Editor’s note: This edition of 20Q was originally published on Playboy.com in February 2021.
Kehlani has never been afraid to reveal herself. Her joys, fears, triumphs and mistakes have stood front and center in her music since the beginning of her ascent to stardom. And that emotional intimacy, in all its heart-on-the-sleeve glory, stretches into her personality.
Anyone who follows the 25-year-old singer-songwriter online (14 million people between her Twitter and Instagram, to be exact) knows Kehlani gives it to you straight, no chaser—whether it’s riffing on her day or responding to a bully or a rumor about her life. If modern celebrity is a balancing act between being accessible and remaining enigmatic, Kehlani has succeeded by opting for warts-and-all transparency instead of carefully curated moods.
In just a few short years, the Oakland native has become one of pop’s most vital voices, winning fans with optimistic meditations on romantic desire, anguish, self-love, sexual fluidity, spirituality and mental wellness. But it was a bumpy journey.
Kehlani’s father died when she was an infant, her mom was in and out of jail while struggling with addiction and she was placed in foster care before her aunt adopted her. The nation first met Kehlani as a wide-eyed teenager on America’s Got Talent in 2011, when she was in an eclectic cover band hoping to catch a break.
The group placed fourth in the competition, and judge Piers Morgan rightly noted that she’d be better off solo. But reality show platitudes don’t mean much to a hungry teen with a dream, and Kehlani shouldered through shady industry deals and homelessness before AGT host Nick Cannon became a mentor, helping put a roof over her head and funding the studio time that allowed Kehlani to record her first mixtape, 2014’s Cloud 19.
With her sweet, bubbly tunes that toed the line between frothy pop and buttery R&B, Kehlani made the kind of music that reminded us why we first fell in love with Whitney, Mariah and Brandy back in the day. Her 2015 mixtape, You Should Be Here, broke her to mainstream audiences, and a record deal with Atlantic and a Grammy nomination added to her rising stock in the industry. But as Kehlani’s star ascended, the spotlight on her personal life intensified.
She was one of a few queer women in pop music, and her romantic relationships and preference for unrestrained vulnerability became fodder for online bullies. All the hate and negativity Kehlani encountered online added to the pressures she felt ahead of her major-label debut, 2017’s SweetSexySavage, a collection of vibrant pop and R&B she made while trying to get her head on straight.
And then came last year’s It Was Good Until It Wasn’t, a deeply personal album that showed her examining relationships and processing her feelings without the positivity afforded by youthful insouciance. She was a mother now—her daughter Adeya Nomi was born in 2019—and she was ready to do some alchemy on herself. It Was Good Until It Wasn’t perfectly summed up where she was at the time: Her heart was filled with grief.
The messy unraveling of her relationship with rapper YG was playing out on the blogs, and she was reeling from the tragic loss of close friends Chynna Rogers and Lexii Alijai, rising rappers who passed away three months apart (the album ends with a verse from Alijai). It’s the kind of heaviness that usually pushes an artist to make their most poignant work, and Kehlani was no exception.
It Was Good Until It Wasn’t was her most personal and successful project to date, speaking not only to how damn good the record is (many critics put it on their year-end lists, and it hit number one on the Billboard R&B charts), but also to Kehlani’s bold decision to release it by tackling the creative promotion from her garage (with the blessing of her label) just as Covid-19 was upending the world.
Maybe you, too, were stuck inside, sitting in your feels as a pandemic left folks lonely, afraid and detached from all we knew—and here came an album that made space for all of the languishing and horniness and misery and, ultimately, the healing that comes after loss.
Nearly a year after the album’s release, Kehlani has found a peace that once seemed impossible. The world is still fucked up, but she’s at joy in a way that is immediately apparent when her warm giggle echoes through my phone. She’s calling from her home in Simi Valley, which she bought during the pandemic out of a desire to escape the noise of Los Angeles and build a commune for her tribe.
Hearing the gleeful energy coming out of her nearly two-year-old daughter in the background, I can’t help but feel a sense of pride thinking about how far she has come from when I first met her in 2017. She’s gotten out of the darkness that has clouded her for so long and is recording new music from a place of newfound happiness.
