hunt, five years before he debuted with his self-titled album, the song became an instant classic for Farris. “When I first heard it”, Farris remembers, “it made me cry because I knew what he was talking about – ‘penny with a hole in it’. I knew what we had just discussed, how I was feeling about all this stuff. It was like, ‘Dude you captured that thing perfectly.'”

With “Hopeless” a staple on R&B radio stations, Columbia now pigeonholed Farris as a strictly R&B-centered artist, a point of contention when Farris began recording her full-length follow-up to Wild Seed-Wild Flower. “When I first came to the company, I was told that I wasn’t a black artist. They had listened to ‘I Know’ and they were like, ‘That’s definitely not an R&B song’. When ‘Hopeless’ came, they were like ‘Oooh! Go there Keep doing that!’ I’m going, ‘Okay, we’re going do that but we’re also going to do this‘. They just didn’t like it.” The direction the label had in mind – a whole album of “Hopeless”-sounding tracks – was not what Farris recorded. Columbia disliked the second album so much that they refused to release it as submitted. Dionne Farris refused to change the record. Reaching an impasse with her label over the style of the album, Farris requested a release from her contract. The conversation between Dionne Farris, Columbia, and her lawyer went something like this:

Dionne Farris to Columbia: “This is not going to work. Just let me go. We’re going to be standing here a long time. I’m not going to budge and neither are you.”

Lawyer to Dionne Farris: “They’re not going to drop you. You are an artist that has made money for them.”

Dionne Farris to Lawyer: “It’s already out there in the universe. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to know this process anymore because this is now becoming a chore and a task. It’s becoming tedious and I don’t think it’s necessary.”

Farris quickly realized that there was very little artistic or financial stability in being signed to a major label. The publicists and handlers who had an office, stationary, insurance, and expense accounts actually had more security at the label than the artists. “They have it better than we do”, Farris exclaims. “These guys who are your representatives, they’re taking you out but it’s on your dime.” The schmoozing, the fame, and the notoriety foisted on Farris did little to assure her of the label’s long-term investment in her career. To the amusement of the executives at Columbia, Farris suggested earning the same benefits as those who worked for the company. “That’s how I felt about it at that time: ‘I don’t have any stock in the company. Let me get that. Let me do it that way and I’ll feel a lot better about what’s going on because, essentially, I’m an employee too.'” In a token gesture from the label, Farris eventually got some stationary with her name on it.

To the astonishment of her attorney, Dionne Farris was also released from her contract.

Birthing a New Beginning

“For U” Video Shoot, circa 2007: Dionne Farris opens the front door to her two-story house in Atlanta. A videographer follows her around the house as she mimes the lyrics to “For U”, a song from her new Signs of Life album. Farris gives a tour of her home. Sitting at the piano is a young girl with straight, shoulder-length hair. At one point during the video, the music stops and Farris addresses the girl, “Tate, you know the piano is old, so if you don’t want to play that one, just go play the organ in the back.” Tate is 12 years old. She sings, dances, acts, plays piano and guitar, loves to read, and is very proficient with math and science. She’s also the daughter of Dionne Farris.

When Farris left Columbia, she didn’t shop around for another label deal, she closed the door on the industry altogether. Instead, Farris focused on raising her daughter, who was born just before “Hopeless” was released. Farris welcomed the change. “It was like this – here’s music and here’s a whole new life. It allowed me to open up to myself and figure out the things I didn’t know and then get a grasp of those things as quickly as possible because now I’m raising somebody else who’s looking at me like, ‘Mommy what do we do now?’ You may not have all the answers but you have to be one step ahead so you can figure them out.”

To the initial bewilderment of her family, Farris decided to home school her daughter, something she hadn’t planned to do but decided to do since she wasn’t impressed with the school system in Georgia. “My thing was, I need to be able to give her some sort of foundation so that when she goes in there and she is socialized, she still has a set of values. She’s going into seventh grade now. She is top of her class. My mother, being an educator of 36 years, is the best cheerleader. She said, ‘You did an excellent job giving her a great foundation.'”

Though Farris has spent the majority of the past 12 years raising Tate, she also went through a dark period, a phase that is succinctly acknowledged in her dedication to God in the credits for Signs of Life: “Thank you for my life back. I’ll never again think it’s not worth living.” She shudders at the memory of what she felt during that emotionally turbulent interval:

“Life came upon me in a way I didn’t understand. It stands to paralyze you if you are not ready to keep moving. There was a big period in my life when I did not sing at all. It physically hurt in a lot of different ways, not just my voice. For that gigantic gap of time for me not to sing, I was like, ‘I might as well just be gone’. I did a lot of detrimental things to myself, trying to harm myself. I didn’t cut my wrists or anything like that but I had those bad thoughts.”

