With his mystery intact

finally free

Porsche or Tesla?” The valet asks the question hastily, humbly, eyes not quite meeting those of the contemplative man standing before him.

Frank Ocean has been staying at this secluded hotel here for a while now, long enough that when the valet spies him coming down the front path, he knows the routine. On this night, it’s the Tesla, the Model X SUV with the gull-wing rear doors. Inside, the dash looks like the helm of a spaceship, with a centre console map display bigger than an iPad that, once on the road, Ocean never consults.

It’s been more than a year since he’s had a steady home. He moves from city to city, hotel to hotel. In a couple of days, he’ll be in New York, looking for an apartment. A day after that, he’ll turn 29. Four years ago, he released ‘Channel Orange’, a clever, sinuous, supremely confident deconstruction of contemporary soul and announced that his first love had been with a man. In the subsequent months, he was nominated for six Grammys, performed at the ceremony and toured the world. And then, he was gone — not quite a full disappearance, but something like it. What had appeared to be the beginning of a stunning ascent instead curled into a question mark.

Finally, this past August, Ocean returned, and with a bounty — a visual album streaming online, ‘Endless’, followed by another digital album, ‘Blonde’, complemented by a glossy magazine, Boys Don’t Cry, distributed at pop-up shops in four cities. But apart from a lighthearted note and a couple of photos posted on his Tumblr, Ocean didn’t speak publicly. Having emerged from the ether with fanfare, Ocean returned to it quietly, his mystery intact. Not that you would be able to sense the swirl of curiosity that surrounds him by his demeanour.

During conversations over two days last month (edited excerpts in the box), he was preternaturally calm, consistently forthright, reflexively self-aware and wryly funny. This has been the case for years. It made him something of an outlier when he emerged as part of the rabble-rousing Odd Future collective, and an outlier still when he catapulted into pop’s top ranks, a group of people not much given to pensive remove.

Over the past three years, his absence from the pop troposphere — a void interrupted only by the occasional collaboration, Tumblr post or paparazzi shot — has felt like a position statement against celebrity culture, while simultaneously guaranteeing that Ocean’s fame, turbo-boosted by fervent curiosity, would grow even wider. His exile began in earnest in 2013. He was living here, in a glass-walled apartment high over Sunset and Vine, with a panoramic view of South Los Angeles. But the city was choking him: people had stolen money from him; there were “physical sorts of things going on in the streets”; and he grew concerned about the management of his affairs.

Paring to the essence

Control is often at the forefront of Ocean’s mind. When he was on tour, his concerts would be recorded each night, and he would watch the tape, type up notes and email them to his team to prepare for a morning meeting. When ‘Blonde’ and ‘Endless’ were being recorded, he carried the hard drives with his music in his backpack, and the backups, too: “I’d rather the plane goes down in flames and the drives go down with me than somebody put out a weird posthumous release.”

After bouncing around hotels in London, he moved into a furnished apartment that he eventually stripped bare of all but the essentials: “I just wanted to be able to walk around and not run into an end table or some useless piece of furniture.” He rode electric bikes around the city, made new friends — “which is not as difficult as celebrities make it sound” — went on dates.

Piece by piece, the music that would become ‘Blonde’ and ‘Endless’ was coming together, although up until then, it had been slow going. He’d begun recording at Electric Lady in New York, but after he took a pause away from the studio, the rhythm of writing was gone. “I had writer’s block for almost a year,” he said. During that time, he would go to the studio, “stare at the monitors and come up with nothing, or nothing that I liked.”

That dry spell broke only after he reconnected with a childhood friend from New Orleans who was going through difficult times. That conversation, he said, “made me feel as though I should talk about the way I grew up more.” He decided that he wanted ‘Blonde’ and ‘Endless’ to be more autobiographical than his earlier releases. “I wrote ‘Channel Orange’ in two weeks,” he said. “The end product wasn’t always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.”

So he turned inward, and backward, telling stories about his childhood, family life and romantic relationships. Many of the new songs have two or three competing narratives — different points of view participating in the same story. “That was my version of collage or bricolage,” he said. “How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves, we know the story, we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.”

At the same time he was chasing a perfect-feeling sound, he was trying to regain control of his business relationships. He replaced his team — new management, new lawyer, new publicist. And he began negotiations to free himself from his contract with Def Jam, the label that had signed him in 2009 and effectively shelved him until his self-released debut mixtape ‘Nostalgia, Ultra’ caused a stir online in 2011.

