Album Cover Photo by Nerd Rat Media
An album listening party feels a bit like a baptism. The child, or the album, is blessed by a select few friends and family members, and after completing this rite of passage, is ready to make its public debut. This pervasive sense of witnessing something intimate and sacred hung in the air at the album listening session for LAWLESS: A Love Story, the musical lovechild of DNA Picasso and Dominique Christina. Like proud parents (Dominique is actually a mother; more on that later), the real-life couple gathered just a handful of people, mostly the producers and engineers who worked on the project, for a preview in the exact same recording studio where the album came to life. I was lucky enough to be in attendance, and though I had already heard the album (one of the perks of doing promo work for artists), I really believe that you absorb music differently in this kind of close-knit incubator. Hearing LAWLESS in the firetruck-red recording room at The Lab Studios, sharing an ottoman perch with one of the project’s producers, I was struck with too much inspiration to not write this review. (By the way, unless I’m being pitched, that’s pretty much how all my reviews happen.)
For my Pink Sofa people not familiar with DNA and Dominique, they are a Denver-based artistic power couple of wickedly talented multi-hyphenates. DNA is an award-winning hip-hop artist, entrepreneur, event producer, founder of the Colorado Music Industry Alliance, and a general fixture of the music scene state-wide (and probably like seven more side hustles I don’t even know about). Dominique is an award-winning poet, author, curator, installation artist, actor, and the Arts Envoy to Cyprus (She also has several hidden Forrest Gump-like connections to American history and music). Though Dominique is the granddaughter of a music teacher and vocal coach (Her grandmother is Christine Torrence Johnson, who also taught none other than Earth Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey), she only briefly pursued a career in music before being turned off by the misogyny she witnessed in the industry. She’s contributed vocals and lyrics to a few tracks in DNA’s discography (“Mama I Made It”, “M.I.A.,” and “Shooter”) before, but LAWLESS centers her voice in an unprecedented way. As a poet and author, she’s naturally a gifted lyricist, but her unusual, Badu-esque vocals knocked me sideways. My words can’t do them justice; you’ll just have to listen for yourself.
The album’s title is a nod to Dominique and DNA’s shared desire to color outside the lines, rejecting whatever rules or expectations fail to serve them. Inspired by actual letters exchanged between them at the beginning of their relationship (Dominique calls them “epistles,” and considers LAWLESS an extension of those conversations), the pair co-wrote the majority of the fifteen tracks on LAWLESS together. As a result, the songs form an unmistakable narrative arc, where the trajectory of the album closely mirrors the artists’ own love story. In our post-listening discussion, the word that kept coming up was “cinematic,” with DJ MNM directly comparing the listening experience to watching a movie. Of course, art cuts deeper when you know the artist behind it, but I think after listening to a vividly autobiographical album like this, you’ll also feel like you know DNA and Dominique. I’ve watched DNA’s music evolve into a more therapeutic, vulnerable form of self-expression over the last few years, in no small part due to his relationship with Dominique and how it’s changed him as an artist and man. On LAWLESS, this typically private couple offers such a candid look at their love, it almost feels voyeuristic to listen.
Dominique and DNA’s love story is pretty incredible in its own right, too (the aspiring novelist in me can see it so clearly as a multi-generational epic). LAWLESS listeners will notice a strange circuitry connecting the two artists’ lives. Dominique is the mother of twins; DNA has a twin brother named (ready for this?) Dominique. Their grandfathers were born the same year, and DNA shares a birthday with Dominique’s father. Dominique wrote an acclaimed poem about a mother who took her own life and the lives of her children when she jumped off a building. DNA’s estranged birth mother lived in that very same building. The absence of DNA’s biological mother had been a source of deep-rooted shame and sadness for him, and Dominique didn’t just show him what a mother’s love looks like, but she actually helped him find his birth mother. They’ve led not quite parallel lives, but lives that correspond like two sides of the same coin. Given their individual circumstances, it seems only destined that they would end up together. Their meeting, as told by LAWLESS, feels like something karmic mysteriously coming full circle.
At the album listening session, DNA mentioned that LAWLESS was inspired by late ‘90s and early 2000s R&B– “the shit we grew up on,” in his words. Props to all of the producers who put in work on these nostalgic grooves, especially the legendary homie Mic Coats, and youngin’ Eriktheproducer, who is definitely one to watch. Even though there are rap verses, hip-hop beats, gospel influences and soul for days on LAWLESS, it is first and foremost an R&B album, with more singing from DNA than on any other project of his. Sonically, it’s heavy on the “blues” half of R&B, but lyrically, it’s joyful. I’m not quite sure how to describe this juxtaposition, but it brings to mind DNA’s The Color Blü, an album that plays on the connotations of the color and ultimately recasts it as a symbol of all emotions–good and bad.
Like The Color Blü, LAWLESS explores various modes of love: being in love, self-love, familial love, and the question of whether one even deserves love. But the most interesting theme here is the symbiosis between art and love. For Dominique and DNA, their art is love, and their love is art. On the verge of giddiness, both artists kept reiterating how easy it was to create together, how prolific and productive their collaboration was, and how once they started making art together, inspiration started to strike anywhere and everywhere (Speaking of which, when are we getting B Sides From the Taco Star Parking Lot?). “We want people to know that love is real, it’s urgent, not at all corny, and it’s worth celebrating. We want people to hear this project and know they’re deserving of love,” the couple says. “Many couples keep the art separate, but we couldn’t follow in those footsteps because our love is art.” Case in point: because their love is often conveyed through musical terms (in lyrics like “I don’t want a song, I want the whole catalog,” “Best collab of my life,” and “This ain’t no standard issue love song”), many of their lyrics could interchangeably be used to describe their music or their relationship.
The sheer amount of love that went into LAWLESS was obvious to all the guests at the baptism/listening. LN Deuce, the engineer who recorded, mixed, and mastered LAWLESS, praised DNA and Dominique’s dedication to the project, emphasizing their hands-on approach in ensuring that the final product sounded exactly as they wanted it. Singer (and past DNA collaborator) Lady Los expressed appreciation for the couple’s unapologetic depiction of Black love. DJ Malc G marveled that Dominique sounds like “A modern-day Macy Gray,” while DJ MNM compared the duo to what Erykah Badu and Andre 3000 could have been. High praise, but certainly well deserved. Thank you, Dominique, for sharing your insane talent (one of many!) with the world. And thank you DNA, for inspiring your partner to sing again. Y’all have something special here, and I don’t just mean the music.
LAWLESS: A Love Story is available now on all music platforms, but you’ve also got three chances to see Dominique and DNA perform it live: Friday, November 22, Saturday, November 23, and Friday, November 29. Tonight (Friday, November 22), they’re at The Moxi Theater in Greeley with Anville, KIMEX, and COLLUR. Saturday, they’re doing a SoFar album release show in Five Points (location TBA) with a full band, plus a special opening set from Lady Los. Finally, next Friday they’ll be at the Black Buzzard in Denver with four phenomenal hip-hop artists: Osha Renee, RO$$A¥, Meta Sarmiento and ReSrface (If you’re a hip-hop fan, you MUST go to this show).
This is beautiful 😭