Posse Magazine by ckbretal

posse

contents contents contents contents contents contents contents 16

Fashion For Musicians

Quick Piano Lesson

Curating The First Gig

Tuning Your Own Guitar

articles

FEATURES

06 08 Music Festivals Are for the Gals

Sister Sister Sister

Five Music Festivals that are changing the gender gap in music.

The trio HAIM talks about sisterhood & their new music.

Kali Uchis chats about life, and her upcoming album Isolation.

Performance led on by Kesha has us crying in the club.

Kali, What You Mean?

Feminism at the Grammys

)

Departments 04

Contributors

Letter from the Editor

Our Monthly Playlist

posse

Editor In Cheif Chelsea Bretal

Art Director Paige Mulhern

Research Editor Shanti Zschocke

Head Writer Courtnay Tassillo

Creative Director Juliana Giokas

Features Editor Christie Kingsley

Photographer Pallavi Rawla

Online Editor Aimee Hill

POSSE

Contact Posse.com 200 Main Street, Boston, MA 02115 United States

) Thank you for picking up this issue of Posse Magazine! As a child, I have always had an interest in music. I don’t play any instruments, or even try to sing, but I have grown to love what music can do for people. I’ve quickly realized that print media for the music industry is male dominated and I wanted to do something about it. With that in mind, I started Posse to get the word out about all of the badass females in music. I hope to bring attention to females who are putting in hard work. Posse’s purpose is to celebrate women loud and clear. To bring you a great read, I worked with a great team of ladies to produce this musical magazine. This issue focuses on HAIM, a sister trio. They touch on women being oppressed outside of the studio and in award shows, because yeah... it happens. It’s our mission to make sure these sisters are heard and that you can learn from their story.

Chelsea Bretal

mic check

{

Letter from the Editor

MARCH

MUSIC FESTIVALS

ARE FOR THE GALS by Tia Long

Just when you thought the gender imbalance on music festivals lineups might never end, it turns out we only have to wait four years for 45 festivals to get with the (literal) program. While it's definitely a forward-thinking initiative, the lack of female representation on festival and conference lineups needs to be addressed right now, particularly given Pitchfork's analysis of 23 festival lineups last year showed only 14 percent of acts booked were female. This gap is even more striking in 2018. The highly expected Wireless UK festival was recently slammed for their lineup consisting of three women: Cardi B, Mabel, and Lisa Mercedez. In the wise words of Halsey, "It's 2018, do better!" Why aren't women headlining these festivals? While we're still awaiting 2018 announcements from a few generally balanced shows (Made In America, Full Moon, etc), here are a few recently announced lineups aiming to decrease the gender parity gap.

Essence Fest takes place July 5â&#x20AC;&#x201D;8 in New Orleans and is a three night long concert, party, and conference all in one. Headlining this year are icons Janet Jackson, Mary J Blige, Erykah Badu, and Jill Scott. The Essence Brand is known for highlighting Black women in news, lifestyle and entertainment and the annual festival gives African American artists, writers, craftsmen, culinary artists, businesses and others a chance to collectively showcase their works over the Independence Day weekend.

POSSE

Form is in Arizona’s desert eco-city of Arcosanti, and it’s stocked with girls. Form is May 11—14. Form conceptualized just four years ago with three days and nights of live performances, panel discussions, and new art. Charli XCX is set to headline, following performances by Willow Smith, Courtney Barnett, Mitski, and more are locked into the schedule.

3 4 Looks like NYC’s Panorama didn’t have trouble fitting women in on their schedule. The Randall’s Island Park experience has one of the more balanced festival line ups of the year. Janet Jackson will headlining with other live performances from Cardi B, Sza, Sabrina Claudio, Jhene Aiko, Helena Hauff, Shanti Celeste, and more. Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival has increased from only having 4 female performances in 2002 to about 30 on this year’s lineup. That’s quite a jump. Artists like Dua Lipa, Sheryl Crow, and Kali Uchis will take the Manchester, Tennessee stage in from June 7—10.

