The musician was reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow while creating his latest album, Baby, an experience that proved to be more psychological than he expected
Dijon pushed himself to the brink while creating his acclaimed second studio album, Baby. But it wasn’t the music that sent him there — it was a postmodern novel about the creation of ballistic missiles in Europe at the close of World War II. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, the musician revealed that a friend attempted to stage an intervention to stop him from reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow due to the adverse psychological effects it seemed to have on him.
“I was having a really hard time with the record,” Dijon said. “Like, psychosis-level shit.” His friend had warned him against Gravity’s Rainbow, saying, “You shouldn’t do that, it’s so paranoid.” He turned out to be right. “I was having mania,” Dijon said. “I was having all sorts of ups and downs and a true disbelief that I was supposed to continue to be making music.”
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With Baby, Dijon became fixated on “this idea of trying to make a new kind of thing, new kind of record,” but dismantling what that could look like scrambled his sense of reality. He thought “that maybe I’d contributed all I could contribute with the last record and the video,” adding, “there was a part of me that, having a kid, panic was setting in that I’d chosen a really volatile profession and brought a child into this world and I’ve only made one album and What have I done?”
Dijon eventually got Baby across the finish line. “Throughout the album, fragments of sounds — fiery adlibs, Golden Age hip-hop samples, whizzing, inverted vocal riffs — all jut out like beams of light piercing through the pitch black of night,” Rolling Stone wrote in a review of the record. “The record is indeed best described by that all-encompassing word, experimental, but here Dijon occupies a space closer to traditional R&B, concluding the sonic excursion of the preceding half-hour with a thematic summation.”
