"I Know"

Dionne Farris, memory, and getting older

There's a slide guitar on Dionne Farris's "I Know." I, uh, know you already know. It's not exactly hidden in the mix. It was also frequently mentioned in the press when the lead single from Wild Seed – Wild Flower, Farris's 1994 solo full-length debut, scaled the Billboard Hot 100 to a peak position of number four. 

"It has the bluesy slide guitar sass of Bonnie Raitt," said the LA Times. "Like Beck's 'Loser' and the Stone Roses' 'Love Spreads,' it hints at a new blues revival with a slide guitar hook over a funky hip-hop rhythm," noted SFGATE. "But the kick comes from a peek-a-boo slide guitar, weaving in and out of the nimble beats and subtle tambourine like a generational flare," commented Spin.

"Peek-a-boo slide guitar," a line that somehow didn't flow from the pen of Rick Derringer. Anyway, do I remember that slide guitar peeking out? I do not. In fact, I completely forgot it was there until I heard "I Know" in the grocery store a couple weeks ago.

It's strange what your brain excises from songs before storing them in your memory banks. For instance, until it started making the rounds again after its appearance in the movie Everywhere All at Once, I forgot Nine Days' Jeremy Dean hammered out a Hammond organ solo on "Absolutely (Story of a Girl)."

Weird. What do you call it when a musical element vanishes from your mind until you observe it again? Sonic Schrödinger's Cat sounds like a forgotten psych band with high-priced reissues that immediately hit the reseller market. And I won't float my idiocy as a Mandela Effect because I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on the planet who is this oblivious. It's also not one of those deals where it's like, "We uncovered long-lost Rolling Stones mono master tapes in an attic in Exeter, and now 'Under My Thumb' has finally been restored with its intended Whoopee cushion solo." Likewise, it's not a radio edit switcheroo where the label got cold feet because a test group in Muncie displayed an abnormal fear of rototoms. The slide guitar in "I Know" and Hammond solo in "Absolutely (Story of a Girl)" have always been there. But when I had to commit the shape of those songs to memory, I snipped these elements out.

So, why? There are studies on music memorability because of course there are studies. I've also wondered whether pop music has trained me to listen through it. But, in these instances, the "Curious Cases of the Slide Guitar and Hammond Organ," as an unimaginative editor would force me to call them, I think it's something else.

When I was studying and then briefly teaching IT concepts, my one-liner that everyone immediately got sick of was that you have to learn everything to learn something. Because IT is so intertwined and complicated, there's no natural starting point. Instead, the entire discipline is thrown at you at once, and the intricacies of specific topics are only unlocked when you later learn the finer points of related subjects. In essence, it's a lot of "Oh, that's why we do that" over and over and over again. It's also why I learned way more in the field since nothing gets you up to speed faster than breaking expensive equipment.

I think music is similar. Every day, I learn something new that provides more context to music I thought I already had a firm understanding of. Kristen Pfaff, the bassist on Hole's 1994 breakout Live Through This, was in the great noise rock band Janitor Joe. The sessions for The Wild Tchoupitoulas's sole 1976 album provided the proof of concept for The Neville Brothers to form a band. Hans Zimmer is in the video for The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star." In these examples, the music doesn't change — that's the thing about music in the recorded age: it's locked forever in amber — but I've changed. I have more experience. I have more knowledge. Thus, I can make more connections. And those connections change the way I approach the music.

Here's my theory: When "I Know" was a hit, I didn't understand how rare it was for slide guitar to do a peek-a-boo in a '90s pop context. In essence, that element either wasn't significant enough to commit to memory or...I didn't hear it in the first place. I tuned it out. It's similar to how I'd read about router protocols and briefly retain some of that information to pass tests. But book smarts are about as useful as learning to play an instrument by reading about it. Those routing protocols didn't mean anything to me because they were just acronyms. They wouldn't mean anything to me until, down the line, I had to troubleshoot routing protocols, and some grizzled trainer who dreams in Unix would say, "This is how you get everyone in HR to stop yelling at you." Oh, that's why we do that. Oh, that's slide guitar. Same thing.

