Fear the Turtle
On Dijon, Maryland Roots & Going at My Own Pace
My grandma used to drive me to elementary school. Sometimes, we’d stop at Subway on the way, and I’d always get the same thing: ham and cheese on Italian bread with lettuce, tomato, mayo, salt, and pepper. There were also times we’d stop at Burger King. But we’d always pass Centennial High School in Ellicott City, Maryland. I didn’t really think anything of it until I learned Dijon Duenas went there.
Centennial is where Dijon met Abhi Raju, who he worked with to form the music duo, Abhi//Dijon. It wasn’t until they graduated and began attending the University of Maryland that they started gaining attention for their melancholic R&B tunes.
After wrapping up their time in College Park, Raju and Duenas moved out to Los Angeles. While they remained friends (Raju is clearly pictured on the cover of Duenas’ latest album, Baby), Dijon saw his move to LA as an opportunity to begin exploring his solo career.
Dijon’s Absolutely was one of my favorite albums of 2021. Along with his friend and collaborator, Mike Gordon (aka Mk.gee), Dijon has since inspired the latest iterations of music from Justin Bieber and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who he opened for on tour in 2022. Little did I know that, at one point, Duenas was fashioning his love for music 10 minutes from where I went to elementary school.
The early 2000s—those years when my grandma was driving me to school and I’d sit in her basement in the evenings watching basketball until my mom picked me up—was a great time to be a sports fan in Maryland. The Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl in 2001, which is also the same year Michael Jordan came out of retirement to join the Washington Wizards. My first NBA jersey was a blue MJ Wizards jersey.
A year later, in 2002, Dijon’s future alma mater, the Maryland Terrapins, won their first men’s basketball national championship in school history. I remember that team so fondly. Names like Juan Dixon, Steve Blake, Lonny Baxter, and Chris Wilcox. I still have the Sports Illustrated commemorative issue with Dixon on the cover. But there was another championship issue, also picturing Dixon, that read “Mighty Maryland” with the subheader “Fear the Turtle.”
Especially after the Terps won, I started seeing the team’s slogan, “Fear the Turtle,” everywhere. And recently, while reading a Talkhouse interview Dijon did with Hovvdy in 2019, I thought about it again. While on the topic of Lucinda Williams, Dijon shares how hearing that she takes a “really, really long time” to make music has been helpful because writing songs doesn’t come easily for him.
“There’s this, like, ‘OK, you’re gonna have to strike while the iron is hot’ kind of world, which just isn’t my impulse,” explained Dijon. “I just don’t approach music that way.”
Later, he adds, “It’s scary in this hyper-fast consumption world. It feels like before I’ve even started, there’s a potential that I’ll be left behind because I’m not making enough music to sustain interest.”
I’m curious if Dijon still feels this way. Regardless, it was a brave thing to confess, especially to his peers. This fear of slowness, which is really a fear of being forgotten; of no longer mattering; of losing what he had started to build. I feel this pressure with my writing. As an essayist who wants people to read my work and connect with it, I worry about going too long without publishing. I watch my numbers dwindle as the weeks pass without a new post—and in some ways, it can feel like I’m fading into obscurity, into nothingness.
I wonder if my readers will return, yet I still take the time because I need it—and the time demands of me. Writing isn’t my full-time profession. I work a corporate job 40 hours a week. I sit in meetings at least 20 of those 40 hours and expend my creativity in different ways. When I’m not working, and even while I am, I’m trying to be a good husband and a good friend and son and brother. I rest and decompress and refuel and read and listen and watch and distract.
I’ve learned that expressing myself doesn’t always come easy. Sometimes, the words just aren’t there. As they come, I jot down manic half-thoughts and ideas in my Notes app. But the aha moments when those ideas connect are rarely instant. They take time. It scares the shit out of me, but I give myself permission to be slow. I believe my best writing and living is borne from taking my time. Not rushing it. Not forcing it. But letting the game come to me.
In sports, forced plays are often the worst plays. That’s when turnovers happen. But when teams let the play unfold and get the ball to the open player or look for the high-percentage shot, it’s easier to score. Earlier this week, Paige Bueckers scored 44 points on 80% shooting, which is the most points by a rookie in WNBA history and the most points in a game by any player this season. Bueckers did this by getting to the spots where she knew she was more likely to score.
