Jazmine Sullivan on Shamelessness, Heaux Tales, and Her Biggest Year Yet
The R&B singer-songwriter digs into her striking fourth album, an ode to women who’ve been relegated to being archetypes: hos, homewreckers, gold diggers.
When Jazmine Sullivan decided she wanted to confess, she invited her closest friends to the pulpit and asked them to perform emotional exorcisms in the form of interludes. She told them they could retreat into a closet if they needed to, and then hit record. She wanted real-life testimonies about passion, regret, indecision, fantasy. Compressed into brief monologues, these admissions pepper Sullivan’s fourth album Heaux Tales, which valorizes the stories of misjudged women in her life who also exist everywhere. “To be honest,” Precious says on “Precious’ Tale,” “money makes me cum.”
After Sullivan’s RCA Records reps suggested she make a concept album, she took a beat, nervous about having to build on the success of 2015’s Reality Show, a collection of towering anecdotes about neglected women, set around the framework of reality TV. She retreated home to Philadelphia and unraveled a new yarn of narratives, occasionally battling writer’s block, then returned this past January with the eight songs and six interludes of Heaux Tales. Debuting at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, the album focuses on mistakes made in darkness and then talked about privately. “These are conversations I’ve had since I was in high school and now in my early 30s,” Sullivan tells me over the phone. “There was nothing I put on the project that I hadn’t experienced, and that’s what I think is drawing people. We have all had these conversations in our own way with our own group of people.”
She has very loosely connected with writer-actor-producer Issa Rae to bring Heaux Tales to life visually, and she’ll end the year with one of 2021’s best albums, a space where women can hear other women cycle through entanglements with love, sex, and money without judgment. It’s a project that welcomes contradictions as much as it does empathy, largely around the decisions Black women make while trying to undo someone else’s damage, as well as their own. On the intro “Bodies,” Sullivan sings about waking up dazed and trying to pep-talk her way out of spiraling after a night of drinking and hooking up; inevitably, she spirals. On the closing track “Girl Like Me,” sex is a way to recharge her desire after feeling “squeezed out” in a relationship. It’s a reflexive choice that ends with what seems like an empowering move: “A ho I’ll be,” she sings, sounding emphatic yet reluctant.
Even with 12 Grammy nominations to her name, Sullivan is still too often quietly celebrated as one of R&B’s greatest, most perceptive singer-songwriters, with a voice many would parkour off a cliff to possess. Mere months into the new year, she’s gained the sort of visibility that commands a People write-up about how she’s “taking 2021 by storm.” At the Super Bowl in early February, she sang the National Anthem firmly and beautifully, as she does, but as a duet with country singer Eric Church. Though appreciated among peers (Solange singled her out as “one of the best songwriters and voices of our times”), Sullivan is sensing a shift toward more fame. “Is it a good thing? It is. In a way,” she says, cautiously.
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