The Music News Round Up! Tuesday, June 5, 2012

9. Tom Krell, a.k.a. How to Dress Well, talks with Interview magazine. In the interview, he discusses things like his new mixtape, his current enrollment in grad school, and his thoughts on R&B today. [Interview] Check out some memorable quotes from his interview below! On going to grad school. "I'm moving through my Ph.D. work. I always have taken long, roundabout paths through things, so I've been a grad student for long enough—by years' standards—I probably should be done. But I went slowly through my Master's, and I had a year fellowship when, it should have been a post-doc fellowship, but it was between my Master's and doctoral stuff. So I'm ahead of the game and behind the game. I've been in grad school a bunch of years. The coursework is almost done, now I just have to write the thing." [Tom Krell via] On the R&B genre and if people think too much of it. "Yes and no. As someone who listens almost exclusively to contemporary hip-hop and R&B, I definitely like "No Bullshit" by Chris Brown, and melodically I'm really into what he's doing—that song is kind of singular because it's got this piano intro and outro. But obviously I'm not singing about what he's singing about. What we want out of our songs is not the same thing." On PBR being the beer equivalent of fun. "Well, it sounds to me like a party. Yeah, so like Frank Ocean a very talented R&B singer, but his influences are, you can tell he wants to be something halfway between Prince and Stevie Wonder. He's just doing something. And The Weeknd guy just sings about abusing women and taking drugs. I think I'm doing something very different than either of those guys for certain. Those are your only R&B touchstones, if the three of us are your touchstones, then that's cool, it's a really good way to get into good music. I think it's cool that I may have started a change."