Though she’s tight-lipped about what shape the new music she’s working on will take (A mixtape? An EP? An album?), Kehlani is certain it’s the best music she’s made yet. And as usual, she’s ready to reveal all.
Q1: It Was Good Until It Wasn’t was one of 2020’s most critically acclaimed albums. What sort of impact has that had on you?
KEHLANI: It really showed me a lot about my ability to create in times when we were told we wouldn’t know what was going on: We don’t know when the album can come out, and we don’t know about videos. It showed me that I can create in my backyard. I can create in my garage.
My music can reach these levels that are critically acclaimed, with people being really shocked—like, “Whoa, she really did create value.” [It Was Good] pushed me to a huge limit, and that showed me more about myself, and more about my art. More than even the critical acclaimed-ness.
Q2: Do you feel pressure to constantly create and release music?
KEHLANI: People always want more. They consume at such a high rate. I fully understand that, so the only pressure I can apply is self-imposed. I’m blessed to be able to make so much music. Anybody who knows me knows that work is what I love to do.
If I’m not at the studio, I’m home, completely focused on my baby. Then she comes with me to the studio. I don’t feel outside pressure to create and release; I just love creating and releasing.
Q3: Much of your work has been created as you went through personal heaviness. What is inspiring the next Kehlani project?
KEHLANI: I’ve always got something up my sleeve. I have taken this opportunity during quarantine to go extremely inward, cracking down on my spiritual journey and spiritual self and enforcing boundaries I never had.
I have a therapist, finally, who I absolutely love, and I have a routine of getting up and praying. I’m in this consistent, deep connection inwardly that I don’t feel like I’ve ever had. I thought I had it. When you’re a spiritual person and you finally find the real deep route to commit to, you always end up being like, “Oh, I really thought I was doing the work before.”
Now that I’m really doing the work, I’m like, “Oh, man, I was just carrying a bunch of crystals in my pockets.” The new music I’ve been making is just a reflection of a healthy self, healthy love for the self, healthy love with spirit, healthy love—healthy everything around me. [The music] sounds really refreshing. It feels really refreshing. It feels grown.
Q4: How has your approach to songwriting shifted?
KEHLANI: In the beginning of my career it was very, “I have to keep the lessons. I have to push the self-love, push the young kid coming up and they can’t tell me shit.” I went through all the phases. It was like, coming-of-age love songs. And then it was young girl empowerment.
And then It Was Good Until It Wasn’t came, and I finally learned how to write with some depth about sadder things. I always wrote my way out of sadness with uplifting angles, but It Was Good Until It Wasn’t taught me to alchemize my sorrow. The new music is not sad. I’m just not sad. I don’t feel sorrow.
I’ve been very blessed for this period of time—which could’ve gone a whole different way for me—to actually have taken me in a very positive direction. I don’t take that lightly for one moment, because it’s a really crazy time. It’s honestly a very privileged thing to even be able to speak about the pandemic in this light.
Q5: Your fans have such an intense connection with your music. How do you balance their expectations with your creative desires?
KEHLANI: I just try to remember that, at the end of the day, I’m the only one left to face my own decisions, and self-betrayal feels way worse than disapproval from strangers. I could completely betray myself and make things my fans are obsessed with.
Meanwhile, I’m over here itching to try new styles, itching to try new things. If I just put out what they want me to, then at the end of the day I’m going to feel worse because I’m going to be haunted by that. So I’d rather bite the bullet and put something out there I was really excited to make.
Those who are meant to love it will find it. Some of my favorite songs I’ve ever written—a lot of my core younger fans who might have come to me for the mainstream R&B songs didn’t understand them. Fast-forward a couple years and they’re like, “Okay, I get ‘Butterfly’ now. I love ‘Butterfly.’” People who get it will get it. People who don’t, don’t.
Q6: What do you do when you feel stuck creatively?
KEHLANI: You can’t force it. Art is an alchemy and a medium shift, and you don’t force a medium shift. If you’re sitting at your altar and nothing’s coming up for you, you don’t force the spirits to talk. You might leave an offering. You might say a prayer. You might light a candle. You might light some herbs. You don’t force the message to come to you; that’s just not how it works.