I mean, look, this isn't the greatest admission from someone who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about music. I'd like to believe I can get my appraisals right the first time, that I can dig into a composition, isolate its merits, and contextualize those merits accurately. But it never works out that way in practice. I always feel like I'm one book, article, connection, or similar song away from fully understanding a piece of music. More often, it's simply because I haven't done enough living.

"Oh wow, Wolf, so you're telling me you get older...and then you learn more things? What a penetrating insight." OK, yes, fine, that realization is elementary. It's Art 101. There will be a time when you finally get the Animaniacs "fingerprints" joke and the world will continue to turn. But music, specifically popular music, feels different than, say, clicking around IMDB for signs of Kevin Bacon. It's like a flip of the Doobie Brothers album title, What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits: What Was Once Boring Is Now Interesting. What I mean is that stuff you deem dreck as an unworldly pre-teen can be transformed by uncovering something new about it: a musical element, session player, writing credit, and on and on. Those moments of discovery are like opening a game show door and finding out what you're really playing for. In that way, my understanding of the material is based on how many doors I want to open.

Here's what I mean. This is a story current Alice in Chains singer William DuVall told his former Neon Christ bandmate Randy Duteau:

My involvement in Dionne Farris' album came about because she'd just left Arrested Development (having been the featured singer on their breakout hit "Tennessee") and wanted a solo career playing music that was a bit more eclectic than strict R&B/hip-hop.

She wanted a bit of rock 'n' roll in there. So she sought out David Harris, whose band Follow for Now were one of the great black rock 'n' roll bands of all time, and who were then still a major local and regional force. Then David told her something like, "If I'm going to be involved, you should also get the guy who's my favorite writer, William DuVall."

Around that time (['92-'93]), David and I were thinking of forming a songwriter's collective along with Milton Davis. It was supposed to be based on the Holland/Dozier/Holland-style partnerships of Motown in the '60s, a good idea that never really got off the ground but did find expression, at least somewhat, on Dionne's record. Ironically, it was Milton and me who wrote "I Know," the song that got Dionne signed to Columbia Records and became her big single, though he and I barely said five words to one another during our entire association.

Let's open some doors. By that point, William DuVall had been in the Atlanta hardcore band Neon Christ, done a stint with Bl'ast, formed The Final Offering with Corrosion of Conformity's Mike Dean, and released one album with the seriously underappreciated No Walls, a group championed by Living Colour's Vernon Reid and the Black Rock Coalition.¹ No Walls happens to feature some nifty song structures built around meaty acoustic guitar chords.

Meanwhile, David Ryan Harris had spent seven years in the eclectic Follow for Now, a band due to be rediscovered if someone can figure out how to get its eponymous 1991 full-length on streaming services.² By the way, that's likely Ryan Harris playing slide guitar on "I Know." (Little Feat's Paul Barrère plays slide on the "(NY Reprise Mix)" of "I Know.")

Our final "I Know" contributor, Milton Davis, was just getting rolling in the industry. "I Know" and Wild Seed - Wild Flower are his first credits.³ Next stop: playing bass on John Mellencamp's Mr. Happy Go Lucky alongside fellow bassist...Raphael Saadiq. Saadiq never fails, so I didn't see my near future featuring a possible reappraisal of Mellencamp's '90s work, but here we are.

Those are some doors. We still need to open the one leading to Dionne Farris.

After "Tennessee" blew up, Farris had buzz. But going back to Arrested Development wasn't an option. The business side of the group was souring. And her relationship with the group's drummer, Rasadon, with whom Farris moved from New Jersey to Atlanta, was falling apart. "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," Farris told Christian John Wikane in a 2009 PopMatters profile.

Farris bloomed in the demo sessions with DuVall, Ryan Harris, Davis. The recordings made the rounds. Randy Jackson signed Farris to Columbia. She recorded and released Wild Seed – Wild Flower. Columbia didn't understand what it had. From that same PopMatters piece:

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 from but adding to.