5 This year Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival upped its female performance presence from nearly 40 to just under 60 this summer. This help increased the rate from about 25% to 33%. Coachella is April 13—15 in Indio, California. Beyoncé was scheduled to headline last year but cancelled due to pregnancy the twins. Thankfully, the queen has been confirmed alongside Eminem and The Weeknd. Indio, California will be once again flooded with flower crowns, and tassel jackets, and music lovers from across the nation this Easter weekend and the following for three days of debauchery.

music festivals are for the gals

SISTER SISTER SISTER HAIM is a California trio combining rock, pop, indie and R&B to churn out one of the most unique mainstream sounds in recent years. One of the most notable aspects of HAIM is their status as a full-album band. Unlike most artists, their albums chart higher than any of their singles. You would be hard-pressed to find another band like that in 2018. The band recently announced dates for their worldwide Sister, Sister, Sister tour through choreographed dance on their Instagram, representative of their quirky social media presence. The synergy of the three sisters comprising the band, Danielle, Este and Alana HAIM, comes through in everything they do, from the seamless three-part vocal harmonies in their songs to the band’s playful videos on social media. The band’s sound shuffles somewhere between 70s rock and contemporary R&B. The band’s most recent release, “Something To Tell You,” shows the diversity of influences HAIM puts into their songs. Written by Jacob Harley & Photographed by Robin Harper

sister sister sister

HAIM working in their home studio.

The album’s title track features a low-strumming guitar and infectious electronic beat that makes it hard not to shimmy along. The sisters sing in dramatic harmony reminiscent of Destiny’s Child. On the other hand, “Nothing’s Wrong,” with its background synth and call-and-response vocals between Danielle and her sisters, sounds like it could’ve filled Madison Square Garden at the height of hard rock. Danielle takes the opportunity to rip a guitar solo at the song’s conclusion when the band plays the song live. HAIM’s live show is a separate entity from their albums; the band’s live performance truly gives new life to the songs. The band reached a huge audience opening for Taylor Swift on her 1989 tour. A whole new breed of music fans were introduced to their energetic live show. It’s not uncommon for each sister to grab a drum and break out into a jam during the show. The band brought a small section of horns, strings and a piano to complement their “Little of Your Love” performance on “Saturday Night Live.” The live instrumentation brought an energy and power to the performance that a recording couldn’t have. The band’s lyrics are often personal and very emotional; many songs revolve around love and

POSSE

relationships. “Something to Tell You” covers loves lost, longed for and lingering. “Night So Long” is particularly gut-wrenching: “I say goodbye to love again/In loneliness, my only friend” Danielle sings over a muted, down-tuned guitar strum. “Kept Me Crying” chronicles staying up for a late-night phone call from an ex-lover. Despite the personal nature of the songs, the band has released many collaborations and remixes, showing they aren’t afraid of hearing a new spin put on their songs. DJ BloodPop’s remix of “Little of Your Love” ups the pep of the original song by adding a bouncy, infectious dance beat to the song. HAIM’s collaboration with Calvin Harris, “Pray to God,” manages to be catchy yet foreboding in its ominous sounding verses with lyrics like “I pray to God, I just don’t know anymore/I lost the feeling, but I try to hold on.” HAIM’s used their platform to spread various messages of female empowerment in many forms. In subtle ways, their lyrics and music convey private emotions that promote vulnerability and expression. In not-so-subtle ways, the band speaks out on social media and in public to support women in music. At the NME Awards, upon the band winning an award, Este

spoke out about sexist attitudes in music during the band’s acceptance speech; “To anyone that identifies as a girl: Whenever you walk into a guitar shop or a sound check or a recording studio, do not let anyone that’s there intimidate you or make you feel like you don’t belong there. Because you do belong there.” One recent evening, Danielle Haim faced a microphone, coaxed a shivering two-note riff from her Gibson SG and tried not to think about Liza Minnelli and the Pet Shop Boys, who were staring at her, in extreme close-up, from a framed poster on the wall. The poster was goofy; the track she was recording was anything but. “I say goodbye to love again/ In loneliness my only friend,” she sang, loading the words with an audible ache. Danielle fronts the rock band HAIM, which she formed 11 years ago with her sisters, Este (bass, vocals, percussion) and Alana (guitar, vocals, keyboards, the occasional cowbell). At first, the trio jammed in their parents’ living room in California’s San Fernando Valley, later booking gigs around town for ever growing crowds. The band’s killer debut, 2013’s Days Are Gone, made HAIM stars. Taylor Swift is a friend. U2 recently invited them to their studio in Malibu to toss around ideas for new music. But on the April night that Danielle recorded “Night So Long,” their long-awaited second album, Something to Tell You, due in July, remained unfinished. She was at the hillside house she shares in an L.A. East side neighborhood with her boyfriend, Ariel Rechtshaid, trying to nail down the song. Rechtshaid is a gifted producer who’s helped craft music for Usher, Vampire Weekend and Adele, among others, and he’s worked with HAIM since 2012. The couple were in their ground-floor studio, a cozy space that’s filled with gear and mid-century furniture. Danielle wrote “Night So Long” when HAIM were on tour. The lyrics grapple with paradoxical feelings of loneliness that can creep up amid the frenzy of performing nightly for thousands of strangers. “That song came about from being completely alone, with a guitar in a room,” Danielle recalls a week later. “When we get to play every night, we feel so fucking lucky. But it’s isolating too.”

