This article is sponsored by Dear Genre.
“The object of making art is not to make something good, but to make something true.”
Rick Rubin
The Order
Meeting with André Cataldo feels less like a press interview and more like two creatives in a Parisian salon.
We talk about Romantic opera and Alexandre Cabanel’s The Fallen Angel as the cover art selection for Dear Genre’s latest single “New Orders.” It’s fitting for André, a man who fell by the wayside in a long bout with addiction. And yet, still he refused to stay down. There are too many amends to be made. “I can’t be perfect,” he said. “I’m just trying to be better.”
He talks about putting his people-pleasing behind him, letting his “freak flag fly”, and the quiet radicalism of simply being yourself when the world is hellbent on trying to make you into something you were never meant to become.
What’s emerging here is someone who seems, for the first time in a long time, genuinely comfortable in his own skin. “It doesn’t take drugs or alcohol these days,” he said. “I’m just a weirdo,” he said with a chuckle.
The Prayer
Nowadays, he’s not losing sleep at 3:00 A.M. over past mistakes. He’s, once again, being pulled into creative pursuits.
“Even when I was not doing well with my addiction, I always felt if I needed to get away, I could lock myself in my room and just play my instruments. And usually songs will come of that [sic]. So, it gave me this sort of idea that this was kind of my religion…This is what I go to—to feel better, to get into myself. I even go as far as saying that’s how I tap into my higher power…Usually, it strikes me at 3:00 A.M. when I’m trying to sleep…That’s something worth waking up [to]…And whatever comes out, comes out. And then those are the songs that I go with.”
Songs are like prayers—especially when you’re improvising. An artist might perform a song, never record it, and never play it again, but it’s been released. That spiritual aspect to the craft of songwriting is palpable in “New Orders.” You can hear André’s experimental instincts coming alive over four minutes, almost in real time as the arrangement itself tells the story of its creation.
The Transmission
The song starts the way good ones often do: with a feeling before a thought. An ominous synth builds gradually into something more layered, more expansive, putting it squarely in synthpop territory by the time it hits its stride, with a Depeche Mode-like pull and an industrial edge.
But the song’s emotional DNA traces beyond a few decades; try over a century, to “Habanera” from Bizet’s opera, Carmen. You may not know the name, but if you heard it you’d probably recognize it immediately. “[In ‘Habanera’] it’s kind of a staccato on the cellos and the violins. If you listen to “New Orders”, it’s literally just that, in a different strumming [pattern].” André wasn’t pinching the motif, he just wanted to recreate its power.
The credit for that sound goes to Dear Genre’s producer Damon Sheets, who brought forth the 2020 Man in Full album. Damon didn’t use André’s voice recording as a scratch track—he blossomed it, building the entire arrangement around the original audio.
The Meaning
Dear Genre’s lyrics are abstract by design, deliberately left open to leave room for the listener’s mind to wander. “To me, that’s what art is about,” he said, “creating space for the viewer to create their own world through what you’ve given them.” So, when fans tell him what one of his songs meant to them, he doesn’t redirect them toward the “real” meaning. Instead, he just listens.
When I wrote about Dear Genre’s 2023 single, “Speak Your Mind,” the song seemed, on the surface, a boy-meets-girl love story. But his fans heard something more and claimed it as an anthem about speaking your truth without fear of judgment.
I thought “New Orders” had a singular meaning, too. It turns out André didn’t really have one in mind at all. He’s not writing protest songs or creating mental images the way a Nashville storyteller might. He’s doing something more rare: transmitting a feeling so precise that listeners reconstruct it in their own meanings, their own stories, without a single signpost pointing the way. And that’s just the way André wants it.
“New Orders” by Dear Genre is available now on all major streaming platforms.
