On the value of being true to your own pace

I’m wondering why you released two albums this year, whether due to your natural creative pace or some intention of defying the music industry’s expectation that artists release albums once every two years.

I’ve always been creative at my own pace, even when I had a label for my previous three projects. But I think naturally, even before the internet, I was always a brash, impulsive person. I think my creative impulse all stems from—I don’t want to say mental illness, but extreme impatience.

My level of output has always been pretty much consistent, which is, to say, a lot. Working with a label, I have to fulfill certain campaign duration needs for marketing reasons, but I felt really free this year. After I released my final project with my last label in March or April, I just felt like, we live in a dystopia and I don’t care any more about rollouts. At this point in my career, I’m so over rollouts, and I’m so over trying in this non-meritocracy music industry. It’s not really out of a “fuck the music industry” mentality, even though I do think “fuck the music industry” every day.

As artists, our duty is to be true to our own pace. Our only duty is to honor the creative impulse. Creating campaigns is so antithetical to that, which is why artists have teams to do all those things that are anti-creative, in my opinion.

I’m interested in living in a dystopia being more of an inspiration than something that gets you down or limits you. Can you talk more about that?

Everybody who partakes in the arts—in the world—right now is faced with this AI slop paradigm shift where we’re like, “Is our existence needed when there’s all that shit?” Some people listen to Suno music. There’s so much reasonable fear within myself and within everyone. It’s this existential fear of whether or not we have purpose anymore. AI is an attack on purpose, in a way, because AI art, if you can call it that, is not a consequence of lived experience. The duty of an artist is to translate their lived experiences into a different form—hopefully something beautiful, but sometimes really ugly. That is also good, necessary art. AI doesn’t have lived experience.

When I was talking about this dystopia, I was trying to get at this existential anxiety of, “What’s the point, then, of art if it’s not valued, if the lived experience of being human is no longer valued?” I don’t think we’ll let that happen. I’m hopeful that we, collectively, as humans, will sense in some invisible fourth-dimension way the necessity of human storytelling. Now more than ever, making art is so intertwined with trying to express or seek truth in this era.

Can you talk about why, with You Win Some, You Lose a Lot, you’ve gone in a newer musical direction of mostly instrumental beat work instead of your signature indie-R&B style?

I recently did an interview that talked about how the album was so different to my previous work. I think it’s tempting, from a journalistic point of view, to frame it as, “Oh, she went on a detour.” … When an artist needs to be marketed, different players in the industry need to [box them into genres]. This is not their own fault. It’s only human to want to recognize patterns and fit artists into genres. I’m also not trying to be like, “Oh, I’m genre-less, I’m post-genre.” I think that’s really stupid.

I know I have a sound, but a recent mentality that has really freed me is, the more confusing your online presence is or your artist images are, the more freedom you have to make things that actually interest you. I’m interested in making things or being in experiences that let me grow. I’m still proud of things I’ve made before, and I might go back to it. I don’t like the idea of making resolute decisions about the directions of my career. I feel like that is something you do from a journalistic angle, and it helps people understand artists. I think the reason I feel so free recently is because I’ve completely abandoned my self-consciousness and my desire to have my career looked at in that way.

I wanted to make [You Win Some, You Lose a Lot] instrumental and electronic because I’ve always loved composing things, and putting my voice over it or not is just one decision away. I could have sang over those beats and it would’ve felt very me as well. I’m interested in challenging and confusing myself, because when you do something you don’t really understand, it proves that you could also do something different and still make it good. Maybe sometimes, you have to take a detour to go back to your original thing, and it actually makes your original thing even more interesting. I think it’s helpful to always feel like anything is possible in terms of style, whether you’re into visual arts, music, or writing. Not thinking about it as a career, but a state of being.

From what I can tell, the writing you’ve done in the past, things like zines and essays, isn’t as much of what you do creatively these days. If that’s true, can you tell me about why you’ve shifted mostly toward music?

I feel like they’re all the same thing. All of these are just formats. It’s helpful for me to skip around formats when I feel stuck or bored, or sometimes, I feel like every time I open Ableton, I’m creating this similar melody. Sometimes, you get stuck in these loops or tendencies that trap you and make you doubt your ability, or you feel like, “Oh, shit. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the plateau.” Every time I feel that way, it’s so helpful to draw or write just words, and sometimes, that unclogs things for me.

Music has always been my favorite form because it’s invisible. It has this element of divinity. It feels like the most magical of all the forms. It’s always been my main focus, but underneath it, I’ve always loved writing. I’ve never been interested in having a career in the other things, which is why I consider them secondary, but I also consider them complementary, because every time I write a big essay or poem, I excavate words that I, later on, steal. I love stealing from myself.

It’s all about keeping the flow. So much of creativity is also about association. The more you try to work on something horizontally—when I work on music in the studio or with Ableton open or with a guitar, even after I’m done for the day, I’m still thinking about how to workshop that, tweak that song or line or even just that specific take. I’m thinking about that for the next six months continuously. Well, hopefully not that long, because I’m impatient.

