“About 10 years ago, I made the decision that I just wanted to be happy with my body and I just wanted to be happy with who I am,” the artist says. “That was the beginning of my journey with learning how to love my body. … You have to find that love for yourself deep down inside, underneath all of that questioning and ickiness.”
Interview Highlights
On her role in producing Cuz I Love You
I am classically trained in music theory and music performance, so I have an innate ear and actually a highly skilled ear when it comes to frequency and harmony and dissonance and melody. So for me, it’s this thing that I can feel in my body. I’m almost like a tuning fork where if I hear the beat and I vibrate at the level that I’m supposed to, I know that that’s what I want to get on. And from being trained, I think it’s easier for me to speak a language to producers, and I can speak engineer to the engineers. I think we all just have so much fun nerding out. … I’m credited as a producer on a couple of the songs because I was there, and my DNA is in there as well.
On the idea that it’s odd to have a flute in rap music
You hear a lot of flute in rap! Have y’all heard of J Dilla? Have y’all heard of Metro Boomin? Like, these producers use flute all the time. One of the biggest hits was “Mask Off,” and … the chorus was just a flute solo. I think we don’t see rappers play flute. We hear it and we don’t subconsciously put two and two together. I think it would have been way more impactful to see Future actually playing the line on the flute to “Mask Off,” but he wasn’t.
I think that flute and hip-hop are very sexy. I think that flute and hip-hop have gone together for a long time. I think this is just the first time you actually see the artist actually playing the flute. There wasn’t a disconnect. Growing up in Houston, freestyle rapping was very first nature to me. That was what I wanted to do. That’s what you had to do as a rite of passage. I was very nerdy, and the fact that I knew how to freestyle on a bus, or freestyle in the cafeteria and bang on the desk, just gave me a little get-out-of-being-a-nerd-free pass.
Houston … that’s the city that freestyle really found its swag, and I’m just lucky that I was a part of that while it was happening — and also a classically trained flute player. I think it’s just weird to everybody else, but it’s not weird to me!
On writing “My Skin,” her first body positive song
Someone asked a question. … They asked me what’s my favorite thing about myself? And I told them my personality. And they said, “OK, but physically, what’s your favorite thing about yourself?” And I did not have an answer.
For the first time in my life I had to actually think about something that I liked about myself physically, and because it was so difficult, I was moved to tears.
In that moment, I remembered that I’d just fallen off a cliff. … I was rope swinging into the river, and I am just so heavy, and I fell off the rope and fell on the ground. It was really scary and traumatizing. I’ll never do anything like that again, but I scraped up my skin and I remember my friend was like, “Look what you did to your beautiful skin!”