[Music] you know kamasi washington said to me i'm telling everybody there was two things that i'm a real broken record on since we've gone to isolation the first one and i wish i could remember who quoted me on this but said to me as soon as the doors closed on the world they said mourn your plans and make new ones and that kept me going for quite a while and i liked that because it created
closure and allowed for possibilities of new beginnings most recently i've been feeling a bit of melancholy again just because of the uncertainty of it all right and i spoke to kamasi washington the other day and he said uh it's going to be a great harvest after we finished speaking i just went and thought about that and i thought what that means i thought what it what it takes to get a harvest preparing the soil planting the seeds
protecting the crops ensuring that others don't actually chip away and destroy the crops before you can you know you can harvest and when you get a great harvest everybody eats and i just thought that was a beautiful way to look at it and i wonder kind of you've got so much to look forward to going forward and this album is such an important part of your creative outlet whether you agree with that you feel positive right now and
amongst all of the change yeah you know i i believe in duality in life the yin the yang the option the free will to see something in two ways and it's up to us to have that perspective and that's really what kind of the lyrics of smile talk about is choosing to start to see in a different way and then that rewires your brain which is the most important part of your whole body which you can do by the way and that is
lesson number one when you think you can't get past it is the brain can be rewired and you can mold it it's malleable it is so i haven't said oh 2020 is the worst year because we're six seven months into it and also i have a child on the way and that's that's not a good spell to cast yeah let's bookmark this in a different way yeah let's bookmark this and hopefully in 20 years when i can look back i can
say wow 2020 it was challenging but out of that challenge came the most beautiful thing in my life right and when you look at the album cover for smile you see me as a sad clown and then you see the smile kind of in this smile font it's not me going hey smile like or shoving happiness down your throat or you gotta stay positive you gotta stay optimistic it's melancholy it's satire it's melancholy
yeah i found my smile but i'm not stupid enough to think that you know it's going to stay this way forever if i don't keep doing the work do you know what i'm saying like smile is a real representation to me the record is representation that i got through it and overcame to the other side i'm not saying i'm gonna always be on this other side i could you know fall backwards the mind can trick you right
but at least i have this touchstone now of a body of work that says no you did it once you can do it again it's possible it's possible i don't feel like katy perry of prism could have walked away i feel like it was like i'm gonna stay on this road until some until like you said the fans say take a break you just weren't gonna stop could could you walk away now could you walk away happy now could you disappear well well two things
two things disappearing is extreme i love what i do is it though to disappear into a private universe and raise your family and people have done it i i mean sure but i'm sure a lot of those people still feel very creative and and and wish you know for an outlet um for me it's not about disappearing it's about balance it's about having some freaking balance in your life it's about the art of saying no it's about
yes i think prism is when the when like i started to really kind of come awake a little bit you know i i was just a bit fantasyland idealism candy centric creating a character that was just pure fun and pop and entertainment but prism was definitely like ooh there's something else here who knows that's when the real investigation started but it's not about walking away and that's the thing is like i don't want to ever choose between
being a mom and doing what i love that you know is so archaic i think the reason why women get the responsibility of creating another life is because they can do it all in a pair of hills so it's not about choosing it's about balance and that in turn is why i wrote what makes a woman yeah yeah which is one of the high points on the record which is why it ends the record of course anybody who knows
how albums get made know that song 1 and song 12 10 whatever it is are really important yeah yeah yeah it's like album 101 so for it to be at song number 12 and to to bookmark the record i feel it deserves some time i feel it deserves a little shine in our conversation this song this really cool interesting song it feels like it kind of came out of nashville in the future i don't know or it's nashville in the past or
nashville in the past maybe it's a bit of both maybe it's westworld it's all simulation um what makes a woman yeah i this song was created just as a an appreciation for women and it was a song that i was writing before i actually got pregnant and now is like taking on a deeper meaning i'm like whoa women are able to create a life and like live and deal with all this stuff and give birth to a watermelon
through a tiny thing great this is wild yep that's nice your body is amazing yeah you know when you try and define a woman it's really hard because they're such chameleons they're so transformative and i'm really speaking about myself which is and i've said this several times i i'm not one thing and i don't like to be put in a box even sonically or when i experiment with music but i have wild ideas of like going to
oxford one day and some people are like great cool i'm like why not i mean i did get my ged right so there's there's some things that are you know people would have a comment on but you know i have these out of the box dream stills or ideas or dimensions that i want to touch in my life and i i feel like women are are are very chameleon in that way that they are not just one thing they are so malleable and
so elastic and yet you've you've spent a majority of your adult life in an industry which has tried so hard to define female artists it's still it's it's still not good and you know what i always say is some of it comes from the audience they like to pit us against each other i was going to say it more often than not it ends up in some kind of very strange perceived dis function within the artist's room where a female
