Dawn Robinson, who rose to fame with the girl group En Vogue, has opened up about how she’s been living out of her car for years.
The Grammy-nominated singer, 58, shared a candid video to YouTube where she explained how she’s become devoted to the lifestyle that was once a necessity.
“You guys, for the past three, almost three years, I have been living in my car,” Robinson told viewers in the clip posted on Tuesday (11 March).
“I said it. Oh my god, it’s out. I’ve been living in my car. Oh my gosh.”
Robinson explained that she had moved in with her parents near the beginning of the pandemic, around 2020, but had fallen out with her mother.
“That was wonderful until it wasn’t,” she said. “I love my mum, but she became very angry, and a lot of her anger was taken out on me. I was like her target all the time, and I was like, ‘I can’t deal with this.’ Like, I respect her too much.
“I didn’t understand it,” she continued. “I still don’t. And it hurt me, so I was just trying to figure it out, but I couldn’t.”
Robinson said she slept in her car for around a month in Las Vegas before accepting an invitation from her manager at the time to stay with him in LA. However, it turned out he didn’t have room for her, so she stayed in a hotel for eight months, which he paid for.
She said she felt constantly stressed over whether he could pay the bill and that her attempts to move into an apartment, which she estimated would cost less than a lengthy hotel stay, were thwarted because he didn’t like the neighbourhood.
After researching communities of people who live in their cars and RVs, she told her assistant that she was going to give it a go.
“I just thought, ‘Wow, these people. I could do this, I think’,” she said, laughing. “And I ended up in my car, and it’s been, like I said, three years.”
She recalled the first time she saw the sunset from her car: “It was beautiful.” The first night was “scary”, Robinson said, but she soon learnt how to make herself feel safe.
“I was so free, I felt like I was on a camping trip. It was the right thing to do, I didn’t regret it.”
Robinson soon discovered that many other celebrities had experiences of living in cars, including Marvin Gaye, who was living in a bread van on the beach in Maui before the release of his song “Sexual Healing”.
“We say that we can’t do certain things before we even know we’re capable,” the former singer continued, confirming that she is documenting “this whole adventure”. She added that she’s “glad” she “made this choice”.
Robinson rose to fame in the early Nineties alongside original En Vogue members Terry Ellis, Cindy Herron and Maxine Jones, becoming one of the most successful girl groups of all time.
They have sold millions of records worldwide and achieved a number of his songs, including “Hold On”, “Free Your Mind”, “Don’t Let Go (Love)” and “Giving Him Something He Can Feel”.
Robinson departed from the group after a brief reunion for the En Vogue: 20th Anniversary tour in 2009, along with Jones.
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