Admired by SZA, Steve Lacy and more, the 25-year-old is writing one perfect pop song after another – while contending with an absent father, self-doubt and an industry that undermines Black women
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.”