artist and a female artist end up you know at each other and it just i never know how that starts and i could trace it back as a super fan i never know how it starts we never see uh niall horan and shawn mendes fighting like we never see it i'd pay too though yeah that would be hot um but we don't see it you don't hear about that you don't read about like ed sheeran you know go on who's he fighting go on yeah who's
who's ed sheeran and justin bieber fighting right you never heard wow who's going to win that no but hang on hold that thought because we're on a serious topic but we can't sidestep that i mean now horan and sean men as it's obviously nile like shawn's got reach he's tall but nile's irish he's going to beat the out of him but when it comes to ed sheeran and justin bieber i don't know we just don't hear about it that's why
it's an exciting thing to talk about now because you've never ever heard about it but like take any female performer and you hear about it every single day like you read you want to read twitter comments no somebody want to take my account and read my twitter comments no you don't you don't because it's like it's all about like who's better than who who's skinnier than who who sold more number ones and who who's
doing better this year than who who made this much more it's like okay well what about just like liking the music like why is it about why did you ever get swept up in it though did you ever find yourself even just subconsciously because you're exposed to it all the time and you're and you're facing all of this all the time that the bloodlust catches you're just like ah i am competitive but i'm not competitive
with women no no no no i'm competitive in that i want to succeed i care about my art and i hope that it reaches that's how i'm competitive but like i actually truly want every single female in the industry to feel supported and loved and feel like they can speak their truth and deliver their message no matter how many of us women are in the industry i mean time and time again like i want to hire what more women
than men i want to give them i want to support them you know because i know what it feels like to like just be in a room of all of my my female peers and go do you like me i really want to like you i want to talk to you i know we're going through the same exact thing like we're literally going through the same exact thing can't we talk about this there's only five other people in the world that are going through this
and you're in the same room can we please just have some whine and talk about how hard this is please you know and like that that would have been amazing i i think we're more there than we were at five years ago i think there's been you know an evolution but there has to continue to be i think amongst peers there's more understanding and compassion and love but it has to definitely also be in in the listeners and the fans
the you know the the real fans they also have to not play the petty game with us i agree we talked a bit about this when we first met it was the first kind of common ground we landed on really early on which was this idea of um trying to to encourage artists to acknowledge the stresses strains and demands that are placed on artists now versus before and you and you've seen this transition
yourself as fans we have every availability to you we have this insatiable desire and appetite for quote-unquote content we have all of the tools and platforms for you to feed me feed me dopamine dopamine dopamine dump me yeah and by the way i'm talking about myself here i'm not throwing judgement at any fans out there i'm i'm pop culture lover i love it i lust so i'm like if you want my attention and
you don't want a if you want to be a and not b c d e or whatever f or g then you've got to keep me pumped up and what i've been noticing in in recent conversations that i've been having and it's been pretty evident in the conversations the way they've come out is that artists are tired and that it's exhausting and the demands are exhausting and that it doesn't feed the soul it just feeds the timeline
and we spoke about this and i know that you're very you feel the same way and they've there's got to be a conversation we have to use this kind of experience to have this conversation so that we can educate each other as to what the actual outcome is and how dangerous it can be because it leads to coping mechanisms which are more easily available than ever before right over the counter and then
we lose good people because they can't handle the stress we lose good people you lose the artist i see artists out there that i've known for you know a decade they're not there anymore they're not present anymore they're not there and it's sad it's sad that they felt like they had no choice and obviously we all have a choice and it's up to us to do the changing i just hope one day there is somewhere artists can go or a community or
we can just shift you know our perspective a little bit as a whole in general but um it's not for me i'm not tired it's sad i'm not tired it's sad yes it's sad to see when you know artists are on a cocktail of medications and they're just not like they were it's sad that like artists od it's sad that you don't see artists becoming grandmas and grandpas because they shoot themselves in the head
it's sad why is that glorified why is that rock and roll why is that cool that's not cool that's someone's brother that's someone's sister that's someone's mom that's someone's dad that's someone's niece or nephew that is someone's life it's not part of the trade it doesn't come along with the territory and artists that think that they they have to stay in pain in order to be interesting and cool and creative are lying to
themselves and i lied to myself for a really long time i was like i don't want to face my demons because what if i'm not like i don't have anything to say afterwards i get scared to go to therapy because you know all of a sudden i don't feel as intensely you know i think the stigma of mental health and the conversation has to be broad the stigma has to be taken off i think media has to have some
accountability i don't know if they ever will but what i do believe is i believe the fans the fans will have it before the media has it but like i said earlier in this conversation the people have the power so they can make the change they control the media what happened first the music or the music industry the music then the industry was born out of it remember the people have the power so it's up to us to do our individual work you