Raveena is feeling sick. It’s a gloomy day in mid-March when we’re supposed to meet at one of the musician’s favorite food spots, the beloved South Asian canteen Punjabi Deli in lower Manhattan. But only an hour before we’re scheduled to talk, her publicist texts me that Raveena has a sore throat from her red eye flight and wants to do a phone interview instead. Considering that the coronavirus outbreak has begun to hit New York City hard, I agree, sadly pushing visions of chana masala and warm basmati rice from my mind.
“I don't think I have the roni,” Raveena assures me light-heartedly later that afternoon, when we finally get on the line. She’s calling from her home in Queens, and politely declines to turn on FaceTime because, as she describes it, her house is “chaotic.” Her voice, which is soft and saccharine, usually sounds effortlessly luxurious in her lush R&B songs that have garnered over a million listeners worldwide. But a tinge of stress materializes when she describes the “millions of boxes” around her. She’s about to move from New York to Pasadena in just four days' time, all while working on her next album.
The 25-year-old musician just happens to be undergoing a major life change in the midst of a major world crisis. The decision to switch coasts happened “kind of suddenly,” she says, and was prompted by a recent breakup with her ex-boyfriend and musical collaborator, Everett Orr, who has produced every song she’s released in the past five years. After meeting at the prestigious Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU (which, full disclosure, I attended at the same time), they began to create the songs that would appear on Raveena’s 2017 breakout Shanti EP.
Not only did her debut project exhibit her penchant for painting entire intimate dreamscapes with just a few lyrics, but it also introduced to the world her transporting R&B that pulls at once from Bollywood soundtracks, the luxurious soul of D’Angelo, and the jazzy melodies of Norah Jones. Then, when she came out as bisexual with her 2018 single “Temptation,” Raveena swiftly gained a cult following for her sensual depictions of queer romance and sexuality.
Her most recent album, 2019’s Lucid, saw her mature even more as an artist. Throughout, she revealed more of her personal history with abuse and intergenerational trauma as a child of Indian immigrants, all while weaving in themes of sexual liberation and spiritual self-healing. It established Raveena as an emerging star who is unafraid to be a voice for fellow “brown weirdos,” as she puts it. “I want to create a space for all types of outsiders, survivors, queer people, people with depression, people who just felt like they didn't fit growing up,” she says, her voice taking on a somber tone.
Raveena was raised between Queens, New York and the suburbs of Connecticut by Sikh parents. “Being Sikh defined our existence, especially because my whole family wore turbans and patkas,” she explains, referring to the cloth head coverings that made the male members of her family stand out amongst white Americans. “My hair was past my butt and I wasn't allowed to cut it. It was such a visible part of our identity.” She has since chosen to move away from solely following Sikhism in her adulthood. “I do definitely identify with it, but it’s more that my spirituality stems from a lot of different religions... I'm just enjoying creating my own philosophy.”
The sense of alienation she experienced in adolescence caused her to turn to music as a refuge; as a young girl, she found solace in soul singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Amy Winehouse, Lauryn Hill and Sade, and used their voices as templates as she practiced vocal runs for hours by herself in her bedroom. The mix of different cultures in her everyday life was a “weird state of being” that “led to very weird choices” in her music. “It can definitely be challenging being a South Asian artist and not having a lot to go off of in Western music culture,” she admits. “It's easy to feel super displaced and confused, like, ‘Where do I fit into all this?’ But that's also the most exciting part about it. There isn't a framework so you can invent your own.”
At the core of Raveena’s work is her belief that music has the power to heal and inspire, and that philosophy seems to carry into her fans after they listen to her work. When scrolling through the top comments to her delightfully serene “Tiny Desk Concert” for NPR, you’ll find sweet sentiments from listeners about self-nurturing and caring for others. “Anyone else using this as a source of mental peace during the coronavirus chaos?,” one user writes. “I just listen to this and this is my first time hearing of Raveena. All of a sudden I want to go home and give my wife a foot massage,” says another one. In response, Raveena speaks of her own listenership with a kind of reverence. “I feel like what unites the community around my music is it attracts a lot of kind and very soft people, and I hope I don't lose that,” she says, adding that she knows her fanbase could change as she becomes a bigger artist.
The need to forge her own path is important now more than ever before. In February Raveena released her four-track Moonstone EP, which features outtakes from the Lucid recording session and serves as the final goodbye to the chapter of her life where she made music only with Orr. It also arrived with the stunning music video for “Headaches,” the singer’s solo directorial debut and next step in forging her reputation as a queer icon.
The pink-and-purple tinged clip follows Raveena and wellness influencer Hitomi Mochizuki as they fall in and out of love, kiss wildly in roofless cars, and go on dates in dim sum restaurants. Its depiction of Asian femmes engaging in a whirlwind, star-crossed romance felt revelatory, because that particular type of queer representation is so rare in Western media and it wasn’t tailored toward a male gaze. “I felt very strongly about directing it myself,” Raveena says matter-of-factly. “I was like, I don't want this to have someone else's gaze on it. I want it to be something that just looks like the fantasy of my dreams.”
She considers herself a “late bloomer” when it comes to realizing her queerness, something she attributes to the fact that she initially thought that her early relationships with women didn’t count. “I feel like I was engaging with my queerness before I was engaging with my heterosexuality,” she says. “Like my first five kisses were all women. It's wild that, in my mind, I only registered the heterosexual experiences as the real ones.”
She points out that mentality is a result of being taught patriarchal ideals, which she’s worked to unlearn by exploring her queer and polyamorous identities. “In queer relationships, they're less based off of hierarchy,” she explains, “It’s like being so comfortable with another natural woman's body and not feeling like we have to shave for each other or look a certain way based on the male gaze.” With her experience engaging in polyamory, she cautions that it can get “messy really fast” according to her personal experience. “It just takes a lot of communication and trust and breaking down a lot of ideas of what heteronormative monogamy looks like… We constantly have to break it down and see how it’s affecting us.”
She’s also begun work on her next album, which she describes as the “main healing force” that’s been anchoring her during this intense transition period, in both her personal life and the world at large. Though she calls scouting for new musical collaborators to work with a “hard and awkward” process, a burst of excitement appears in her voice when she tells me that she’s been writing every day, teaching herself how to play piano and guitar. “It's such a dark and crazy time. But it's also a time of rebirth,” she says. “I think the biggest act of self-care I've done in this time is buying an upright piano. It's definitely not a smart financial decision right now with everything going on, but I felt like this is what I need at this moment. I'm focusing on making so many songs and using all this confusion and pain into the best way I know how.”
Even as she admits that the collaborators of her dreams are “pretty down” to work with her, she mentions being drawn to musicians who have genuine sense of wonder, curiosity, and creativity. “I'm just seeking out those people who make it for love, connecting with others, and the greater good of art... Just seeing how we can both grow off of what we do together,” she says. Her ultimate goal as a musician, she says, is to be a “long term career artist and have lots of albums that form a mosaic of exciting stuff.”
So what does the next piece of the mosaic sound like? At this point, Raveena is too scared to give anything away about her next album. What she does reveal is that she’s already “very deep into it,” having written a slew of songs even though she also says that “we haven’t really started [on it].”
“I can say it's a very crazy album. I'd say it's gonna surprise people,” she says, with a twinkle in her voice, like a huge grin is creeping over her face.
Credits:
Style: Branden Ruiz and Chelsea Gaspard
Hair: Malcolm Marquez
Makeup: Diego Lucas
Photo Assistant: Nikita Merrin
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