HAIM are rock classicists in certain ways (playing their instruments, writing their songs, straight up shredding live), but they’ve also helped to redefine what, exactly, the term “rock band” can mean these days: opening stadium shows for Swift (they say her crowds showed them love, despite, or because of, the raucous jam that closed the band’s set each night); collaborating on an EDM single with Calvin Harris; enlisting A$AP Ferg for a remix of a song they wrote under the influence of Timbaland. The sisters grew up listening to tons of different artists, but it was acts like Sly and the Family Stone, Talking Heads and the Gipsy Kings (their dad kept a Lain music station locked on the car-stereo presets) that taught them bands could pack dance floors. HAIM specialize in an uptempo, syncopated sound that pulls together 808 beats and disco guitars; New Wave riffs and roaring solos that wouldn’t be out of place in an Eagles encore; sunstruck Fleetwood Mac harmonies; and Bootsy Collins indebted slap bass.“Night So Long” was an outlier melancholy, sparse, slow and HAIM weren’t sure how to make it work. “The more we fussed with it, the less impactful it got,” says Alana, sitting beside Este, a few feet from Danielle. At last, they struck upon a solution: They kept it ultra-minimal, but Rechtshaid busted out a “room-simulating” gizmo from the Eighties called a Quantec QRS, which he bought online from a guy in Germany. He used it to slather thick reverb over Danielle’s guitar. Now the song sounded austere and massive at once. “It feels like a hymn,” Danielle says. HAIM play a rough mix for me, and it’s a knockout. When it’s done, Este, perched on the edge of a lowslung armchair, asks, “Did that give you the feels?”

From left to right the sisters are: Danielle Sari Haim, Este Arielle Haim, & Alana Mychal Haim. All three sisters play more than one instrument. Este plays both guitar -and bass, Danielle plays guitar and drums, and Alana plays guitar, keyboards and percussion. For live performances, Este plays bass, Danielle plays lead guitar and sings lead vocals, and Alana plays rhythm guitar along with keyboards and percussion. All three sisters contribute three part vocal harmony.

sister sister sister

HAIM for VOGUE

Breakthroughs take patience. HAIM know this well it took them seven years to put out their debut, after all, refining songs, playing them live, gauging crowd reactions, refining further. “If someone else wrote our songs instead of us, we’d be quicker,” Alana says. “We go over every single sound, every single beat,” Este adds. I wonder if HAIM ever worried, as the years since their debut went by, that people would forget them. They shake their heads. “Maybe we would have been worried,” Alana says, “if we didn’t think we were making awesome shit.” It’s a beautiful L.A. afternoon. Danielle is rocking a vintage Oakland Raiders T-shirt under a chunky blazer. Alana is in a tattered T-shirt with John Belushi’s face on the front. Este is wearing a crescent moon necklace that Stevie Nicks, a big HAIM fan, gave each sister as a gift. “She took us to Moonshadows,” Danielle says, “this restaurant in Malibu, and was like, ‘This is where we used to hang out,’ telling us stories about Don Henley and stuff.” Last year, HAIM got word that another iconic California artist wanted to meet them. “Our friend was at this party, and Paul Thomas Anderson was there too, talking about how he really liked ‘these girls who play rock music and come from the Valley,”

