Many pop music videos are an excuse for gorgeous styling and showboating choreography, but for the US psychedelic-R&B singer Ravyn Lenae, the stakes were rather higher on her latest shoot. She wrote the song One Wish about her absent father and then, to clean the slate of their fractious relationship, cast him in the video as himself.
Lenae says her father, who was a teenager when she was born, “was in and out of my life a lot during my childhood, so our relationship was always on and off”. One Wish is about him not turning up to her 10th birthday party, with Lenae refusing to make him the subject of a candle-blowing wish. The chorus is wracked (“I can’t forgive you … I can’t forget you”), but by the time of the video shoot, Lenae was feeling more lenient. “It was important to have a song to release a lot of the negative emotion that I had around our relationship. I got a sense of why he did distance himself; I can empathise with being 19 and having this huge responsibility and still figuring out who you are.”
He hadn’t heard the song prior to shooting the video; they debriefed afterwards over chicken and waffles. “He was like: ‘I heard some of the lyrics and it really hit me. I’m just happy we’re at a place where we can talk about it.’ There was something so nice about him being in my world for a little bit, being on set and looking up and seeing him there. That’s literally all I ever wanted as a kid.”
This is just the latest chapter in the highly emotional bildungsroman of Lenae’s discography, which began in her mid-teens in her native Chicago. Now 25, she is an astonishing writer of melody, perhaps the best of her generation, with luminously pretty lines lighting up every song of her new album Bird’s Eye, just as they did with her 2022 debut, Hypnos, and a string of EPs and mixtapes before that.
Mapped on to Bird’s Eye’s winning melodies are lyrics about every type of love affair, situationship and human tangle imaginable, not just with family members but with soulmates, scumbags and everyone in between. “I’m learning to peel back the layers and speak more candidly about where I’m at,” she says, emanating serenity and self-knowledge during a brief visit to London. “That’s why I think albums are so beautiful, because you can literally hear the maturity happening in real time.”
Growing up in Chicago, she attended performing arts school, where “my brain exploded with fever for learning music”, leading to “this double life”: learning classical music at school, then diving into her city’s porous scene, where jazz, rap, soul and more flowed into one another.
She became acquainted with local rappers such as Smino and Noname; she supported the latter on tour, followed by stints with fellow open-minded, unguarded R&B singers SZA and Jorja Smith. “Noname, she’s just so blunt – and her candour on stage inspired me a lot. The SZA tour, I learned something about work ethic. Just seeing her get up and do it every day, that was the moment where I had to process: is this something I want to do for ever? Jorja, I loved how much her team was like her family and I saw how much of an impact that had on her spirit. Because I can feel lonely and crazy [on tour]. It’s a lot of energy being expelled, with a lot of new faces.”
An admiring tweet from the lo-fi funk star Steve Lacy led to her recording an EP with him and then moving to Los Angeles at 21. She began bringing together Hypnos. At its core are slow jams (including the rapturous Skin Tight, again with Lacy), sung in a coy, breathy upper register, but she went way beyond the bedroom, zooming into the cosmos on the back of varied rhythm tracks. It was enormously acclaimed, but Lenae has a hint of reservation about it now. “Hypnos is a transitional project for me. I was feeling like I’m in between two parts of myself, trying to get to the other side. Having to make new friends [in LA], to create the sense of home somewhere else, definitely translated through the music. I was searching for my voice … trying to overcome this clouded feeling of not being able to see my path.”
Part of that came from trying to make her way around the boxes that the music industry tends to make for young Black women. “I was just overthinking too much, wanting that to be an R&B album. I felt like I had to prove myself in that way – to Black people, to R&B listeners, to people who respect and love that genre like I do. I was raised in R&B, so I’m not rejecting that in any sense; I’m glad that it came out the way it did. But, in hindsight, I placed a lot of weird expectations and rules on what it had to be, versus now, when I’m making music a little more freely.”
She puts her earlier mindset down to “fear of fully acknowledging control over my direction. I’m still gaining that confidence: in rooms, in my opinions, in my decision-making. And also learning to navigate as a Black woman in such a space that … I don’t want to say devalues, but undermines. Every day, I literally get in the shower and say: I’m going to be bigger than the idea people have of me.”
That confidence is evident on Bird’s Eye, made with Dahi, a producer who has worked with Kendrick Lamar and Vampire Weekend and whose versatility chimed with Lenae. The album hops from roots reggae to perky alt-pop to cosmic R&B and beyond. One particularly gorgeous song, Pilot, about resigning yourself to the confusion of your mid-20s, became what Lenae calls the “anchor” for the album. It’s an example of how she uses the shape of a melody to invest meaning: her voice soars and flits like a murmuration of birds, revelling in the moment and not fretting about the next.
This is hard-won wisdom for Lenae. She was in “this really weird funk for a few years, where things were happening around me and I wasn’t an active member of my life”, she says. A relationship breakup after Hypnos helped: “After the emotional shock of it, a lot of that cloud started to clear up,” and she started “understanding the things I want out of life: the type of friend I am, the type of daughter. Grabbing the reins of life a little bit more.” That clarity comes through on another highlight, Love Is Blind. “I found this part of myself that I think is left out of a lot of love songs: the growth on the other side.”
As Pilot attests, she still doesn’t necessarily know where she is going, but she is enjoying the journey. “I check in with myself a lot more; I ask for support when I need it. I just have more fondness for life.” And, as a result, she says, her creativity is sharper than ever before. “The wheels are turning. There’s oil. The engine is new.”
• Bird’s Eye is released on 9 August on Atlantic Records
