When I started Mrs. International, I knew I didn't want to just put a song on Spotify, post the cover, tell everybody to go stream it, and move on to the next one.
There had to be more.
Maybe that's because I've never really understood myself as only a recording artist. I am a performer. I write. I love theater. I love images. I love clothes. I love characters. I love the moment when something becomes so theatrical that, for a second, you forget where real life ends and the performance begins.
So Mrs. International became my first opportunity to put all of those things in the same room.
The record itself is intentionally larger than life. It's about love, desire, obsession and spectacle. It's sensual. It's theatrical. It's meant to make you move. But underneath all of that is character. There is somebody inside the song.
And once I realized that, I didn't want to stop at the music.
I started thinking about photographs. Moving images. Dance. Clothes. Writing. Characters. Vignettes. What happens before the song? What happens after it? What does this person look like? What does his world look like? What happens when another record enters that same world?
Suddenly I wasn't making a single anymore.
I was building an anthology.
That's really what Mrs. International means to me now. It is the first step into something much larger. The website describes it as “a first step into the anthology,” where music, character and cinematic storytelling occupy the same world. That's probably the simplest way I know how to explain what I've been trying to build.
The music is the door.
It isn't the entire house.
That's why you may hear a record and then see a photograph that expands it. Or a film that complicates it. Or come here and read something that changes how you understood a lyric. None of those things are accessories to the music for me. They are different pieces of the same story.
Even the dance belongs to that.
With Mrs. International, movement became another language. What begins casually can become performance. Two people can start by simply finding the rhythm and, somewhere along the way, become larger versions of themselves. Rehearsal becomes spectacle. Clothing changes. Posture changes. The camera changes. Suddenly we're not practicing anymore.
We're in it.
And I think that's where TERRANCE DEAN really begins for me.
Not with the idea that every song has to sound the same, or every photograph has to look the same, or that I need to trap myself inside some carefully manufactured character.
Quite the opposite.
I want the freedom to make whatever I want.
But I want you to know when you've entered my world.
Mrs. International was the first time I could really see that world taking shape outside of my head. Music. Performance. Fashion. Photography. Film. Writing. Some of it polished. Some of it strange. Some of it deeply serious. Some of it just meant to make you feel good.
But all of it connected.
So, no.
It was never going to be just a record.
— TERRANCE DEAN