It’s been a decade since Kehlani released You Should Be Here, and she’s grateful for the life-changing mixtape.
“At the time I recorded it, I was just a hungry 19-year-old trying to follow up the splash that my first project made, trying to get my emotions down, trying to explain myself, trying to get people to feel me. Looking back at it now, I’m grateful that I was down to bare myself in that way and I was down to be emotional and vulnerable,” she explains to Billboard, adding the project changed her life.
She says it opened up the opportunity for her to release other projects and marked the moment where she had to start making “changes to prioritize the light that I found” after years of suffering from mental health issues.
“Those were the first years of my life with stability and with control over my own life,” she says. “Everything was shifting, and I finally had a grip on it. I just needed to protect it.”
Asked what she’d tell herself in the You Should Be Here era, Kehlani shares she’d let her younger self know that her “life’s about to change.”
She continues, “The art that you’re making is going to have big cultural significance that gets a lot of people to relate to you because of your story, your upbringing, your background, your emotional journey. It’s going to bring a lot of those people who need it to the forefront, but also don’t take that on as your own. Lock in, focus on your relationship with God and perfect your craft. Take your time and have fun.”
Kehlani shared she would also tell herself to prioritize her mental wellbeing, as she “spent a lot of years working myself to burn out” and “growing up in front of the world.”
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