Kenyon Dixon has earned five Grammy nominations in as many years, and with most of those nods coming from the best traditional R&B performance category, the acclaimed singer-songwriter hopes his new Ego Ruins Everything LP cements him as an unignorable force in the genre’s contemporary wing.
Released independently last month (July 24), Ego Ruins Everything finds the Los Angeles-born artist delivering a nuanced take on modern masculinity through semi-autobiographical vignettes that build an immersive concept album, tied together by an ever-evolving series of “Running” interludes. From the gospel-inflected “Real Good” and the swaggering, cavalier “The Man” to the scene-setting pre-release singles “Talk You Through It” and “No Jodeci,” Ego fuses pieces of all of Dixon’s past efforts. But this specific convergence of his penchant for ‘90s/early ‘00s R&B nostalgia with emotional self-awareness reminiscent of Comeback Season-era Drake makes Ego a particularly ambitious project for Dixon.
“Instead of going right into the ego of it all, I wanted this to be a journey,” he tells Billboard. “I wanted to talk about how we got here, so I start with a good memory and use the sonics to warp that feeling and take us into [the world] of Ego Ruins Everything. And tone-wise, this is very different from the rest of my music. My fans are used to love songs, so I thought it was important to start [in a familiar] place and then go somewhere else.”