"11th Hour": solid song. It's like if Prince wrote for Saint Etienne. That's David Frank producing. You know, David Frank from The System, the same David Frank who played keyboards on Chaka Khan's "I Feel For You" and Phil Collins's "Sussudio." In 1994, Frank was also collaborating with Omar. His most significant credit that year, though, might be The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy," which Frank earned thanks to the extended sample of Mtume's "Juicy Fruit." (A person who didn't get a credit on "Juicy"? Pete Rock, but that's a debate for another time.) This is to say that David Frank brings a different vibe than "I Know." And that's Wild Seed - Wild Flower's deal, really.

Here are the first four songs that follow "I Know", Wild Seed - Wild Flower's opener: "Reality" reaches ahead of its time by mapping out the brittle coffee shop funk that would be Nelly Furtado's shtick in a few years; "Stop to Think" transforms Lenny Kravitz's "Freedom Train" into a fuzz-guitar churn that could've come from The Bomb Squad; "Passion" offsets the smokey seduction of the verses with the metallic crunch of its chorus; and "Food for Thought"'s slow, string-quartet-employing pace proggily transitions to Clark Sisters' gospel for a bridge. Wild Seed - Wild Flower doesn't get any less eclectic from there — there's a cover of "Blackbird" and skits featuring David Alan Grier. Often, the album feels more like a career-spanning compilation than a debut.

However, I wouldn't say Wild Seed - Wild Flower is all over the place. Besides "I Know" and the "Blackbird" cover, Farris has at least a co-writing credit on the rest of the songs. And she approaches the wide-ranging material with the same level of confidence, that being the undeniable skill of a star. Indeed, Farris never seems trepidatious about the stylistic shifts. Sure, you can sense that the showpiece bluesy funk of "Water," which reminds me a bit of mid-'70s Etta James, might be her wheelhouse because...I mean...listen to the way she crushes it. But, on the other hand, the more restrained "I Know" and aching "Blackbird" demonstrate not only Farris's versatility as an interpreter but the true dynamism of her voice.

So, is Wild Seed - Wild Flower a good album? "I Know" aside, I don't think the original material rises to Farris's level as a performer. When the music is more interesting, it's occasionally waylaid by some real lyrical duds that never reach beyond an Intro to Philosophy bong-aided study session, a consequence of a 24-year-old trying to aim for universal resonance.⁴ "Why are things the way they are?" goes "Reality," "Who said that the sky was in fact the sky/ And not the ground that we should walk upon?/ Makes you wonder, hmm?" Not really. But Pete Escovedo (an absurd number of credits and also Sheila E.'s dad) and Skitch Lovett (of the P-Funk castoffs Mutiny) play on that song, and that does make me wonder. 

For better or for worse, this is how I'm wired: finding my inroads into a lot of music via its metadata. This isn't a surprising acknowledgment. I write three types of stories these days, one of which is "I can't believe [x] is related to so many other things." Would I prefer to be the type of person who could immediately ID a novel chord progression or melody? Absolutely. Instead, I'm the "Did you know there are Piledriver lyrics in the congressional record?" person. That's fine if you, like me, didn't realize for a long time that the name "Trivial Pursuit" is also a dunk on those who excel at the game. But thinking about music in only that way — as a glorified Connect 4 board or conversational fodder to bore whoever is within earshot at a dinner party — misses what makes the music you like interesting. In fact, it makes me feel like one of the calculating doofuses that Farris battled with.

According to Farris, one of her big fights with her label boiled down to the executives' unwillingness to engage with her eclecticism. Farris contended that she was making worthy material no matter where it would be filed in a record store or what radio station format would play it. "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,'" Farris said to PopMatters. But the conversation changed when "Hopeless," the song written by Van Hunt that appeared on the Love Jones soundtrack, hit on R&B radio. "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 "this" in that case was Farris's intended follow-up to Wild Seed - Wild Flower, which was so at odds with the label's reconstituted expectations that it was shelved. From the artist's perspective, the major label wanted people to fit neatly into major label boxes. (It's not a shocker to learn that, according to a 2017 interview with RnB Junkie, Farris commiserated with Prince over label woes during this time. It was also not the first time their careers crossed paths: Prince scored a $100k payday for the uncleared "Alphabet St." sample in Arrested Development's "Tennessee.") Thus, Columbia's intransigence, not to mention Farris's unwillingness to conform to an ultra-simplified idea of marketability that would, in turn, nullify her identity, led to Farris's extended exit from the music industry.