Church was the one place Farris felt compelled to sing, though it took some encouragement over a period of three years from the church’s praise leader, Nina Walters, for Farris to feel comfortable in front of the congregation. “She kept saying, ‘You need to let God use your voice’. I’m like, ‘Huh?’ I didn’t know what that meant.” Respecting the sanctity of church, Farris was initially hesitant to sing, fearing that her involvement in the choir would be viewed as a performance. “I didn’t want the velvet rope at the church”, she says.

What Farris didn’t expect was the congregation’s reaction when she finally decided to sing. “When I got up there the first few times”, she recalls, “people wept. I mean they broke down like, ‘You’re anointed’ — I had never heard that in the secular world ever — ‘Your voice breaks yokes and it opens up chambers’. That was the catalyst to birthing something deeper for me about what I’ve been given. I’ve been given a gift and a gifting for more than just singing songs that I like.”

During her years at Columbia, the frenetic pace of touring and stardom distracted Farris from realizing how deeply her gift affected listeners on a spiritual and physical level. Witnessing, up close, the visceral reaction people had towards her singing propelled her towards reigniting her career. The process of renouncing a career in music then rediscovering her voice is symbolized by a post card Farris hands out at her concerts. The photograph depicts a pregnant Farris with the words “Birthing a New Beginning” written across the photo. “I’m nothing but pleased at this point in my life”, she says. “I have a 1993 Toyota Corola. I have no qualms about what is in my midst right now. I’m grateful and thankful that I have the opportunity to be here, to begin again.”

Free, Clear, and Back Onstage

Photo: Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo

Free, Clear, and Back Onstage

Friday, August 1, 2008, 9:30 p.m.: After performing a powerhouse 70-minute set for a standing room-only crowd at Joe’s Pub in New York City, Dionne Farris is holding court backstage in the famed venue’s rehearsal room. She is remarkably energized for having just signed a stack of CD’s and posed with a crowd of fans for photographs. She treats those who stayed behind to an impromptu, spellbinding performance of Nina Simone’s “See-Line Woman.” Minutes after the applause, Farris sits at a table reviewing the payment terms for the night’s performance. These days, Farris is more than a performer, she’s a label executive, publicist, and CD manufacturer.

A reinvigorated outlook and perspective infuses Farris’ creative re-birth. It’s an attitude that inspired the name of her label, Free & Clear. Though Farris fielded many offers to sign with record companies after she left Columbia, and even signed with Matthew Knowles’ Music World Entertainment for a “hot second”, she is clearly not mourning the divorce from major labels. “I don’t want any parts of the traditional experience of the music industry”, she emphasizes. “What I would like to do with Free and Clear records is help promote other artists who have talent but also put them up on game and make sure they know their business and know what the business is … and be fair about it.”

Dionne Farris’ first signing for Free & Clear is herself. Released online in early 2008, Signs of Life traces the journey Farris traveled after Wild Seed—Wild Flower. It also collect her various collaborations with Van Hunt, Jamey Jaz, Count Bass D, and Tomi Martin (of Three5Human). Farris sells physical copies of the CD at her shows and autographs every one of them for audience members. After giving Farris several standing ovations, the majority of the audience is usually more than eager to buy Signs of Life.

Thriving on the reciprocal nature of live performance, Farris shares the advice a former label-mate at Columbia gave her about how an album is but one component of a career and not the sum total. Nancy Wilson, who’s recorded more than 40 records in her career, told Farris, “The record is for you to stand on. That’s your platform. Keep making the records and you service the people. You go and tour and that’s where you make your money.” In establishing her record label, Farris has heeded the advice. She explains, “Signs of Life is making sure that number one, people can hear the music so they’ll be inspired to come out, but it’s also facilitating us to go around. I’m ready to go. I’m extremely ready. I’m so ready to keep being onstage. There’s just a repertoire now that I’m grateful for. We do almost a two-hour show.”

In those two hours, Farris covers every corner of her career, the past and present, the rare and renowned. “I Know” and “Hopeless”, of course, receive the expected roar of approval but so does the new and less familiar material. She begins the set with the reggae-sway of “Baggage” (a non-album single available on her MySpace page). Her voice soars to heavenly heights during “Remember My Name”, a song that she characterizes as a conversation with herself and with God. The music turns sublimely serene on “Hidden Charm”, a song that Van Hunt wrote, among three others on Signs of Life. “Van and I made some really great music”, Farris says. “Sometimes he would give me tracks, sometimes he’d give me whole songs, and sometimes he would listen to what I was saying. He has such a great ability to interpret stuff that you said. That’s what, to me, ‘Hidden Charm’ was. We were talking about all those things that were going on and he came back with the song.”

