“I know now that you have to make a choice to have self-love,” she says. “It can’t just be like, I’m just going to wait around and maybe one day I’ll love myself. It’s more like: I really want to learn how to fuck with myself. Once I did that, I had to take the steps to actually make that happen. You have to get alone time, you have to pick up tips and tricks to self-care so that you can fucking learn it. If meditation is good for you, stop talking about it and meditate. Stop talking about getting essential oils and go get them. Stop talking about going to get a massage, and go get the damn massage!” Inspirations from her time off, the sounds of each city she recorded in, and childhood favorites like Jill Scott and Lauryn Hill (whose face holds a special place on Kehlani’s left arm as a tattoo) led to the '90s R&B-infused SweetSexySavage. The lyrics deviate from the more melancholy music of her past, instead focusing on carefree romance and being a woman in charge. (A personal favorite of this writer is the track "Too Much," with its chorus "I'm too much of a woman/Too much of a woman/Too much of a badass bitch/Too much of a boss/Baby it's your loss/Now you gotta live with it..." Girl...) Though her new outlook on life overflowed into a bubbly project full of sunshine, Kehlani admits it was a challenge balancing that positive perspective when the culture and climate around her was in upheaval. “I am very easily affected by the things that go on in the world, so I purposely don’t follow that many pages on Twitter, and I had to delete the CNN app,” she says. “As much as I want to stay informed, I choose to tap into resources on my own time — but make sure they’re resources that don’t instill fear or hatred in my heart.” Though at times she feels the need to protect her own creativity and energy, she also knows that she can’t completely check out — because as an artist with resources and a platform, she feels she has a responsibility, one she’s taken advantage of by speaking out about the Women’s March and suicide prevention efforts through her shows and social media. “We artists can’t all keep complaining that we’re so mad and then not do shit to help out,” she says. “Everyone’s busy saying, ‘Fuck this guy,’ but you have all this money, and where are you putting it? We can go march and scream all we want to about these things, but we have too much money and too much power to not be running our own communities ourselves…I just want to tell some of these artists, Come on, bro! You live with three people…why do you need seventeen rooms? Put that money elsewhere. It doesn’t make no fucking sense." (For the record, the L.A. resident says she lives in “the smallest little apartment with two cats and three best friends — it’s not a glamorous fucking life, just real chill shit.” Real chill shit includes meditating, walking on the beach, and watching Netflix’s The OA, which she calls “the most life-changing thing she’s ever watched.”)