Dope FADER article & interview with Frank Ocean, possibly my new favorite artist at the moment (it's either him or The Weeknd).
...Now 23, Ocean came to LA from New Orleans five years ago, after dropping out of college. The drive, which he made with his then girlfriend, took just two days; they stopped overnight in El Paso. Ocean intended to stay six months; he’s been there five years. To pay the bills, he held a series of dull jobs, in a cell phone store and in the insurance business. Slowly, though, he began carving a place for himself in the music industry, writing lyrics for people like Justin Bieber and John Legend, fulfilling one half of his boyhood fantasy: making decent money. “The writing, for me, is the easiest part—I was looking for another word besides easy—but that’s the part that’s the most natural to me. I never felt like I had a crazy, natural talent for singing,” Ocean explains. He got so good at creating these worlds for other people that he’d nearly stopped seeing a place for himself. “There’s a point, I’ll be honest, when I put a lot of my artist ambitions on a shelf somewhere,” Ocean says. “I had a couple of writers I really respected talk about how much of a calmer existence it was not to be an artist and be in the forefront and be that guy. I think I started buying it a little bit. I started drinking the Kool-Aid.” Eventually, though, his impulses kicked in and, last fall, with or without label support, Ocean began to conceive and record his debut album, Nostalgia, Ultra. Conjointly, he also invented a new persona, disassociating himself from the songwriter Lonny Breaux, to become Frank Ocean—an alias cobbled out of various tributes to Frank Sinatra, Ocean’s 11 (the original) and a pimp-like character he created to razz a friend at a party. In at least one interview, he even claimed to be Billy Ocean’s son.