The process is ongoing, even when you’re sleeping, at the back of your head. The more different outlets you have to keep your attention in that space in your head, the better it is for an abundance. The more, the more, if that makes any sense. There’s no limit or ceiling of where your creativity can go. The more you go into it, the more you can manically get more and more out of it. It just somehow is exponential.

There was something you said about stealing from yourself that really stuck out to me. I’d love to hear more about what you mean by that and how that’s been a part of your creative process.

The key thing is the idea of preciousness. There have been times in my life when I’m just feeling so precious about everything. I’ve learned that that’s actually worked to my disadvantage.

By preciousness, I mean, for example, I write a song, and in a verse, I already use this metaphor or rhyme that I thought of in the shower two weeks ago. Three months later, I write another song that’s better, but I’m like, “Fuck, I already used that line. I can’t reuse it again.” Fuck it. Why can’t you repeat yourself?

I’ve let go of the idea of having a perfect discography or a perfect career, or a perfect musician profile on Pitchfork. I don’t care anymore. I think messiness is liberating, and messiness includes repeating yourself and not viewing yourself as having this precious position in the music world. Let’s say someone makes something similar to you. Instead of accepting that or learning about that with a sense of fear and a sense of, “Oh, my God. I’m being replaced,” it’s been so liberating to really not view myself as such a precious, neat story.

Instead, think of your creative process as a practice. If you approach it as a practice—which is to say you show up, you do the work, you’re a student, you’re not performing a career—if you approach it with that mentality, you make things that are way more interesting and exciting, and things that could surprise you and take you to places you might otherwise not go.

By stealing from myself, I mean the idea of, I work on this, I work on that. And then, I’m going to take a little bit from this version of myself and put it there. It’s all a mess on this massive table, and I’m not trying to present it yet. I’m just in the kitchen, everything is messy.

How has this all differed for work outside the cehryl discography, like film scoring and whatnot? How have you learned to do that? What have you learned about yourself from doing it?

There’s no separation between anything I do creatively. I put out music as cehryl, but when I’m scoring films, it’s spiritually the same process of entering this trance. Spiritually, the process is the same, when I score films, of entering my imagination.

Everything comes back to being in touch with my imagination, but the only difference is when I score films, I’m in an imaginary landscape that was sketched out to me by the director or filmmaker. I’m in that landscape and it’s in that space in my head, but it’s the same as when I’m writing songs about my own life. In both cases, I’ve allowed myself to completely exit my physical form, enter this imaginary space, and feel the feeling in that scene and let the appropriate melody for the appropriate scene come out of my hands or voice.

I make a lot of other things. It’s almost a problem. Recently, I’ve been making a lot of text keychains. I made 80 of these. This one says, “I love making it worse, so I can make it better.” I have a bunch that say, “Dive now, float later. Love now, cringe later. Listen now, look later.” Which is an important thing, I think, for 2025 musicians.

A lot of those are text-based but could have been a lyric. This could have been a tweet. This could have been the header of an essay. The same feeling could have been expressed non-verbally in a film score. To me, all of this comes from being really emotionally sensitive not just to myself but to the world. It’s all the same thing to me. It looks different, but the essence or what I’m trying to communicate or express is the same.

Do you have anything else you want to say about creativity and imagination that you haven’t said yet? Or, when you were answering any of the questions I asked you, did you have anything you wanted to say that you didn’t quite get to say?

Imagination is the only and final way we can survive this horrible life. … All hope in any circumstance, in our individual and collective lives, comes from imagining. By imagining, it’s like it hasn’t happened yet. Nobody knows what it’s going to look like.

The act of imagination is an act of hope. The act of imagination is about possibility. It’s about believing. It’s actually faith. It’s similar, because you’re blindly believing in something that could very well be shit. For example, if tomorrow, I decide to make heavy metal, I need to have enough imagination to believe—it’s delusion also—that I could make something good.

Imagination is the final frontier we must all protect. That’s the one thing, whether you’re in a difficult, politically ravaged situation in your hometown or whether—imagination is the only way out, and it’s the only thing you have to yourself. That space is really sacred, and it determines everything you can be that the world tells you that you can’t.

All the arts arise from brave people imagining something that has never existed before. It’s magic, and it’s crazy, because it’s free. It’s the only way we can actually surpass our mundane physical form as humans. The imagination is where we go at the most desperate times and the most euphoric times. Whether or not you’re spiritual or religious, I think we all have imagination. It’s totally universal.

One final thing that I wanted to add is that people sometimes confuse action with a state of being. By that, I mean it’s easy for record labels to sign an artist and to push, “Oh, this is an artist. She writes all the songs.” But I think making art is really a state of being, which is a lifetime. It’s not about the individual actions of going to the studio, making a record, or putting out a promotion. It’s all the times in between as well in which you think about, “What is it [I’m] trying to say?” It’s about your sensitivity to the world.