“A seven-year chess game” is how he described the process of buying himself out of his contract and purchasing back all of his master recordings — using his own money, he said. As a condition of the arrangement, he said, Def Jam took on distribution of his next project, ‘Endless’, which is available only as a streaming video album on Apple Music.

Then, less than two days later, came a big surprise: ‘Blonde’, released independently by Ocean. This was Ocean’s checkmate, an album wholly his own that took centre stage: ‘Blonde’ debuted atop the Billboard album chart with the third-biggest opening week of the year, behind only Drake and Beyoncé. When releasing ‘Endless’ and ‘Blonde’, he took his time: “I know that once it’s out, it’s out forever, so I’m not really tripping on how long it’s taking.” He described his mood after the release of ‘Blonde’ as “postpartum.”

‘Half-a-song-format’

And there have been accolades, too. In 2013, Ocean won two Grammys, and he has been nominated since, but come February, he will not win any, because he chose not to submit his music for consideration. “That institution certainly has nostalgic importance,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem to be representing very well for people who come from where I come from and hold down what I hold down.” He noted that since he was born, just a few black artistes have won album of the year, including Quincy Jones, Herbie Hancock and Ray Charles.

Ocean is as much refusenik as artiste — what he does may be less important than what he chooses not to do. And moving forward, what he may choose not to do is release an album without a visual component, or even release something album length at all. “Because I’m not in a record deal, I don’t have to operate in an album format,” he said. “I can operate in half-a-song format.”

Or he might devote less time to music. “I believe that I’m one of the best in the world at what I do, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be,” he said. “It’s more interesting for me to figure out how to be superior in areas where I’m naive, where I’m a novice.”

‘Certain moments were drawbacks’

There’s a fine line between a sane escape and running away. Did you feel you were on one side or the other of that?

I never thought about it like that. I always thought about it like, if your house is on fire, you need to get out of the house.

Did you feel that certain things in your career also hadn’t gone the way you would have liked?
Certain moments were drawbacks for sure. Now I look at things differently, but at the time, yeah. Audiences in excess of five million people (on national TV). I was always reluctant to do those things except in cases where they had this nostalgic significance to me. Like performing at the VMAs, being tapped to perform at the Grammys — me saying yes to those things had a lot to do with how those things made me feel before I was actually in the business. And just wanting to be rubbing shoulders with those people and being seen at those places. I still was reluctant and sort of skeptical of those things because I questioned whether or not I was prepared.

I feel like the public knock on you is that you want to be anonymous, or you want to be in some kind of retreat from the spotlight.

Sometimes I’m fascinated with how famous my work could be while I’m not so famous. Super-envious of the fact that Daft Punk can wear robot helmets and be one of the most famous bands in the world, while also understanding that will never be my situation. It’s too late. It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure. I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean. A lot of people stopped me on the street when I hadn’t put music out in a while, literally would yell out of an Uber, “Frank, where the album?”

On ‘Blonde’, especially, you used a lot of different voices.

Sometimes I felt like you weren’t hearing enough versions of me within a song, ‘cause there was a lot of hyperactive thinking. Even though the pace of the album’s not frenetic, the pace of ideas being thrown out is.

Are they always multiple points of view, or are they multiple Franks interrupting each other to be heard?

It’s the same thing to me because my point of view from one emotional state to another is different. Sometimes I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

Were you working toward a fixed idea on these albums? Or was it mutating and evolving as you went?

When I was making the record, there was 50 versions of ‘White Ferrari’. I have a 15-year-old little brother, and he heard one of the versions, and he’s like, “You gotta put that one out, that’s the one.” And I was like, “Naw, that’s not the version,” because it didn’t give me peace yet.

You were reaching for something ineffable?

They’re just chords, just melodies. I don’t know what combination of those objects is gonna make me feel how I need to feel. But I know precisely the feeling that needs to happen.

What about the data side, the numbers, the sales?

I know exactly what the numbers are. I need to know. I need to know how many records I’ve sold, how many album equivalents from streaming, which territories are playing my music more than others, because it helps me in conversations about where we’re gonna be playing shows, or where I might open a retail location, like a pop-up store or something.

Do you feel like the numbers are commensurate with what you thought they would or should be?

Well, we doubled ‘Channel Orange’ first week. I’m always gonna be like, “We could have done a little bit better.” I guess there’s a satisfaction that comes with looking at numbers like that, and I’m making, like, No Limit-type of equity, Master P-type of equity on my record.