POSSE

Alana says. The director asked the friend to pass HAIM his e-mail. Soon, they found themselves over for dinner with Anderson and his wife, Maya Rudolph (“One of the funniest people on the planet,” says Este). Anderson said he wanted to shoot something with them. “It was like, ‘Uh, you could shoot us on an iPhone for an hour if you want,’” Alana says. Last November, Anderson dropped in as HAIM laid down preliminary tracks at a Valley recording studio called Valentine. The studio had mostly ceased operations in the Seventies and was frozen in time, from the equipment down to the “vintage porn magazines lying around,” Alana recalls. As HAIM worked out arrangements on the fly, Anderson circled with a film camera. “In the room, it looked like nothing,” says Rechtshaid, “and we were like, ‘Uh, is this working out?’” “He was like, ‘Yeah, got it, perfect,’” Alana says. “And when we saw the dailies, we were like, ‘Eureka!’” HAIM decided to use clips from this impromptu session, Danielle behind a drum kit, banging out a monster beat; the trio feeling their way through a rough version of a pining song called “Right Now” to promote Something to Tell You. It turned out they had another connection to Anderson: He also grew up in the Valley, and their mother, Donna, was his elementary-school art teacher. “She told us he was a really talented kid,” Alana says, “but really hyperactive, and that she tied him to his chair with yarn once, to get him to sit still.” She cracks up. “This was back in the day, not legal now!” When they told Anderson, “He showed us this painting of the mountain from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He was like, ‘I love your mom, I painted this with her.’” “We have that Valley kinship with him,” Danielle says. Este nods: “The connection is deep.” HAIM’s Valley roots are central to their self conception. Their mom moved from Pennsylvania to California in her twenties, landing a teaching job and falling in love with HAIM’s dad, Mordechai, a professional soccer player in his native Israel who now works in real estate. The parents enlisted the girls to play in a family band called Rockinhaim, street fairs, classic-rock covers, teaching them to play the drums before anything else, which helps explain HAIM’s emphasis on rhythm and grooves

HAIM on set for “Something to Tell You”

today. For all their success, they describe their lives in Los Angeles as exceedingly low-key. Alana just got an Amazon Prime account and has been binging documentaries. Danielle likes to stay in and cook. Este’s favorite pastime is to go see horror movies by herself or “watch MasterChef Junior and cry at these little kids.” The Valley remains an object of derision in L.A.: a déclassé zone, the stereotype goes, full of Clueless style uptalkers, chain stores and porno shoots. HAIM felt this snobbery firsthand growing up. Some dude at a party once asked Este for her number, and she made it as far as “818”, the Valley area code, before he cut her off and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t date 818.” (“You know what?” Alana says, laughing. “It’s his loss.”) By contrast, HAIM refer to the Valley as “Great One Eight.” Danielle and Alana now have homes on the ast side of L.A., which they are quick to note is a short ride on the 101 from their folks. Este has a place “10 minutes from our parents’ house,” she says, not to mention in the same neighborhood as Anderson’s childhood home: “I’m never leaving the Valley, dude.” The next morning, HAIM pile into a booth at Du-par’s, a diner in Studio City where they’ve been eating since they were kids. “This place feels like home,” Alana says, gesturing at the floral print carpet and up at the Nineties office style drop ceiling. They recommend the pancakes, but order eggs, it’s Pass over, and as Jews, they can’t eat leavened bread. In a few hours they’re due at a nearby rehearsal space they’ve got some still unannounced shows coming up shortly, with a summer tour to follow.

They’re psyched to get back out and play. Days Are Gone sold 90,000 copies in its first week, and HAIM went on the road for the better part of two years. They headlined their own tours, and supported not only Swift, but also Rihanna and Florence and the Machine, growing accustomed to filling huge rooms with a fat, swaggering sound. In October 2014, on a break from touring, “We went right back into writing for the next album,” Danielle says. “We didn’t want to take any time off. But nothing really stuck.” Alana explains the difficulty this way: “All we knew for two years was wake up, soundcheck, play the show, go to sleep and fit in a slice of pizza at some point. We needed to turn our brains from touring brains back to writing brains. When we came home, we literally got off the bus, took a nap and went right into the studio.” “Which was our parents’ living room,” Danielle clarifies. “For four months, we tried to bang out songs, trying to write something every day...” “But we were really hard on ourselves,” Alana interjects. Danielle continues, “We’d write things, but it would always be like ...” “Is that good?” Este finishes, scrunching up her nose. Alana adds, “You get scared. Like, ‘Can we do this again?’” They decided that rather than trying to overhaul the sleek but sinewy sound they’d minted on Days Are Gone, they’d dive deeper into it. They put somewhat less emphasis this time around on studio fuckery, Danielle says, focusing more on sturdy songcraft. But the album is full of ear candy, weird, processed vocals; beats that mix electronic and acoustic; and other sonic doodads that Rechtshaid

