Her follow-up record, Empathogen, released in May this year and led by “Symptom of Life”, replaces this anger with enlightenment. It was recorded sober, though partly inspired by a series of intense (and unspecified) plant medicine ceremonies. The resulting sound is cleaner, jazzier, more hopeful. “I decided, like, OK, I’m done with this ‘woe is me, everyone’s against me’ attitude,” she says. “It’s time to do a bit of work and figure out who you actually are.”
When I speak to Smith, she is on the freeway to her LA studio, squeezing in some final sessions before a stint supporting Childish Gambino on his US tour. In the opening minutes of the conversation, the camera on her phone turns on, unexpectedly, swivelling onto her face in the backseat. “Oh! Here I am,” she says, her golden eyes growing cartoonishly wide. “I did not expect to do that. That was a mistake.” The screen judders and glitches, but she chooses to leave it on. “A pretty substantial amount of my life is now spent in the studio. If I’m not in the studio, then I’m at home with my six animals [three cats and three dogs],” she says, flashing a smile that reveals a gleaming set of grillz. “Or I’m somewhere doing something ethereal and witchy.”
In interview, Smith is warm and receptive but also guarded (she has previously joked about being “the sus-est person of all time”, which is understandable, given the immense fame of her family). She never reveals too much, and stays vague on the details: for most of our call, her eyes are off-camera, focusing on the road ahead. “I was born into a family who does entertainment. I could have chosen to not put myself in front of the world… but I think there are a lot of things that need to be expressed and a lot of issues that need to be raised,” she says, carefully. “Artists have always been the people to raise those questions, hold a mirror up, and show people the beauty and the darkness of the human experience. From there, so many beautiful things can happen.”
Smith was born on Halloween, in the year 2000, to one of the most famous families in the world. Her father, Will Smith, is one of the most bankable leading men in Hollywood, and her mother, Jada Pinkett Smith, is a successful actor in her own right. It isn’t just a movie dynasty: Will has won multiple Grammys as a rapper, while Jada toured the world as the frontwoman for her own nu-metal band, Wicked Wisdom.
As a result, Willow’s upbringing – alongside that of her older brother, Jaden – was anything but conventional. She decided young that she would follow in her parents’ footsteps, releasing her exuberant debut single “Whip My Hair” when she was just 10 years old. Her parents were firm but supportive, with Will, in particular, holding Smith to a high professional standard: she may have been young, but she still needed to work hard and honour her commitments (she has since called his behaviour at the time “harsh”). It turned out to be too much pressure. While in Dublin supporting Justin Bieber on his world tour, after immense public attention and a wave of anxiety attacks, she told Will she wanted to go home. When he didn’t take her seriously, she shaved off her hair in protest. She was 11 years old at the time.
What followed, she recalls, was her first “dark night of the soul”, a period characterised by extreme guilt, disorientation and a “loss” of sanity. “I think I was just really overwhelmed, and I had so many moments where I didn’t feel understood. At the time, I didn’t know how to express what I was going through, because people were like, ‘Oh, you’re a brat,’ or ‘You’re being ungrateful.’ I never wanted anyone to think I was ungrateful. I never wanted anyone to think that I didn’t love my life. And so that’s why I kept it all inside. But as we know, when you keep things inside, they come out at some point.”
“Conscious young Black kids are a ‘cool’ thing now, but back [when I was starting out] they weren’t. I do think it was mocked, but the truth is still the truth, even if nobody believes it” – Willow Smith
Smith has spoken openly about her experiences with self-harm in this period. The confusion, she says, came from not being able to match her emotional pain with her physical circumstances – her struggle didn’t seem justified, given her material privilege. “I think the self-harm was a way for me to let those emotions come out in a way where I wasn’t opening myself up to judgment from other people,” Smith says today. “Obviously I look back on it now and I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness, that was so dark.’ I went to therapy – I still go to therapy, because everyone should go to therapy – and I just realised why it was happening… your energy gets stuck and stagnant, and you start doing weird shit to try to compensate for the lifeforce that’s not flowing, that needs to be flowing through you.”
There was also the sneering prejudice of the media and wider society. Smith grew up as a Black woman in the US, with extreme fame, offbeat creative interests and spiritual leanings. Much of her childhood was spent in Jada’s meditation room, poring over sacred texts and esoteric philosophy. In the age of Insta-spirituality and TikTok tarot, this kind of upbringing is barely worth mentioning, but in the late 00s and early 10s it was a different story. In one 2014 New York Times interview with her brother Jaden, her precocious interest in quantum physics and the Indian philosopher Osho was widely mocked, as was her self-identification as an ‘indigo child’. “Conscious young Black kids are a ‘cool’ thing now, but I feel like, back then, they weren’t,” she chuffs, before shrugging. “I don’t know what people thought, it’s not really my concern. I do think it was a little bit mocked, maybe a lot mocked, but it was still the truth. The truth is still the truth, even if nobody believes it.” These interests haven’t gone away, and Smith finds joy in being a “nerd”. She still dreams of one day studying physics at MIT, and her Instagram is filled with lofty cultural references, from musings on epistemic relativism and tributes to the late David Graeber, to posts on the beauty of the spine (AKA the “tetrapod vertebrate model”).
