I've always loved vintage and I never like to have something someone else has.
I saw myself traveling with a company or making my own work and being a little weird. I wasn't thinking about the business side of anything, I just knew that I loved dancing.
Back then, it's weird, because I wasn't consciously thinking about it and I think that's why the doors opened and I had the opportunity. It was a big shift and I realized that you can plan and think your life is going somewhere, but you also have to surrender to what opportunities present themselves and really go for those as well.
The greatest blessing is that, within all of this, I've still been challenged every day to question and show who I am.
What kind of art do I want to make? What do I stand for? What inspires me? And then to have people in return respond to that... I think that's the greatest thing because throughout dancing, I'm always looking for that.
I think the lion, besides the elephant, was the one animal that I just started thinking about so much.
More than anything, it's been a transition into embracing my destiny. I have everything around me to be able to do this properly. Whether or not I was hiding from that early on, I think now it's great to feel that way. It's just the journey.
There's been so many, I think [Lucas Goodman and I] share this, but for us, Afropunk was a really big moment just because it was in New York.
We had spent a lot of time in London [with Lucas Goodman], which has been amazing, but also it was kind of a homecoming and we felt so surrounded by a specific community of people who are just so New York, so unapologetically themselves and so creative.
To be on stage, to be sharing a stage with Lauryn Hill, Grace Jones, SZA, Kelis, and all these incredible women, I'm like 'When did this happen?'
This is what I love to do. I love to perform for people that get it or just want something interesting.
[My mom] put me in dance class when I was really young just as a thing to do and I loved it. I remember being excited every time I went, no matter how tired I was - it was the one thing that I always liked doing.
[Dancing] was just a nice way of expressing myself, listening to music, and being able to move around and be free, but also really learning something. It was just a nice balance of training and expressing yourself at the same time.
I was working on a piece for one of the things I was dancing to and I needed to have original music. I didn't know where to begin, I'm so bad at computers, and I remembered that he actually made music. I asked Astro Raw if he'd be interested in scoring and he said yes.
I was curious because I hadn't really known anyone to do just that, so I would stop in on his sessions with his rapper friends, and then one day, I told Astro Raw "I'm looking to sing. He told me to try it out and then we made 'Treat Me Like Fire' and everything started."
I've always been kind of surrounded by music my whole life, so my earliest memories of it were just hearing it in the house.
Basically, my senior year of high school, I was going to look at prospective colleges and I went to visit Northeastern University because one of my friends was going.
I just wanted to shed everything and do the things I really wanted to do. All the things I was scared of, I just wanted to try. It was like a clearing.
In New York everyone just kind of knows each other.
It's so important to embrace what you have because if you don't, that can be the root of very self-destructive habits, which I think people waste a lot of energy on.
I feel like my dad was the more artistic one, creating his own thing, loving to be around people, and all this stuff, doing exciting things, and my mom was more of the performer.
As we're growing and stuff, it's been amazing to feel so embraced and have them be so excited. I definitely leaned into my dad a little more starting out because once we actually started to get those people knocking on our doors and emailing.
My mom has kind of been more of the emotional support system. One time I was really feeling all out of it, just dealing with a lot of cooks in the kitchen and adjusting to what it means to be in the music industry, and I called her. One of the first things she said to me was 'You have to be thankful that these people even like you, no one liked me, at all, I was not really accepted for a very long time.'
We're always working on new music and now that we have our own studio space we have tried to stay focus and really explore. But we have projects out that we are super proud of and want to keep building on that.
In music in general, you're always getting a lot of information, buts it's most important to have honest communication. It's always important to understand that we can do so much individually if we connect with one another and have honest conversations. As scary as it is, it can be very liberating. Staying connected to the people you love and staying connected to the things that really matter has been my biggest lesson.