HAIM’s Upcoming Tour Dates April 3 — Portland, OR / Schnitzer Hall April 4 — Seattle, WA / WaMu Theater April 6 — Berkeley, CA / Greek Theatre April 7 — Santa Barbara, CA / Santa Barbara Bowl April 13 — Las Vegas, NV / Pearl Concert Theater April 14 — Indio, CA / Coachella Music Festival April 21 — Indio, CA/ Coachella Music Festival April 24 — Austin, TX / Stubb’s April 25 — Houston, TX / Revention Music Center April 26 — Dallas, TX / South Side Ballroom April 28 — Atlanta, GA / Coca Cola Roxy April 29 — Nashville, TN / War Memorial Auditorium May 1 — Washington, DC / Anthem May 3 — Boston, MA / Agganis Arena May 4 — New York, NY / Radio City Music Hall May 7 — Toronto, ON / Massey Hall May 8 — Detroit, MI / The Fillmore Detroit May 10 — Kansas City, MO / Uptown Theatre May 11 — Chicago, IL / Aragon Ballroom May 14 — St. Paul, MN / Palace Theatre May 28 — Morrison, CO / Red Rocks Amphitheatre

POSSE

The SISTER SISTER SISTER

describes, self deprecatingly, as “production bullshit.” (Dev Hynes and Rostam Batmanglij also helped on a few tracks.) The solitary origins of “Night So Long” not with standing, the HAIM sisters prefer working out songs “in the room, together,” says Este. Alana says that “the bulk of our songs start with a track, drums, a piano,” that they rough out and record into Garage Band. Sometimes, Danielle adds, “it’s a riff, or a word or a phrase, and we build off that.” In several of the lyrics on Something to Tell You, Danielle swings from regret to recrimination. “I was too proud to say I was wrong,” she apologizes on the lead single, “I Want You Back,” adding later, “I’ll give you all the love I never gave you before I left you.” On “Right Now,” though, she sings, “You had me hanging on a dream you never believed.” When I ask what experiences such lyrics draw upon, she says their connection to actual relationships of hers isn’t always direct, and that she is “a little uncomfortable” discussing her personal life publicly. “If I’m feeling some type of way and we start to write,” she adds, “I don’t fully understand my feelings until the song’s done and out in the world. That’s how it was with

the last album. I think I’m gonna start to figure out what a lot of these new songs mean in two months, or something.” But in the case of “Right Now,” Alana says there’s no ambiguity: She sees it as an ode to boss-ass bitchness. “I grew up listening to Tom Petty’s ‘You Got Lucky,’ where the whole theme is, ‘You’re lucky to be with me,’” says Alana. “I never really heard a song that said that from a woman’s perspective. Being a woman in a power position and dating someone, in my experience, is hard. You need a man who’s strong enough, to paraphrase Sheryl Crow.” Danielle adds, “We deal with that a lot, not even in dating, but just being the chair women of our company. Asserting our power, sometimes it’s tough.” “I’ve been called ‘entourage’ at festivals,” Alana says, dousing her eggs in Cholula hot sauce. “I got on a golf cart this one time and the guy said, ‘Miss, get off.’ I said, ‘I play in HAIM.’ He said, ‘Never heard of you, please get off.’” She shakes her head, still irked by the memory. “Is that how you look at me, for real? I couldn’t possibly be playing, I must be someone’s girlfriend.” Then she grins. “I was like, ‘I’m wearing puppy pajamas, bruh. You don’t wanna fuck with me!’”

sister sister sister

POSSE

kali, what Inside her hotel room in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, the 24-year-old singer lays out her origin story. She lounges in a white plush robe, canary-yellow stockings and fuzzy slippers, speaking fondly of the Andean foothills of Colombia where she spent much of her youth. A trace of saudade washes over her face when she recalls her teen years in Alexandria, Virginia. There she spent many a night hunkered down in her Subaru Forester, cooking up song ideas on her keyboard after a family feud left her homeless for a time. “Nobody in my family has ever done anything like this,” she says of her music career. “All my friends go to school and work jobs. It can be really lonely.” Uchis is currently based in Los Angeles, but her real home is the road. Following both Grammy and Latin Grammy nods in 2017, she booked her dream gig by opening on Lana Del Rey’s U.S. tour this past winter; then she kicked off a run of festival dates with her inaugural Coachella shows in April, coinciding with the long-awaited release of her full-length

