Dessy Di Lauro And Ric’key Pageot On Parlor Social & Music Heals [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

Dessy Di Lauro and Ric’key Pageot, who’ve been a couple and a creative team for more than a decade, have recently made their musical partnership official in the form of a duo called Parlor Social.

Dessy Di Lauro & Ric’key Pageot Exclusive

“We were a couple first, but the couple actually met through music and we connected through music and started writing together in Montreal. At the time it was just me as a solo artist, but we’ve been doing this for like 10 years now where we’ve been writing together. So the natural thing was to become a duo. We’ve always been that duo,” Di Lauro explained in an exclusive interview with uInterview. “We just decided to come up with a name and change our name and become a duo, make it official.”

Fortunately for Di Lauro and Pageot, despite having occasional disagreements, they’re happy to be working through the creative differences with each other rather than anyone else. They credit their common musical sensibility, understanding of one another and common goals for making it relatively easy for them to work together. For them, it wasn’t hard to settle on a sound that was inspired by the jazz of the 1930s, but thrust into modernity with the themes of the present and technology.

The end result? “Picture this — if Lauryn Hill, OutKast, and Cab Calloway had a love child it would sound like this. That’s basically the best way to describe us in a nutshell,” Pageot says. “It’s 1930s, if 1930s were today, that’s basically what it is. If the 30s had today’s technology, today’s sound, this is how we would sound like. So we’re bringing back — picking up where [Harlem Renaissance musicians] left off basically.”

In addition to preparing to tour on their first album as Parlor Social, Say Hep Hep + This Is Neo-Ragtime, Di Lauro and Pageot are doing a project with Music Heals in Haiti.

“It’s our first time going there [to work with Music Heals] so the initial thing is to just meet the teachers, meet the students. Basically interaction with them and see how they’re doing things, mentoring the kids,” Pageot, who is of Haitian descent, explained. “I’ve been wanting for a long time to be involved in some kind of charity for teaching kids somewhere. […] It’s been something that I’ve been really putting out there to the universe that I really wanted to give back and teach kids.”