Back to Kali

Kali Uchis does not like to be the center of attention. Our original lunchtime table wasn’t in an open part of the restaurant, but she still preferred to move to a spot in the corner. Now nestled between two walls, she’s protected and able to keep out of the way. She excuses herself for being shy with a nymph-like laugh.

At the age of 25, Uchis is often unsure of herself, but her brutal determination keeps her moving forward. She’s hard to miss, dressed for the roller rink in blue denim and a vintage long-sleeve T-shirt. Her lashes are extended, her lips are plumped and her nails form miniature Perspex daggers. Her hair is a wig.

“I just throw it on and then I’m done with hair!” she says.

The restaurant is in Studio City, which—like Uchis—is a bit of an outlier in Los Angeles. It’s not Valley Valley; it’s not Hollywood either. But if you know your chutoro from your otoro, you know that Sushi Katsu-Ya is worth the trek. Uchis knows. She’s a pescatarian, and she orders a baked crab hand roll that she manages to wrap her mouth around without ruining a smidgen of lip gloss. She talks fast and loose. She drinks hot tea. She spills a lot of it too.

When she put out her jazz-inflected neo-R&B album Isolation in 2018, Uchis received near-universal praise for her loner anthems. She collaborated with Tyler, the Creator; Damon Albarn; Steve Lacy; even Bootsy Collins. In interviews, however, journalists failed to get a read on her. An article in The Fader asked, WHO IS THE REAL KALI UCHIS? Today, in the first week of 2020—a year in which she’ll release a new album (in the spring) and star in a movie (Blast Beat) that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival—it’s becoming clearer who she is. She’s someone who’s finding her roots, someone who’s taking the reins of her creativity, someone who’s more accountable for her actions. Someone who means business.

“I been working,” she says of the Christmas break. “It was hard for me when the new year started, because we went into a weekend. Do I not e-mail people that day?” She smiles warmly and shrugs. Last year was rough; Uchis was eager to wipe the slate clean.

“A lot of fucked-up shit happened in 2019—technically two weeks ago, but I’m gonna leave it back there.”

Personal or work?

“Um, a lot of personal stuff.” She goes quiet. Over miso soup and popcorn shrimp it becomes obvious that some wounds are too fresh to be exposed.

“In 2020 I’m trying to move from a place of love,” she says. “Be myself. I worked out the things I needed to at the end of 2019. I could bring in the new year knowing what I know.”

The past year wasn’t all bad. Uchis bought a house in a neighborhood a little deeper into the Valley.

“Growing up, I never had a safe space to be myself,” she says. “My main dream was to be able to not ask anyone for shit—to take care of myself.”

Kali Uchis grew up Karly-Marina Loaiza between Virginia and Colombia. She has three brothers and an older sister, and when they were little their house in Virginia was a safe space for immigrant cousins en route to their own American dreams. She shared her room with female relatives who passed through.

It wasn’t a happy childhood. “The way my family communicates with each other can be really aggressive,” she says. She learned how to defend herself. “People in school and my family were always making smart remarks about me. You learn how to have tough skin. You learn how to be combative.”

In school, Uchis was a “super band nerd,” playing piano and saxophone. She was quiet and escaped public speaking by ditching school. She wrote stories. She made clothes. To this day she wants to be a movie director; she’s always writing plots. “Anything I could do in the creative process made me feel like I could escape my situation,” she says. “From the moment I got my first job I was really good at saving my money.”

At 15, Uchis began working odd jobs. She worked at a grocery store. She waited at a Mexican restaurant. Her last retail job was as a cashier. “All my friends were going out partying. I was paying bills.”

At the low point of a long-strained relationship with her parents, Uchis, then 17, was cast out of the house and had to live in a parking lot in her Subaru. Soon thereafter she made her first mixtape, Drunken Babble, on GarageBand, debuting the results on a free download site in 2012. The internet was impressed—so impressed that the DIY swirl of samples, soul and synth-laden rap caught the attention of Diplo and Kaytranada, who helped her produce her first studio EP, 2015’s Por Vida.

A North American tour led to a record deal with Virgin EMI, which led to Isolation in 2018, which led to a Grammy nomination. But her nascent stardom wasn’t enough to heal her wounds.

“I was self-destructive in my career,” she admits. “I’m opinionated. I fight with people online.” Even with her increased visibility, Uchis took everything personally, as she had in her youth. “Being a public figure is being constantly up for display. It can really fuck with your mental health.” (She contends that record labels should pay for their artists’ therapy.) She has come to an important conclusion: “Criticism and flattery are the same thing. As long as people are talking about you, that’s all that matters.”

In 2017, Uchis came under fire for comments she made on Twitter, lashing out at critics who had accused her of manipulating her image to capitalize on her brownness. (The controversy stemmed from tweets that compared her differing looks on the cover of Por Vida and a promotional photo for the album.) She maintains she never intended to hurt anyone but admits she attacked people on bad days because it was her only vehicle for venting.

After the clash, she took a lengthy Twitter break. “It fucked me up,” she says. She was too sensitive to be online. “Sometimes I just don’t want to be fucking looked at.”

Uchis went to therapy for the first time after her summer tour. She says she’s never had a consistent support group: “I literally didn’t have anyone to talk to. I’d never objected to a therapist. It’s just that they’re very expensive. It came to a point where I was like, ‘You know what? I want my mental health to improve.’ ”

Mental health issues run in her family: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression. “A lot of family members have killed themselves, killed other people, been abusers, been abused, all types of ways,” she says. “When you have that embedded in your DNA it can take a while to learn how to cope with it on a daily basis.”

