How to Dress Well Makes You Rethink the Question 'How Was Your Day?'

American singer-songwriter Tom Krell (aka How to Dress Well) once described his sound as a convergence of Mariah Carey and Elliott Smith. It's that juncture of emo-acoustic and twinkly sentimental balladry that's led to Krell's music being labelled as 'lo-fi R&B'. Certainly in his older records, that came through. But with 2014 album "What is This Heart?" Krell's moving away from those early roots, towards something more musically diverse. (That said, the chorus of 'Precious Love' is decisively reminiscent of an early '00s R&B ballad, and it's great.)

Krell picked his stage name semi-randomly from the spine of an old book he bought from a used bookstore ten years ago — justifying it by pointing out that we don't generally choose our names. True. That preoccupation with the uber real is reflected in his music. His lyrics are at times so personal they're almost uncomfortable, but then he turns it all weirdly in on itself with alien synth sounds and a falsetto that's painfully otherworldly — like, as one YouTube commenter put it so aptly, the ghosts of dead R&B singers come back to sing in empty bathroom stalls.

Take this cover of Janet Jackson's 'Again'. Without a ukulele in sight, it's a refreshing antidote to the tired trend of white singers doing twee covers of the work of black musicians.

We caught up with the super well-articulated, notoriously candid Krell ahead of his appearance at Sydney Festival, Melbourne's Sugar Mountain Festival and Brisbane's Australia Day Eve at the Brightside to chat about his newest album, the nature of quotation, embracing your influences, and creating intense, muscular live shows that are all about presence.

Earlier this year you released your newest album, "What is This Heart?" which you recorded in Berlin with Rodaidh McDonald. What was the recording process like?

It was cool. I came in with what could have been a finished record and then Rodaidh really helped me go through it. I'd have a guitar recorded and he would ask me, "What do you want this guitar to sound like?" and I'd say, "I want it to sound really close to the strings, and really raw-sounding." We'd re-record it and he'd help me dial in the details of the details. He's a really helpful engineer.

Making this album, were you influenced by anything in particular? How do you deal with your influences?

A million things. For every song there's a whole handful of influences. I really do live through my influences. A lot of people I know write, and then listen to music separately. When they're writing they want to have this control, they worry that what they're making sounds too much like something else. I kind of have the opposite approach. While I'm working, if I hit on something that sounds like something else, I'll go listen to the song and try to figure out what it was in that song that so moved me that it snuck its way into my creative process. A lot of people have anxiety over influence, but I just really find it super inspiring.

Let's talk about the title, "What is This Heart?". It's in quotation marks — what effect do they have for you?

Quotation is a weird thing. On the one hand, it's about attributing something to someone. It's illegal to misquote someone because we really care, for some reason, about the things we say when they're in quotes. I started thinking a lot about that. An album is sort of like a long quote from me: this is what I want to say, and what I'm willing to have said in my name. Quotes also put things in scenes. Suddenly it's not just text on a piece of cardboard, but maybe it came out of someone's mouth. These things were stirring for me when I was writing. When I look back, what kinds of things do I want to have attributed to me? What kinds of things do I want people to say that I said? When I was writing lyrics for the record I also constantly found that I would think of something that someone said to me. A lot of the lyrics are made up of different kinds of quotes — things that I said that I wish I hadn't said, things that I overheard, things that I said that I didn't know the full consequences of. There's a lot going on with quotation in general.

Talking about your lyrics, a lot of them seem deeply personal, or like they're really heavy with emotion. Does something compel you to write that kind of music?

I suppose so. I don't think that they're personal in the sense of the coffee shop confessional. There are people who write much more directly personal things than I do. I would say that if they're personal, they're indirectly personal. The way I write, it is quite emotional. I guess I'm interested in the emotional life of people in general, which is another way of saying I'm interested in the way people live. Not in what people say when you ask them, "Hey, how was your day?" They'll tell they went to the library, they went to work, they went to the coffee shop, or whatever. But what I'm interested in in people and the self is not that story, but more the way it feels to actually live a life, the actual experience of life. That's the emotional part of life. So you went to the grocery store? Why, when you were walking down the aisle of the grocery store, did you think of your mother ageing and feel an intense pang of guilt? That's the kind of stuff that I'm interested in. Actual life.

How would you explain the progression to this album from your previous albums? Especially because Love Remains, your first album, was very raw and stripped back — how did you move towards something more produced?

Weirdly, I think of this newest record as the least produced. On Love Remains every single sound is filtered and changed to the point of being something really weird. It's full of little weird, suspended-in-time sound sculpture things. But for some of the stuff on this new record I just opened the microphone and sang right into it. There's acoustic guitar on Love Remains, but there's no way anybody other than me could ever pick it out because it just sounds like a weird wash indistinguishable from some of the other sounds. That's something I was actively trying to do because I wanted to make a specific record. Each record is a different response to a different time in my life. I don't really know what's next in terms of how to produce the next record, but it felt important for me on this record to do something with that real life thing I was just talking about. I wanted the music to have a realistic quality to it.

So you're coming to Australia for Sydney Festival. In the past you've said that, rather than being like dance parties, you think of your shows as being more like a theatre performances. What's a How to Dress Well show like?

I still don't think of what we do as a dance party, because it just isn't. But there are moments like that. The thing for me with the live show now is that I want it to be extremely physical and really obvious that there's a person present in front of you, doing this quite demanding performance. Another thing I was motivated by on this record was having really intense dynamic shifts. Having one moment be really quiet so you can sort of hear yourself breathing while you're listening and then another moment being so loud and muscular and intense that it knocks you back on your heels. That's a tough thing to do on a record. It's a much easier thing to do live because you can literally blast someone's head off and then very quickly go to something really quiet and subtle.

I really do think we have the best show I've seen right now. I don’t think I know anybody else who plays a better concert than us, right now, which is cool. I really am super extremely proud of what we're doing live. It's super musical, really funny and fun, and really sad and touching. There are tender moments, and aggressive moments. It covers all the ground I really love in music and live music and live art. We have a really beautiful visual presentation as well that's weirdly connected with my motions. When I move quickly the visuals move. It's really cool. We've worked really hard on it. It's kind of the shit.

See How to Dress Well as part of Sydney Festival's FBi Radio series at The Aurora on January 23, at Sugar Mountain Festival on January 24, or at The Brightside's Australia Day Eve on January 25.

"What is This Heart?" is out now via Domino.