Dillon Francis recently released his Latin-inspired album ‘Wut Wut‘. The night before the release, he did a live Q&A on his YouTube channel.
The entire interview is very Dillon. The moderator (Kyle Anderson) is wearing a nice suit, while the man of the hour comes in wearing a backwards hat and a leopard print shirt with his name embroidered on it. We expect nothing less from him.
It opens with discussing how he became a DJ and his personal achievements as an artist.
“When I knew that I wanted to make music and DJ, the one goal that I had was to play Cinespace in Los Angeles because it was the one place that all my friends who were DJs could play. But I couldn’t do that, because I wasn’t a DJ and didn’t make my own music. So I was like ‘I’m gonna do that! I’m going to show everybody that I can do that.’ And once I do that, that’s kind of it.”
Thankfully that wasn’t it for him. Francis played Cinespace in 2011. The next milestone was to play Coachella, which he also accomplished.
He’s well on his way in achieving his milestone for this new album- to win a Latin Grammy. His song ‘Sexo’ with Residente has been nominated.
He talks a lot about how much he enjoyed working on this album. Francis made each song face to face with the artists in the studio. He traveled extensively in order to get this album done. “It’s fun. You get to help them create the story of the song.”
He went to the Dominican Republic for three days while recording. It was there that ‘Ven’ happened with Archangel and Quimico. It wasn’t a planned collaboration, he never reached out to him. Archangel just happened to be there, and their mutual friend asked him if he wanted to be on the album. “‘Tell him to come to my hotel, and if he’s not weird, we can get into the studio.'” And he must not have been too weird as they were in the studio until 6 AM the next morning, working on the song.
He spent a lot of time on the album, and it evolved into what it is as he worked on it. He never set out with the idea to make a fully (or mostly fully) Spanish album. When asked why ‘White Boi’ was in English, he joked that it was put in there for the people who don’t speak Spanish, so they could get into the album. “And for those people who don’t like ‘White Boy’, the final song on the album (‘Get it Get it’) has no words at all.”
It was very important for him to finish the album with that song. The entire order is very deliberate. “I went through so many tracklists … There were a lot of songs that didn’t even make it onto the album because this order was perfect.”
This order tells the perfect story that Francis wanted to convey. Francis took extreme care in making every song on the album. And you can tell by listening to it, and listening to him talk about it, that it’s a project that Francis is extremely proud of.
You can listen to the full interview here.
