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"    Photo: Jesse Lirola   In the fall of 2010, Tom Krell released How To Dress Well&amp;#039;s debut album Love Remains, a warped, dark look at the deep walls of depression\u2013caused by a personal loss\u2013sheathed in the singer&amp;#039;s ghostly, beatific voice. The &amp;quot;denouement&amp;quot; of Love Remains, as Krell calls it, is &amp;quot;Suicide Dream 1,&amp;quot; an arresting, open-ended artistic statement originally released on Love Remains with a newer version that he debuted on his orchestral EP, Just Once, in 2011. He is currently preparing to return with his second full-length effort, Total Loss. Where Love Remains was meant to depict the way in which depression leaves one with &amp;quot;nothing more than a smothered cry,&amp;quot; his newest release aims to go further. &amp;quot;I realized I wanted to figure out how to do meaningful mourning through my art,&amp;quot; he explains.     ELLE.com spoke with Krell about the evolution of How To Dress Well, why he&amp;#039;s tired of being compared to Frank Ocean, and how he views himself as an ever-evolving work of art. Below, watch an exclusive video of Krell performing &amp;quot;Suicide Dream 1&amp;quot; with orchestral backing at Vancouver&amp;#039;s Waldorf Hotel. ELLE: Did the critical praise heaped upon Love Remains affect the artistic approach for Total Loss? Tom Krell: When I developed the ability and the habit to follow my instincts and really trust myself, I made Love Remains. I have to all the time remind myself: You love this. Follow that love, and just keep going with that love and trusting yourself. Hopefully you&amp;#039;ll end up somewhere good. I&amp;#039;m so proud of Total Loss because it really is for me an emblem of the care I&amp;#039;ve been trying to take for myself and the trust I&amp;#039;ve been trying to have with my imagination. ELLE: Was there an effort to evolve with Total Loss? It&amp;#039;s certainly more piano and vocally-driven than Love Remains. TK: I started to think about Total Loss, and it seemed like it was some kind of synthesis of a completely realistic and honest depiction of depression in Love Remains. This attempt to get a head above water moment out of this affects Just Once. The record to me is a synthesis of those two products. I do think of it as an evolution, but evolution isn&amp;#039;t just from a lower to a more refined form. A life evolves along all different tangential lines and in very ambitious, maybe at first, opaque ways. ELLE: You&amp;#039;ve been quoted as saying you want to make &amp;quot;alien&amp;quot; music, but &amp;quot;not alienate&amp;quot; listeners. TK: I wanted to make songs of all different kinds, all of which are beautiful in their own specific ways. Some of which are quite sad and dark; some of which are quite happy and joyful even. This is why Janet Jackson&amp;#039;s The Velvet Rope became such an important record for me over the process of making Total Loss. Because it&amp;#039;s such a varied record. She could have easily made an entire [album] of &amp;quot;Together Again&amp;quot;-style songs. Then &amp;quot;Together Again&amp;quot; wouldn&amp;#039;t be this unbelievably wistful gem among these angry and frustrated songs. I saw her record as a beacon of self-care and self-trust. I tried to go my own path to my own Velvet Rope.  ELLE: Critics have perhaps unfairly lumped you in with contemporary R&amp;amp;amp;B newcomers such as The Weeknd and Frank Ocean. Is this frustrating? TK: Yeah, to a certain degree. [Frank Ocean&amp;#039;s] Channel ORANGE is a very different record [than Total Loss]. It&amp;#039;s this Stevie Wonder retro. You&amp;#039;re talking about a completely different ballgame of our pure style and approaches. And I think it&amp;#039;s a double disservice to us: me and to whatever R&amp;amp;amp;B music critics group me in with, because you ignore all the details. And the details, at least for me, is where music becomes special.  ELLE: It&amp;#039;s also been a hot topic that you are pursuing your Ph.D. in philosophy while maintaining this blossoming music career. TK: I want to take myself up as a work of art in the sense that I want to make sure that the brush strokes of my life are contributing to something that I can look back on and say, &amp;quot;This was beautiful. This was full of meaning.&amp;quot;           "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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