More from Dessa on her recent adventures
On living part-time in New York: "I've got to say, it lives up to the hype for me. My mom's family is from there, so I've loved it since I was a kid. Living there feels enormous, brilliant, vicious, expensive. Especially expensive! I'll never lose that Minnesota side of me that can't get used to spending as much as it costs to live there. But I still return home often enough to be spared the long, hard salvo of loneliness that can happen when people move there to make it there."
On her work with Lin-Manuel Miranda: "Toward the beginning of 'Hamilton's' meteoric rise, he published a list of songs that inspired him, and one of mine was on it ['Dixon's Girl']. That turned into an internet friendship, and it took off from there, as can happen nowadays. It has been a genuine thrill to work with him. On so many levels, he just traffics excellence, not only in how he works but who he works with. I really had no exposure to the world of Broadway before him, so I didn't know how the people in it act. At least in his case, he surrounds himself with really good, inspiring, hardworking people."
On writing her upcoming book: "I've been very interested in writing since college. I took a class [at the U] on creative nonfiction, which just sounds boring on the surface, but it really sparked something in me. And I've been doing it ever since, throughout my musical career. Whenever I had time, I'd send an essay off to the New Yorker or wherever to try to get it published. Finally, I was able to put a real proposal together and pitch it properly, and it worked. It's essentially all true stories from the last 10 years of my life in piecemeal form."
On her Doomtree crewmates worrying about any possible dirt in the book: "One thing I know is that to write a compelling story, there has to be a decent amount of conflict in it. So my book definitely has some of that [laughs]. I was very careful, though, to ask permission if I thought anything might in any way be off-limits, whether it was members of my family or members of my crew. I sent out a lot of e-mails with essays attached asking, 'Hey, Mom, are you OK with me writing this?' or, 'Hey, Sims, what do you think of this?' Fortunately, they're all very supportive of me, so I mostly got all green lights."
