dijon

anthony eats dino’s samosas
(and gf’s quesadillas)

Why did you choose Dino’s veggie samosas?

I used to go to Dino’s a lot with my mom growing up. I didn’t go for a while but when I started being downtown more again, I was like ‘oh yeah, Dino’s!’ It’s one of the first neighbourhood stores I really connected with. 

I’m half Jamaican and when you walk into Dino’s they’re always playing reggae or soca. Getting the patties at the front till... There are lots of stores like this in Toronto, but there wasn’t anything like that in Winnipeg for a while. Now there are way more, lots of South Asian stores but Dino’s was the first afro, black, South Asian, worldly store. My mom would pick up all these crazy spices and I would get samosas as a snack, or patties and roti. 

What kind of food did you grow up eating?

My mom is Jamaican and my dad is from Sierra Leone, and my mom cooked both foods. Lots of Jamaican patties, rotis, rice and peas, jerk chicken, very meat heavy with crazy flavours. On my dad’s side she’d cook pepper chicken, peanut butter chicken, and this other dish called ‘Okra Soup’. It’s smoked Kroger fish in a green sauce with rice - it’s delicious. I don’t really cook African food, because that’s a whole other beast, I’ve never even tried. If I were to create some type of analogy, Jamaican food is like a cold beer on a nice summer day. Everything is flowing right, everything is fluid - it’s like a circle, everything is a completed taste. With West African food, you kind of have to have an acquired taste for it. If you travel and try it for the first time, you might not like it. It’s very powerful. You might need to develop a taste for it, whereas with Jamaican food it’s kind of like Mexican food or Italian food, it’s easy to understand right away. With Sierra Leonean food - I don’t want to group in the rest of the West African countries because I don’t want to do that to anybody, but you need to build up to it because there’s certain spices, oils and aromas.

How’s that pink beer?

It’s kind of juicy, very summery obviously. It’s not too bad. I would say a nice one-hitter. I’ll never buy again, but thank you for this option. Money is hard to come by and I’d rather spend my money on a beer that I like. My favourite beer is Nonsuch beer. Like, all of them.

What was the first album you bought?

The Fix by Scarface. There’s a song called “My Block,” fuckin’ love that song. That is still probably my favourite song. The cool thing about it, it wasn’t even a gangster song, I just really liked the pianos in it. My oldest brother is pretty much 10 years older than me so I would go to school with what he was listening to, that’s how I came across this music so young. The first rap artist I listened to was Nas and a bunch of New York hip hop. I was inundated with that at home, my brother was also making beats around me too, so that’s how I clicked with hip-hop and music in general. But the pianos on that song, it’s just beautiful and I can just relate to it. He’s from a hood in Texas, and I’m not, I grew up in the South end of Winnipeg. But his approach to the song is something I can relate to, the soul he’s talking about, the people he grew up with.

What do you notice most about music?

The beat. I like when a beat is nice but it sits in the background and allows the vocalist to really paint a picture for you and morph the song, I think that’s a really cool tool to have in your arsenal as an artist. Nas is really good at that, he sketches the beat out for you. Solange is really good at doing that, if you listen to “Cranes in the Sky,” the beat isn’t overbearing, it’s a nice beat and it’s in the pocket sitting there allowing her to paint this picture over it.

I accidentally played like seven of your songs at the same time in different browser windows and it sounded pretty great, how’d you do it?

That’s so funny, and I feel like that’s representative of my music. Because if all the songs were similar, it wouldn’t have sounded so crazy. You were probably hearing rap, and then a sing-y song. I wanted my first project to be like that because I really wanted to show all my personalities off. This new stuff I’m working on is going to be a little more channelled. 

*Exclusive listen for Dijon* 

I was always singing around the house growing up, and I think that actually helped. All you need to do is find the tone or range for your voice. A lot of people can’t sing, like, Johnny Cash didn’t have a crazy voice, right? Or Leonard Cohen. They knew their place and had a tone.

What was the best city to tour in, food-wise?

Maybe Texas, Austin Texas. Tacos, barbecue, all of that. London with all the Turkish restaurants... They have high-end Turkish restaurants, like a Turkish Deer + Almond, for example, but then you can have Turkish street food. In a weird way, I’ve eaten better on all of my other trips than touring. My brother’s in the group, we are the two that would actually plan a dinner, but you get into town, drop your bags off, you’re tired so you take a nap, wake up, you might have a radio interview to do, come back, shower, nap for 30 minutes, wake up, eat dinner at the place where you just gotta get food from, then you’re at the venue getting ready for the show, soundcheck, you might have a beer in the back before the show, and then after you’re selling t-shirts, selling clothes, so when you get home at 1am you go to bed. 

You might go out for drinks but most of the time you’re just going to bed and then you do it again the next day. One time we had a week off in Amsterdam. I didn’t go to many restaurants, but biking is really big, I wasn’t really smoking, I don’t really smoke weed but we went to a few places for that, did some shopping, had some beers, went to lots of parks. Oh! No, Japan! Sorry, we were in Japan. Ramen everyday, cheap Ramen that gets you really full and then there's expensive Ramen with really nice beef, there’s sushi…