debut, Isolation. Onstage, Uchis and her traveling funk band bring her cosmic soul to life; meanwhile, her devout followers, mostly young women, shriek at the slightest swivel of her hips, clad in metallic spandex and glittering platform heels. (“We love you, Kali!” screamed fans during her set at Governors Ball in June. “Fuck the haters!”) Fittingly for the bilingual, bicultural Uchis, Isolation is a genre-hopping pop experience, crafted with help from friends old and new. Spanish-language track “Nuestro Planeta” features fellow Colombian singer Reykon and rocks a low-key, reggaeton roll; Tyler, the Creator and Bootsy Collins share the sunshine on laid-back funk tune “After the Storm”; and the Damon Albarn–guided meditation “In My Dreams” evokes the feverish synth pop of Alan Vega. In talking to RS, Uchis makes it clear that genre boundaries don’t concern her in the slightest. “Anytime there’s a genre, it’s because it has to be classified for the sake of uploading it to a platform,” she says, languidly thumbing her iPhone screen. “I wouldn’t consider my music R&B – but even if it was R&B, who cares?”

you mean?

Written By Suzy Exposito

Kali, What You Mean?

POSSE

Can you describe the area where you grew up? We have Latin culture in Alexandria, but the Colombian crowd is not so big – it’s El Salvadorians, Ecuadorians, Hondurans. There’s also lots of of Ethiopians; I grew up with all the Habesha. I went to a high school called T.C. Williams High School – you know where the Remember the Titans movie was set? It’s one of the most diverse schools in all of the United States. Nowadays I get really uncomfortable to be in a room of people that are all the same, who all look the same, are the same ethnicity and dress the same. I feel like it’s because I just always grew up around people who were all different. There weren’t really any cliques – everyone was just cool with each other. I felt very blessed to be able to go to a school that had a lot of funding for the arts. Unfortunately, they’re shutting down some of those programs now, but they were key in developing me as an artist. I couldn’t afford cameras, or equipment, or a dark room. I wouldn’t have been able to access those things on my own, but we could play with them at school for free. Let’s talk about how you started conceptualizing Isolation. Were there any songs in particular that you modeled the rest of the album after? My songs are all so different. They’re like my babies. They all come from different times in my life, too, because I spent so much time writing the album that I was in a different head space for all of them. So it’s difficult, because they’re not really all about love, they’re not all about one thing. My music is always just an open diary. I just write whatever I feel is going through my head and what I feel most passionate to talk about at the moment. I try to stay away from political topics because that’s not fun for me, and I want music to be fun. I’m very anti–group think, and I’m very pro-independent thinking. Self-reliance, selfawareness is the key to being a human being, and that’s what’s fucking up a lot of shit. It’s important to reject the need to feel like you have to assimilate to society. But I don’t know. I’m working on my second album now….

Tyler, the Creator followed me, what the fuck?” And then he DM’d me, like, “I love your songs, I love what they say, da-da-da.” He said he loved the first mixtape that I ever made. The next time I was in L.A., I just hit him up, and I was like, “We’re gonna make this song.” What was it like, the first time you and Tyler, The Creator recorded a song together? I was super nervous, because I started making music by myself, in my room. I wasn’t used to being in a recording studio, let alone with somebody who was much further along in his career than I was. We made a few songs, and then we just kept working together like that. Every time we meet up, we just make songs. I’m really happy and thankful to have him in my life, because it can be hard as a new artist when you don’t really have anybody. And I don’t have much family in America anymore, either. Nobody in my family has ever been in this industry, so I can’t be like, “Daddy, who should I work with?” I didn’t have friends who were doing it either – all my friends go to school and work jobs. So it was really lonely. You can get pulled in a lot of different directions if you don’t have good people around you. So many people will pretend to be, but they want something from you. They secretly want to sign you, they want your publishing, they want sex from you. So to have people who just think you’re talented and don’t want anything but to work with you … that’s really important. Now that you’ve racked up so many awesome collaborations, who’s your absolute dream collab? Shakira.

Another album? What can you tell me about it? Well, I wrote all the songs on [Isolation] three years ago. To you guys, they’re new, but to me, they’re old. That’s why I’m already so keen to start working on something new, and I’m in a really different place. I feel like my concepts are getting more abstract. I’m not looking to make a song that has a beginning or an end as much as I’m looking to project a feeling. I wanted to ask about your working relationship with Tyler, the Creator and how that came about. You two have such a great rapport. Guess how that came about. Was it Twitter? Yeah, he hit me up on Twitter [laughs]. I told you. He just followed me one day, and I was like, “Oh, my God,

Kali, What You Mean?