So in those times when I feel stuck, I might leave an offering for my art. That means I might go watch a classic film. I might take a walk or take a break and not think about music at all. I might go listen to a style of music I don’t normally listen to—something that will feed me rather than force it out of me. I think about it the same way I think about spirits.
Q7: You’ve talked about leaving L.A. and starting a farm and learning to live off the land. What are some of your favorite foods to cook?
KEHLANI: Right now, I’ve been on such a soup kick. I’ve been trying to be on this no-waste kick. I feel like as passionate as I am about the world and people, it’s very hypocritical of me to be a wasteful person while caring this much. I live with a couple people, so we run through things pretty fast.
But there always seems to be that time every two weeks when things are about to go bad and we have to cook them. My favorite thing to do is just throw everything—all the vegetables—in a pot with some fucking vegetable broth and whatever spices are calling out to me and make a yummy-ass vegetable soup. It’s the best way to eliminate having a big-ass throw-away vegetable pile at the end of the week.
Q8: How did your childhood impact your approach to motherhood?
KEHLANI: Having my child surrounded by me and her dad, but also so much love from other people, is super important, because I always had family around. My aunt raised me, but I also had my cousins and my other aunties and two dogs. They tried to make sure I got lots of social engagement from my family that made me feel full all the time.
There was always music playing in the house. At night, when any of us couldn’t sleep, we would go take a drive around the lake in Oakland and go see the lights. Or simple things like waking up on Sunday morning and having cartoons and art projects.
My aunt was really awesome and super, super, super fun. I’m carrying that into parenthood, knowing that kids don’t need perfect parents—they need happy parents. The things we carry with us as adults are memories of joy, so I consciously create joyful moments in the house for her to carry throughout her life.
Q9: You have been in the spotlight for almost a third of your life. When have you felt the most trapped professionally?
KEHLANI: I’ve always seen such freedom, because I center my freedom. Everybody kind of allows me to do what I do. But back when everything was going on in 2016, I was like, “What if I just want to quit and run away?” And everybody was like, “Nah, you made it this far. You got to keep going. And you can’t let anybody think they got you down so bad that you quit.”
As trapped as I felt and as much as I was like, “Fuck this. I hate everyone,” I am really grateful that everyone woke me up to those thoughts and not only pushed me, but also gave me this safety net to let me know I’m never going to fall that hard again.
That was the most trapped. But pressure makes diamonds, and you can only have light—true light—after darkness goes.
Q10: What about personally?
KEHLANI: Personally, the most trapped I’ve ever felt was probably the cycle of abuse in [a past] relationship. Just feeling like, “I know better, so why can’t I do better?” It’s this weird, rabbit-hole cycle of, like, “Am I being stupid?”
But also, “How do I change things? Can I even change it? Do I have the strength to change this? What do I do?” That’s psychologically the cycle of abuse. Once you’re out of it or when you’re looking from the outside, it seems like it’s so simple to get up and leave. But when you’re in it, it’s a whole other experience.
Q11: How did getting out of those situations shift your outlook on your life and career?
KEHLANI: It told me I am capable of anything, and my heart is never going to steer me to the wrong place as long as I’m listening to the correct side of it. And things are better on the other side.
There is grass waiting for you on the other side, but you have to jump off the porch to get to it. That was a fear that stopped me for a long time. It’s like, “I’ve really got to kick myself off the porch.” Now I can leap off the porch. Now I can fly off the porch.
Q12: You’ve always been incredibly transparent, but what’s something you’ve never revealed in an interview?
KEHLANI: Something I’ve never revealed in an interview? Hmmm. I’m currently looking for a doula certification program. The one I’m waiting for is closed until the spring.
I’m really anxious to take it, and I’m trying to figure out how to navigate wanting to become a full-spectrum doula while being an R&B singer—or a singer in general. I should stop limiting myself to the word “R&B.” I guess I’ve also never revealed that I don’t consider myself an R&B artist.
Q13: Which of your records was the most effortless to record?
KEHLANI: A moment for me that was so beautiful was “Open (Passionate).” I went into the booth and I just kept saying, “Do I got you way too open to be open?” People were like, “Whoa, are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m really trying to make the most beautiful, polyamorous song there is.”
