I’ve always found the discourse around being an authentic New Yorker tiresome, and yet there does seem to be something quintessentially New York about Devonté Hynes’s music. He moved to the city from London, about ten years ago, having spent his late teens in a caterwauling dance-punk band called Test Icicles. After that, he set out on his own as an inscrutable folky named Lightspeed Champion. But it wasn’t until 2011, when he began releasing records as Blood Orange, that his music started to feel truly rooted. The songs are built on a mix of influences, like new wave and R. & B., which is to say that Hynes owes a great debt to Prince. But the music also feels firmly tied to his adopted home town’s musical traditions: the gender-bending transcendence of disco, the playful provocations of downtown avant-garde composers, the found-sound tapestries of hip-hop.
Last summer, Hynes released “Freetown Sound,” one of the year’s best albums. Since then, he’s produced songs for others, like Carly Rae Jepsen, Haim, and Tinashe, and teased some Blood Orange works in progress. He’ll be performing at The New Yorker Festival on October 7th, and joining me for a conversation. I’m eager to discuss his process, and especially all the nonmusical elements that influence his music. In the past, he’s said that he spends a lot of time engaging with other forms of creative expression, such as visual art, while working on his songs; he also experiences synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon in which, for example, people might see colors while listening to music. Like many fans, I glimpse Hynes’s world primarily through his Instagram account, which—with its videos of a dance rehearsal in slow motion, or of a gleeful, late-night bike ride through the city, an iPhone speaker blasting the Clark Sisters’ effervescent “You Brought the Sunshine”—offers a thrilling sense of all the raw materials that go into his sound.