Smith eventually returned to music in 2015, out of instinctual necessity. She has been prolific in the years since, with each album – seven in total – serving as its own emotional exorcism. There are still critics who dismiss her as a ‘nepo baby’, but she views this as frustratingly reductive (a simplistic take that she believes discards her race: “Being Black in America, even with privilege, which I’m never going to deny that I have, you’re still Black”). The hope is that her commitment to her work – to turning up at the studio every day, mastering her songwriting and production skills, and directing her own videos – will be enough to one day silence them for good.
Empathogen is in many ways Smith’s first ‘grown-up’ album. The seed was planted in a Napa Valley hotel room in 2023. She remembers “vibing, drinking some wine”, when her friend turned on the song “My Ideal” by Chet Baker. Smith recounts the story by singing the track’s dulcet opening lines, drifting away with the memory. “I just went down a full rabbit hole. I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is it. This is it. This pain in his voice, the simplicity. Yes.” She booked a studio session for the next day.
The additional inspiration came from plant medicine ceremonies, the benefits of which have long been celebrated by the Smith family. In the early 2010s, Jada turned to ayahuasca after a depressive episode, and credits it with breaking her out of a “cycle of self-hatred”. Will then tried it, taking it 14 times over a two-year period. Jaden has also previously spoken about the “profound” effects of the psychedelic, revealing that it has helped him form closer relationships with both his sister and his half-brother Trey. Smith is equally enthusiastic. “I spent some time with elders from the Amazon forest,” she says of the ceremonies. “They were really just educating me and my family.” When I ask about some of her most memorable experiences, she swerves the question. “Oh, man,” she says. “That’s hours and hours of conversation.”
“My parents always talked to me like I was a human being fully capable of understanding complex ideas. We don’t do that with children, you know? We lie to them, we talk down to them a little bit… and that doesn’t help them”
A huge part of Smith’s journey has been healing her familial relationships – a process that the world has been invited to witness. There’s the talk show, Red Table Talk, which sees Smith get disarmingly candid with her mum and her grandma, Adrienne Banfield-Norris. So far, they have talked through their experiences with domestic violence (Adrienne), and porn addiction, shame and infidelity (Jada). Smith herself has discussed her bisexuality and polyamory, as well as her mental health struggles. It’s an extreme soul-baring exercise that some will find hard to understand. “My parents always talked to me like I was a human being fully capable of understanding complex ideas,” Smith explains. “We don’t do that with children, you know? We lie to them, we talk down to them a little bit… and that doesn’t help them. It affects them when they grow older. My parents speaking to me in an honest, compassionate way made me feel like I could just be honest and compassionate in my everyday life.” She adds that their authenticity is the “core” of why she feels “comfortable being uncomfortable” – both in herself and her art.
The desire for emotional transparency is not confined to her mother’s side of the family: Will has also appeared as a guest on Red Table Talk, released a tell-all memoir and shared radically intimate vlogs on his YouTube (from musings on the nature of love to family holiday clips and colonoscopy appointments). Smith admits that their relationship when she was a child was pretty “rough”, but it’s something they have worked through together. (Will has apologised multiple times, lamenting his “cajoling” parenting style in his book.) “I think when you’re growing up, it’s natural to have that friction with your parents, and I think everyone goes through that,” says Smith. “But when it really changed for me was realising that my parents are human beings, just like me, and they’re afraid and confused, and sometimes they don’t know the answers.” Their relationship now has never been better. “I just love my parents to death. I would do anything for them.”
For Smith herself, this idea of ‘healing’ is not just a process to be worked out on screen or in therapy, but a lifelong practice. When not in the studio, she tries her best to meditate (ideally twice a day, for 10 minutes), chant, read and spend time with her animals or in the wilderness. While she has struggled with perfectionism and not feeling good enough, she is trying to keep her workaholic tendencies in check. “I derive way too much self-worth from my productivity,” she concedes, “[though] that’s something I think we all struggle with, in a deeply capitalistic society.”
Creative expression, for her, has always been a lifeline: as well as music, she is also working on fiction, having just published her debut fantasy novel Black Shield Maiden, co-written with Jess Hendel. Her company MSFTS has also bought the film rights to Alwyn Hamilton’s YA trilogy Rebel of the Sands. As she pulls up to the studio and our conversation draws to a close, it seems only right to ask how, as someone who places such a high value on the power of the imagination, Smith envisages her future. “I want to be someone who creates a loving community,” she says, after a pause. “I want to be someone who supports and uplifts those who are doing the work. And I want to create systems and structures to enhance the lives of people.” As someone who once sang about “murdering my ego with a hatchet”, it’s a fitting answer. “I’m going to do the work until the day I die. Like, obviously you need to have a healthy ego and sense of self. But I hope that one day I can get to a place where I’ve done a sufficient amount of mental, spiritual and emotional work so I don’t struggle with my ego limiting my capacity to love.” For Smith, the quest to build a brighter world will always start at home.
Hair VERNON FRANÇOIS at THE VISIONARIES using OLAPLEX, make-up RAOULALEJANDRE at CLM, photographic assistants ANNABEL SNOVALL, BAILEY BECKSTEAD, SABRINA VICTORIA, styling assistants ANDRA-AMELIA BUHAI, LEA ZÖLLER, TARA BOYETTE, ANNA HERMO, RANDY MOLINA, MIRIAM RUVALCABA, make-up assistant JENNIFER CLEMENS, production RACHAEL EVANS at REPRO, production manager ERIN SHANAHAN, production assistants MAX CASTRO, ARIEL CARRILLO, GARRETT CHARBONEAU JOHN PANKUS, post-production INK
The autumn 2024 issue of Dazed is out internationally on September 12