I’m trying to talk about the technicalities of an open relationship and just fucking be real about how I feel about it. And putting those harmonies together was just super fun.
Q14: What’s the hardest part of fame?
KEHLANI: I’ve had a hard lens on me since I was, like, 13 years old. Everyone you meet has some opinion on you, whether it’s, “I don’t care for her,” “I really care for her,” “I don’t care to care for her,” “I’ve heard of her,” “I think she looks funny.”
I sometimes can’t walk into a room with a fresh slate, and it gives me a little bit of anxiety because I want to be a part of these community-based things, and I want to be in these spaces, and I want to participate in things and experience things as a 25-year-old girl.
I often feel like, “Damn, I’m going to walk in there and it’s going to be a thousand different energies sent my way because of people already holding these little pockets of energy for me before they’ve even met me.”
Q15: What’s the easiest?
KEHLANI: The easiest part of fame is having the ability to do something important. I’ve had friends who needed to find [stem cell] donors.
They led a campaign and got so many people signed on, but I have the ability to say, “Look, we need a bunch of people to donate their samples and take a swab test and send it in to be the match,” and [get more people to sign on] so a lot of other people can find matches and potential donors.
At the press of a button, I can tell millions of people something very important, and they can take part in it if they want to. You can make beautiful things happen really, really quickly.
Q16: Define masculinity and femininity for you, and what did it take for you to arrive at those definitions?
KEHLANI: I’ve discovered that I’ve run from a lot of femininity. I was way more comfortable in a more masculine space. I feel more masculine when I am in my stillness and I’m grounded in a quiet, contemplative mode.
I feel most feminine when I’m being the mother of my house. I also feel my femininity when I take time for self-care—when I take really beautiful baths where I throw some flowers in and I do a hair mask and take time oiling my body in the mirror and saying how beautiful I feel.
My femininity makes me feel soft and gentle and tender and careful in a different way than my masculinity makes me feel. I’m trying not to let it fall into the gender norms of feminine and masculine, but for me it does a tiny bit. But I also am very fluid in both of those settings.
Q17: When do you feel the sexiest?
KEHLANI: I feel the sexiest when I’m really bare—when I’m taking extra time to oil up after my bath and put essential oils into my shea butter.
For me, sexy is very internal. It’s in the comfort and the feeling—not when do I look most sexy, but when do I feel scrumptious?
When do I feel like, “Oh, somebody could just come lick me from my head to my toe right now. That’s how fucking good I smell, and that’s how moisturized I am.” That’s when I feel sexy.
Q18: How does it feel to be a sex symbol?
KEHLANI: I hope people know being a mom doesn’t make you less sexy. Being a mom is the sexiest thing ever. I think something happened to me when I became a mom; I just became sexier. I was this quirky little person before—not super in touch with myself, a super tomboy.
Then I became a mom, and all of a sudden I got these mom hips. I got this mom sensuality and grown-woman attitude and in-touch-ness with my body that I never had before.
You really fucking get to know your body when you birth. When you get pregnant, you become a fucking universe and a portal. So I think motherhood has made me this insane sex symbol even to myself.
Q19: So many people were telling you about the quarantine sex they were having to songs from It Was Good Until It Wasn’t. I have to ask, what are some of your go-to sex jams?
KEHLANI: Oh, this is so funny. I don’t like songs with words when I have sex, because I feel it’s just the wrong— I don’t like people to talk to me too much unless it’s really natural. If I hear, “Whose is it? What’s my name? Blah, blah, blah,” I’ll be like, “Shut up! I don’t know why you’re doing this. It’s uncomfortable.”
Like, I’m about to fall out of whatever mood I was in. So I like to listen to these lo-fi, beat playlists. They’re so nice and it transforms it to a whole other world.
Q20: What does joy look or feel like for you?
KEHLANI: Joy feels like when you know there’s absolutely nothing you would change about a moment and there’s nothing you could change to make you any more joyous.
Like, “Even the way the sun is coming through the window while I’m making breakfast, and the way my daughter is stomping around the kitchen cracking up, and this song that’s playing is perfect and she’s singing along, and my puppy is sunbathing and the plants in the kitchen just got watered so they’re flourishing.” Every single moment of the day is just perfect.