“I think it can be really hard to cleave the two, the hero-worship and the romance,” she told us. “You know, you’re sitting down across the bar table to have a cocktail, and she knows everything about you because she’s seen the documentary, and you know her first name because you met her yesterday. It’s such a pitched field to try to make a relationship of parity.”
While Dessa says “The Chaconne” isn’t autobiographical—there are no famous concert violinists in her past—she alludes to past romantic relationships that have had a similar schism between romantic love and artistic passion that’s represented in the song; as she puts it, “To be loved desperately, but only second-best.”
This year, Dessa released Castor, The Twin, which reinterprets songs from A Badly Broken Code—including “The Chaconne”—and her 2005 EP False Hopes with new, live instrumentation. For One Track Mind, she brought together a five-piece band for a lush rendition of “The Chaconne,” recorded in St. Paul at the McNally Smith College Of Music, just down the hall from the studio where she recorded Castor.
