Photo by Marcus Cooper
The past 18 months have been an emotional journey for everyone, but for Tinashe, they’ve also been a spiritual awakening. Forced to cancel her tour in support of 2019’s Songs For You because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she spent much of the last year holed up in Los Angeles, finally able to sit and enjoy the city she’s called home since childhood. The result is a new outlook on life and the release of 333, her latest album and second since splitting with RCA Records two years ago.
“It allowed me to have time to really focus on what I’m bringing into the world, what my purpose is as an artist, especially now as an independent artist,” said Tinashe to Genius about her pandemic year in a recent Zoom interview from her kitchen. With time and space to think, she focused on “being really authentic in the studio, making songs that inspire me, that I think are interesting, exciting, pushing all the creatives I work with to be a little bit more imaginative or think outside the box.”
The album finds Tinashe sounding more confident than ever in her unique blend of pop and R&B, and it arrives with accompanying visuals that explore the intersection of nature and technology. She draws from a long list of production collaborators to reflect on the pain of past relationships and deliver bedroom jams. It all feels like a natural evolution for the 28-year-old artist. But there was no guarantee she would ever get here.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky, she moved to Los Angeles at an early age to pursue a career in entertainment and found initial success as a child actor and a member of the short-lived girl group The Stunners. She looked to stars like Janet Jackson and (eventual collaborator) Britney Spears, who combined high-octane pop music with intricate dance skills, for inspiration, and inked a deal with RCA Records off the strength of early mixtapes like In Case We Die.
Although she broke out with the release of her 2014 debut, Aquarius and its hit single, “2 On,” the one-time child star would spend years caught in the merciless cogs of the major label system as she struggled to get RCA to square its traditional R&B business structures with her genre-agnostic sound. Years of delays led to public frustration on her part and a muted rollout for her follow-up album, Joyride. She parted ways with the label in 2019 and last year declared that she wanted to abolish the concept of genre.
“When I first got in the game, there were a lot of people saying that I was the new R&B girl, and I instinctively reacted to that like, ‘Don’t put me in that box,’ because to me it felt limiting,” she says. “We at least need to be able to broaden the dimensions of how we talk about genres and those spaces each artist has to fill, whether that be in playlists or on stages. I think it’s important that we are aware of how limiting it can be and how discriminatory it can even be. I think there’s so little discussion about how music is definitely segregated racially a lot still.”
The history of R&B is indeed fraught with categorization by race over sound. “Rhythm & Blues” was coined as a term to replace “race music,” an early label for music by Black artists that fell out of favor in the 1940s. Billboard’s biggest R&B chart was called the “Hot Black Singles” chart for nearly a decade in the 1980s, and many labels still handle R&B artists with separate marketing and promotional teams that often aren’t granted the same budget or opportunities as (predominantly white) pop acts. For an artist like Tinashe, these stark dividing lines proved impossible to navigate.
While RCA may have put Tinashe through the ringer promoting work she didn’t always believe in, success outside the major label system could have proven elusive. She dropped Songs For You as an independent artist shortly after leaving RCA and hoped its comfortable blend of pop and R&B music—which had so confounded the rigid genre structures of her label—would connect with fans. Although it didn’t produce a “2 On”-sized hit, her bet was right. Mid-tempo tracks like “Save Room For Us” and “Touch & Go” earned 15 million Spotify streams apiece, and the album garnered strong critical praise as Tinashe was finally able to show off the breadth of her sound.
“I really didn’t know what to expect,” Tinashe says, reflecting on the Songs For You rollout. “It gave me a lot of confidence moving forward that I could do it as an independent artist, that I could make this work and not just automatically sign to another label again because that was also an option on the table. I really stuck to my instincts in terms of being able to be in control of my creative decisions."
333 finds her further refining these instincts while experimenting anew. Songs come in short bursts, hopping from introspective ballads like “Angels” to soaring dance floor burners like “Undo (Back to My Heart)” and left-field interludes like “Shy Guy.” On her KAYTRANADA collaboration, “Unconditional,” she even switches sounds mid-song, delivering a tight minute of dance music before slowing down as she sings about trying to reconcile a relationship.
She also finds ample opportunity to pay tribute to her surroundings. “I spent so much time here last year that I was just kind of in the L.A. headspace,” she explains of the album’s ever-present references to California. Songs like lead single “Pasadena” hold the state close to her heart:
The summer’s comin' ‘round the corner
And now I’m feelin’ like I don’t even know ya
I’m never leavin' California
Now more than ever life is all what you make it
“As somebody who grew up in a city, I think that we constantly hear about a side of L.A. that isn’t true for me,” she says. “I want to be able to translate that to a wider audience that the city actually has a lot of culture. It has a lot of depth. It has real people. Real families. It’s not all just Hollywood glitz and glam. It’s not all fake people.”
333 embodies California not only physically but culturally, with songs like “I Can See the Future” embracing a “West Coast energy,” as she puts it. Even the album title, Tinashe’s “angel number” that she believes brings her good luck, fits into the new-age spiritualism that feels like a distinct product of the area.
She speaks about the merger of nature and technology with a sense of wonder, explaining how she drew inspiration from the energy and spirituality of the natural world as well as emerging fields like virtual reality and immersive gaming. “I’m thinking about new ways to live in the world,” she says. “I think these things all intersect in a way that’s really interesting.”
The album also gives Tinashe more opportunities to show off something she’s been known for since the beginning of her career: dancing. She recruited famed choreographer Parris Goebel to create her “Bouncin” video, where she twists and writhes on a series of mini-trampolines in a visual inspired by OK GO’s famous treadmill video for “Here It Goes Again.” She’s seen the recent rise in pop video choreography from the likes of Normani, Dua Lipa, and more, and hopes a new era of dance in popular music is upon us.
“I’ve been doing choreography in my videos since 2014 when it definitely was not cool,” she says, reflecting on mid-2010s pop videos that often prioritized narrative structure over the tightly choreographed dance sequences that have defined her videos. “I would love for it to be taken seriously again in the way that it was in the past because it’s a great way to celebrate music and art and movement.”
Now, she’s preparing for her upcoming tour, where she’ll perform songs from both 333 and Songs For You after over a year of isolation.
Taking a plunge into something new can be hard, but sometimes what comes after that is even more difficult. Two albums into her journey as an independent artist, however, Tinashe makes it feel effortless. She’s no longer concerned about trying to define her sound, saying she “still [has] trouble categorizing my album.” While she hasn’t quite figured out how to quantify success, she says that for now, the process is enough.
“A lot of the time, any time that I feel unsuccessful, it’s just whenever I let my thoughts or my perception of myself get in the way,” she reflects. “The fact that I’m able to work, do what I love to do, play shows, do photoshoots, have interviews, I’m living the dream.”
