Inner Visions (Excerpt)

[On working on Sailing Souls and No I.D.]

“The Sailing Souls mixtape, that was the height of me going through all of this stuff,” Jhené recalls. “I’d just had my daughter and I was working at a vegan café and I wanted to do this mixtape, so I was recording after work. I just needed to release all my frustration and my heartache and pain. It’s [easier] for me to write about that type of stuff than [happiness].”

When she got back into the game, she made sure it was on her own terms. “I wanted to do it independent,” she says, but No I.D. made her feel comfortable. “He wasn’t a labelhead. He’s an artist. He’s a creative person and producer. Not only that but he’s a vegetarian, he doesn’t drink alcohol anymore, he just seems like he’s where I would like to be. We ended up having talks about Buddhism and about spirituality and everything was just very compatible. He has proven so far that he gets it. He trusts me. He trusts that I know my vision.”[On violence and her early childhood]

Don’t let the philosophizing and innocent voice fool you; it was all real in the field for a girl growing up on Rodeo and LaBrea in the early ’90s. “I remember the L.A. riots,” Jhené says. “I was a baby, maybe a few years old, and where we lived everything was on fire. We drove up LaBrea to my grandmother’s house. Going up the hill, looking back, I thought the world was ending.” When she was 5, two men robbed Jhené and her dance teacher at gunpoint. “They put a gun to my head in the kitchen while we laid down,” she recalls. Jhené matured fast, listening to Snoop Doggy Dogg and writing her first rap at age 7. In elementary school, she was the girl who taught her classmates the words to Lil’ Kim’s Hardcore.[On her brother]

“When he first found out he had cancer he got into Buddhism,” Jhené says. “I had started getting into Buddhism when I was 15. We were super close, almost like twins. We would get high and have these talks, like, ‘What is life?’” When he got sick, her brother had what Jhené calls “a crash course in enlightenment.” He never spoke about his brain tumor. “He would see friends and they would see that he was walking a little different or had lost weight but he would never tell them, ‘Oh, I’m sick.’” Jhené put her feelings into the song “For My Brother.” He first heard it the day he passed away. Afterward, Miyagi’s sisters held a tattoo memorial service. Even Miyoko, who was scared of needles, got one. She cried the whole time and didn’t feel a thing. Jhené got the rising sun on her shoulder to represent her brother. “Waves of sadness crashing against shores of unsureness,” she sang for him. “So hard for me to understand when doctors they cannot cure this.”[On Drake]

“I look up to Drake,” Jhené says. “Everything in his whole career is commendable. He can act, he can rap, he can sing. I can relate to him. He’s mixed; I’m mixed. Everything he does, I take note because I feel like he’s doing a really good job of being, like, well-rounded. And not only that, he’s really talented. I’m always asking him for advice with stuff and trying to figure out how he deals with being such a big celebrity.”

The SNL GIF bothered her so much that she reached out to Drake to speak about it. “Remember when you went to hug me and I turned around? They made a GIF of it and it looks like I dissed you but….” Drake told her, “You go on the Internet too much.” After a pause, she adds: “And you know what? I probably do.”[On Donald Glover]

“We have the same publisher,” Jhené explains. “One of his best friends, Fam, went to school with my brother who passed away. We have the same sense of humor, very sarcastic and dry. It was automatically like, ‘I like you! We can be friends.’ ” She says the rumors about them being together don’t bother her. “He’s an actor. We’re both creative people. We are friends and we hang out. We’re just friends but I’m also single, so you never know what friendships can develop into. We like each other as people, so you know, who knows?”[On current romantic interest]

So is there a special guy with whom Jhené’s sharing trips to the planetarium these days? “I’m about to give you...not a bullshit answer. There is, but I’m single. Not by choice. Only because I found now that when I talk to guys, they’re wary because they know about Donald, they know I’ve worked with Drake. They’re always side-eyed, suspicious. But I’m loyal in relationships. If I’m your girlfriend, that’s it. I’m practicing to be your wife at that point because I treat it seriously. I feel like I was born to be a mom and a wife and totally domesticated. I’m not going to spend my time trying to prove that I am really who I say I am.” Sometimes guys worry about what happens when Jhené goes on tour. “I can control myself. But if I’m single I don’t have anything I’m obligated to do for you. At the same time, I would like a man to take control and say, ‘I don’t want you to talk to those guys.’ Give me rules. Yeah! Why not? Be a man. But I can say that there is a person and I hope that we grow to blossom and be everything a beautiful couple can be.”

This lucky guy, who Jhené says is “kind of” in the industry “but not like I am,” is definitely not Drake or Gambino. And he had better be able to take a little competition. “Me, I’m a free spirit,” Jhené says. “I don’t know what the future holds. I could meet someone tomorrow and I’ll have to call you and be like, ‘Remember that part where I said there’s a person? That changed. It’s a new one.’ Just because you never know, I’m young.” Until then she’ll just keep on making music. After all, there are no ends, no beginnings. It’s all water.