DX: Did you ever feel pressure from No I.D. to create more records on your own, to show people that you can hold it down on with just yourself on a record rather than a bunch of rappers on it?
Jhene Aiko: Yes! Yeah, it’s funny because I’ve always felt like that. With the [Sail Out] EP, it was just sort of the songs that were more Hip Hop influenced, J. Hennessy type of tracks. When I was recording them, we had features in mind. It was like, “Let’s make a song to see if so-and-so can get on.” It makes it less work for me, because I don’t have to write top to bottom. I can do two verses, a hook and leave 16 bars open to complete the song.
There was “The Worst” in particular, which was one of the last songs recorded for the EP, and I wanted a feature. Dion came in and he’s like, “I think you should finish your songs, and you do them.” He gave me a whole speech on how I don’t need features, and that I can do a song from top to bottom. I was like, “You’re right.” I’ll just write a 16. It took a while, because I didn’t know how many words you had to write into a 16 bar [laughs]. When I did it, I was like, “Wow, I just did a full song from top to bottom.” I was inspired to do more.
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