Of course, Farris's life kept on moving. She had a baby in 1996. "It was like this – here's music and here's a whole new life," Farris told PopMatters. "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." 

And Farris's child is figuring it out. Her kid with Wild Seed - Wild Flower colleague David Ryan Harris is the multi-hyphenate performer Baby Tate. "My mom definitely made sure I was introduced to a lot of music," Tate said to BET. "And not just my mom, my mom's whole family, like my grandma, my aunt. Every time I would go up to New Jersey, we're listening to Al Green and we're listening to house music. And so for me, I was always exposed to a lot."

Considering how much Farris seems to love music, it's no surprise she'd pass along her multiform, eclectic interests. And that love wouldn't keep Farris away from recording music for long. All it took for her to begin her reentry was rediscovering how, once removed from sales figures and marketing strategies and unscalable genre walls, her music moved actual listeners. What deepened and restored her conviction was a shared sensation of catharsis when she started to sing again at church.

"When I got up there the first few times, people wept," Farris said to PopMatters. "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."

With her confidence bolstered, Farris returned to the studio on her own terms, even starting a label, Free & Clear Records, to release her music. Signs of Life came out in 2004. For Truth If Not For Love followed in 2007. And then there's the most Farris project: DionneDionne, a 2014 collaboration with guitarist Charlie Hunter that showcases the two innovatively interpreting Dionne Warwick songs. There's zero chance the major label system of the '90s, comprised of stuffy, box-building executives, would've touched it. That's the point. And Farris sounds incredible on it.

"We're really birds of a feather in a lot of ways," Hunter said in a New York City Jazz Record cover story. "Just in terms of the R&B, soul and the blues aspect of things. And we're the same age; we're from the same era in a lot of ways. I mean, I think, obviously, because she knows she really was a part of a very important hip-hop band, she's very knowledgeable about that world. Much more than I am. And I guess I'm much more knowledgeable about the jazz world, maybe, than she is, although she does have a group with [trumpeter] Russell Gunn, who's kind of a badass. It works, you know? And she's not a prima donna singer. She can just roll with whatever needs to be rolled with."

DionneDionne might be Dionne Farris's best album because it's hewn from her experiences. This older, wiser Farris gives these songs depth, communicating so much with subtle vocal shifts. That makes for a collection as varied and stylistically experimental as Farris's debut. It's more lived in, though. Realer. However, listeners will have to do a little living themselves to hear that.

And that's what I keep returning to, this sense that I've finally lived enough to appreciate this music, that I can finally hear it for what it is. Sometimes, the impetus for that personal musical metamorphosis is something like me recognizing a slide guitar and learning that the song it's spicing up was co-written by Alice in Chains's current front-person. Other times, it's me sensing the emotional vulnerability in a singer's voice, one provided grace by the passage of time, and having it unlock something inside of myself because it matches my own experiences. Naturally, these aren't the only examples. But, in all cases, it's that feeling of "Oh hey, I know that" that's universal. That's a powerful feeling: I know. Well, at least I do now.

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1. DuVall's career often feels like five careers rolled into one. The fact that I'm not even covering Madfly, Comes with the Fall, or Giraffe Tongue Orchestra should tell you something. DuVall's latest studio album is his debut solo outing, One Alone, released in 2019.

2. After "I Know," Ryan Harris would find some success as a solo act and reliable session player. For instance, you might've caught him recently performing with Scary Pockets.

3. Davis hooked up with David Ryan Harris again on Ryan Harris's 1997 solo album. Credits with Idina Menzel, Dawn Robinson, and Al Jarreau followed.

4. I write this as a grey-haired nobody who is a few sunsets away from death and still structures most essays like they're Steiner Math.