“Open”, which was written with Tomi Martin of the Atlanta-based group Three5Human, fires up the rock quotient of the concert. Martin had originally written the song for Madonna but once Farris heard it, she asked Martin if she, instead, could write lyrics for it. “Dionne has a gift for writing songs that come out perfectly”, Martin enthuses. “I told her, ‘That song is yours.'” Underscoring the song’s themes of losing and longing, Farris interpolates a couple of lines from “Missing You” by Diana Ross, which she shapes into a call and response with the audience.

The most emotionally wrenching moment of a Dionne Farris show is actually a song that she has not yet recorded, “Fair.” It tells the story about two friends of Farris’ who were in relationships that ended because of unrequited love. Towards the middle of the song, Farris cries out, “Don’t play with people’s lives/Don’t play with people’s time/Don’t play with people’s minds.” The naked intimacy of Farris’ performance brings tears to people’s eyes. Though Farris embodies the pain and can relate to it, she clarifies that the song is not personal. Instead she summons the pain that one of her friends felt as the relationship dissolved. “I remember them saying, ‘It’s just not fair’. Right from that word, the song came screaming out loud. When you have friends and you feel their pain you can still kind of live their pain for them and that’s what comes up.” Conveying the pain of her friend, Farris falls to her knees onstage, eyes closed, her voice raw with emotion. It’s an astounding moment.

The audience shouts in recognition of “Hopeless” from its first two chords. How does it feel to perform “Hopeless” ten years later? “To sing that song for people and for them to respond the way that they do, it really feels good”, Farris shares. “Sometimes we, as musicians, feel like, (she groans) ‘I have to sing this song 90,000 times’ but I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t want to deprive them and it feels good for me because they’re like, ‘Ah yeah! That’s my song!'” Dionne Farris must clarify one thing, though, lest anyone think otherwise, “I still am not ‘hopeless'”, she asserts, “and I never have been.”

A Wild Flower in Bloom

A recording studio in Los Angeles, sometime in the not-too-distant past: It’s the third day of a songwriting session between Dionne Farris and Jamey Jaz. The two writers have settled on the track, now Farris must write the lyrics. She’s returning to Atlanta tomorrow morning so she needs to write something. What exactly does she want to say to listeners? Turning to her leather-bound journal for inspiration, she notices two lines she’d written previously: “Matter not how many trees that you see/Matter how beautiful the ones you see be.” Pondering the meaning behind those words, Farris instantly conjures up another set of lyrics: “When you overstand help someone understand/ Then and only then you’ll begin to process the plan/Thinking what you would like for life it to be/This is that what was given to me.”

Those last set of words open “For U”, track three on Signs of Life. Akin to “Remember My Name”, the lyrics are like an internal conversation Farris is having with herself. The song touches on the idea that Farris had given up a lot when she left Columbia but came through the experience with a greater understanding of herself. Indeed, the lessons she has learned about life could easily fill a book or two. (In fact, she is writing a book). One lesson in particular is dedicated to a man who figured prominently early in Farris’ career and is now one of the industry’s most recognizable impresarios — Randy Jackson. In the liner notes that accompany Signs of Life, she writes to him, “You are not my friend. You are not my enemy. You are my teacher.” When asked about the sentiment behind that dedication, Farris says, “Randy was the one that gave me that line. I’m kind of serving that back out to him”, she says cryptically. “The time that we spent together was very fruitful. Randy taught me a lot of stuff and at the same time he didn’t teach me a lot of stuff. He allowed the process to teach me because a lot of things he wouldn’t say. I had to learn them for myself.”

In that learning process, Farris often grappled with her decision to leave the industry. “A lot of times I kicked myself”, she says. “I heard from a lot of different people in the music industry tell me, ‘What are you doing? You opened up the doors and let everybody in and now you’re not showing up’. I was like, you know, ‘If it’s for me and I’m supposed to be doing it, when it’s time, it’s going to come back around and it’s going to be better than ever.'”

Patience and perseverance guided Dionne Farris from Wild Seed-Wild Flower to Signs of Life. She is now in full command of her talent and wholly committed to her art. “I never gave anybody a sour taste in their mouth with music that I presented to them”, she says, “so to come back full force, singing even better – this is what other people are telling me – I feel good. I feel like I sound good and I’m loving that. I’m loving the whole process of singing again.” Free and clear, the wild flower spirit of Dionne Farris is gloriously in bloom.