Dijon understands the conditions that are best for him to create, which includes him going at his own pace. He fears the turtle, but he knows that’s who he is. Seven months after completing his Sci Fi 1 EP, Duenas told Hovvdy, “I just started making music publicly and I already wanna take three years on this project.”
“I’m trying really hard to not lean into my impulse, which is just to make a couple songs a year and then sit on a porch,” he continued. “That’s pretty much what I want to do.”
While Dijon only took a year to make his next EP, How Do You Feel About Getting Married?, and one more year after that for his debut album, Absolutely, it took him four years to finally release Baby. Part of why Duenas took so long on his latest album might be found in words he shared with Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal in 2022.
“I’m lucky and grateful to be making music, but with that gratitude comes a responsibility,” said Dijon. “You have to try your best to see the things that are lacking and push them.”
He added, “The ultimate ambition is making your Laughing Stock, your Kid A, your Voodoo. A complete new language… I don’t know if it’s my next album or it might be three albums on, but eventually there will be a new entry point into music, because there has to be. This will change it, I guarantee it. But it takes time! And it takes you bumping your head.”
In this year alone, we’ve seen Bon Iver come back after six years and Clipse after 16. Even Justin Bieber took four years before his newest record, Swag. During Dijon’s four-year hiatus, he sat in rooms with Bieber and Vernon and helped shape their latest offerings. In exchange, they shaped his. But it was all shaped by their time away—time in which they lived, made mistakes, and experienced big life changes. Dijon, Bieber, and Pusha T all became fathers in the time between their albums. This new life stage informed their art and how they presented it.
This isn’t to take away from artists like Tyler, The Creator, who dropped his new album, DON’T TAP THE GLASS, right on the heels of his last project. And there’s something to be said for the push against overthinking and over-producing that led Tyler to release this album while concluding his CHROMAKOPIA world tour. But this was an anomaly for him. Tyler released every two years up until Call Me If You Get Lost and then took three years for CHROMAKOPIA.
Fans appreciate how deeply Tyler cares about his craft and how he used that time between albums to make projects that were unique and thoughtful. Arguably, it also played a significant role in Tyler’s staying power. He created a sustainable rhythm that allowed him to go at his own pace while making music and fan experiences that he was proud of and willing to stand behind.
The flipside is that these albums are huge undertakings. They require a lot from the artists and their people, which is why they take so much time between them. Especially after CHROMAKOPIA where Tyler took on heavy topics, such as a pregnancy scare, losing a lover to cancer, and being kept from his father, he craved something more fun with DTTG and that was less of an emotional lift.
Dijon acknowledges the labor in this labor of love, and it helps explain why songwriting is hard for him. “When I do write a song, it feels like it exhausts every capability per song,” he shared. Duenas and Hovvdy’s Charlie Martin both agree this is “unsustainable.”
On a different scale, I feel this with my writing. I want to write essays I’m proud of, and there’s a level of research and personal reflection that goes into making these essays what I want them to be. That, in itself, takes time. But when I’m done and I’ve published that essay and checked it off the list, it takes me a while to get back into wanting to write something else.
Part of this is that I want to take the time to celebrate what I wrote and share it with other people, and the other part is that I gave of myself what I could to that essay. I need time to reset and replenish so I can return to the page with new energy. But I also relate with the voice in Dijon’s head that tries to convince him, “Those are the final moments and I’m gonna have to go back to waiting tables.”
The looming fear of falling off will always be there. That’s normal in a capitalistic society that tells us, the more you post, the more you work, the more you produce, the more successful you’ll be—and of course, the happier you’ll be. I don’t need to feel bad for having these thoughts or shame myself for entertaining them. But I don’t want to stay there.
I gently nudge myself toward a place where it’s easier to breathe. An opening where I can remember ease is a virtue. It’s okay to take my time to say what I want to say and make what I want to make. I’ve already given myself a gift by showing up once before. It’s a miracle that I’m here, and it’s a miracle if I do it again.
In a world run by hares, we’re not wrong to fear the turtle. But there’s more to the story. That’s what I learned 10 minutes from Centennial where Dijon began to find his way. And the truth remains: we’re still finding our way.
Thank you!
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Gorgeous gorgeous keep taking your damn time my friend 🤩
Also of note to me: almost no promo / posting / press once the record did arrive. There isn’t even a new photograph of Dijon out there.