There is one guaranteed source of catharsis: performing on stage. Last year, touring with Jorja Smith, Uchis covered Radiohead’s “Creep.” It’s a hypersexual rendition—more sensual than art rock. She’s well-versed in Radiohead’s catalogue, and she chose to cover the song because it’s about being unloved. “It’s a song for people who feel like they don’t fit in—that’s the story of my life.”

She listened to “Creep” a lot in high school, around the time her niece, only seven months old, suddenly and tragically died. When Uchis talks about death she seems to disassociate. Her face goes blank. “I’ve lost a lot of people,” she says. “I cried a few times when singing ‘Creep.’ ”

Again she shrugs over the popcorn shrimp. “I’m not a big crier.”

Once she settled into her new house last summer, Uchis decamped to Miami to work with producer Tainy, whose recent clients include reggaetón megastars Bad Bunny and J Balvin.

“I always wanted my second album to be predominantly in Spanish,” she says. But she’s not looking to replicate the successes of Balvin, Rosalía or others setting the Billboard charts ablaze with Spanish-language hits. “I love them, but our experiences are different,” she says.

Her experience is rooted in a childhood spent boomeranging between two continents. Uchis went to school in Colombia for three years and made sure to visit there annually after relocating to the United States. (Her parents still live in Colombia.) She attended T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, which is nearly 80 percent minority. “We had a big Latino community, though not Colombian,” she says.

She knew other Latino kids in Virginia who’d never visited their origin country and didn’t speak Spanish. “They would be bullied if they were fresh off the boat. That’s what they’d call you—an FOB,” she says. “It’s beautiful that people are now embracing those coming straight from our countries. That’s part of what I wanted to do—capture that pride. I live in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean my culture has to be washed away.”

This new, as-yet-unnamed album is in Spanglish and was cranked out in one “super inspired” week. Her rise didn’t create second-album paralysis; if anything, Uchis feels liberated by success.

“I’m going back to how I used to write when I started,” she says. “People might think I feel more pressure, but it’s the opposite. Your first album is how you get your foot on your world. Now that’s over I can do whatever I want.”

Her first single, “Solita,” released late last year, chimes with that sentiment. “Solita, solita / Bailando aquí sola / Es mejor que con el diablo” translates as “Alone, alone, dancing here alone is better than dancing with the devil.”

Uchis offers few other details about the album but does play me five unfinished tracks after our meeting. Even if they’re incomplete and untitled, they prove she’s doing what she wants regardless of the success of Isolation and the stratospheric rise of Spanish-language music on the charts. Uchis’s music is still in its own scintillating corner—a little moodier, a little slower, a little hotter. The tracks are hypnotic; listening to them is like being drenched in billows of intoxicating smoke. In one of them she sings, “I got what you need, I know what you like.”

She explains that the record jumps between genres and moods: Some songs are vulnerable, some sexy, some sad, some empowered. “It takes me by surprise when people say, ‘I like your confidence,’ ” she says. “I never felt like a confident person.”

Clearly she projects confidence into her songs, manifesting the self-worth she seeks. I wonder aloud what fuels that ability when she’s having a bad day.

She thinks. Uchis can’t remember exactly when it happened, but when she was younger she became wise to other people’s toxicity. “People can infect and train you in ways that deteriorate your self-esteem. They make you feel like you’re worthless,” she says. “Everything in my life is what I accept. The things that I’ve been through, I don’t let them define me. That’s an important part of life if you want to move forward and be better than you were yesterday.”

Ingrained sexism is something she’s had to overcome too. “There’s a pedestal you should put yourself on in order to tell the world, ‘I only accept this type of treatment from my friends, lovers, family,’ ” she says. “If you don’t want to interact with me like I’m a queen, then you don’t have to be in my life.” This mentality has caused her to lose a lot of friends—and family. “It’s tough. I’m a Cancer. I want to be a family-oriented person, but they keep doing stuff to piss me off!” She giggles and breathes a sigh of relief. “I’m so much happier than I used to be.”

Her heroes are misunderstood figures, particularly female ones: Eartha Kitt, Amy Winehouse, Erykah Badu. Growing up she had few women in her life to admire (her elder sister was in foster care), so she looked to Resident Evil and Kill Bill for icons (“Women who were kicking ass!”). Consider that list of heroines: If any of them had paid too much attention to how they were perceived, it would have detracted from their power too.

“In a perfect world I would want people to see me the way I see myself,” she says. “I can be hard on myself, but I know I’m a good person. I don’t need people to see that about me. When I’m dead I want to be remembered in a positive way, but while I’m here I don’t mind being misunderstood.”

She continues to ponder her legacy, as though life could end at any moment. “I would like to be remembered for being.…” She flutters her lashes. “Iconic? And imperfect.”

Most of the time she wants to hide in the corner. “If someone told me this would be my future, I’d think they were talking about a whole different person. You have to have good people skills, and I don’t.”

I disagree.

“I’m having a good day today,” she says, smiling. “But if you had asked the wrong question.… I’ve had interviews where the person would have walked away thinking, This girl’s such a bitch. If other people had been through half of what I’ve been through, they would have quit.”

Before she goes, I ask which part of her new home is her favorite. The enthusiastic reply: the recording studio.

“I got a lot of pillows and plushy toys,” she says. “My studio is like a little girl’s room—all pink. When I go to make music I want it to feel like I’m back home in my dream room that I never got to have.”

She grabs her Louis Vuitton and dabs on some more lip gloss before offering an embrace.

“I’m trying to rebuild my childhood.”