How JoJo returned to Saturn

In isolation she’s been sitting down at the piano at her home in California where she lives with her mum, Diana. “I always felt like I should have done it earlier in life...I should be able to accompany myself. Now I'm just humbling myself every morning, sitting down and practicing, doing YouTube videos, and having my musician friends send videos of their hands playing my songs so I can learn how to do them. I'm so grateful.”

Diana has a big impact on Joanna. She leaves her notes on the fridge, daily reminders to stay present. She gives unsolicited advice on her vocals: “Don’t throw away or rush or slur any of the words in the verses they are all important and full of meaning”. Their story feels like a Tom Petty song: a single mom and her only daughter leave their home in Boston to follow a dream to California.

It’s been sixteen years since Levesque, rechristened as JoJo, released her debut single “Leave (Get out)”. The song - now a modern-pop banger - made her the youngest female vocal artist to have a US number-one. As a ten-year-old, a track about dumping your boyfriend was not something that reflected my own reality, but I desperately wanted it to. JoJo's music embodied a life that I absorbed through every early-’00s Mark Waters movie. A life where I could go to the mall and talk about lip gloss instead of following my mum around BHS.

I doubt the song would be released in the same way today: can a thirteen-year-old girl still sing to a younger audience about a cheating boyfriend? JoJo’s generation - Lindsay Lohan, Mary-Kate and Ashley etc - gave way to a very different kind of child-star for the pre-teen market.

Despite her early success, Levesque has had to fight for everything she’s got. Trapped in a contract with her former label, she was prevented from releasing music for years. Her family told her to give up and go to college but instead she dropped mixtapes, covers, toured and fought a lengthy legal battle. She re-recorded her early hits under her own label, Clover Music, to make the music that launched her career accessible to fans online.

“Joanna”, released in October last year, was the first glimpse of JoJo taking ownership of her narrative. The soulful R&B ballad lifts its lyrics from critics and online trolls. “I normally don't have a problem with putting myself out there, talking about relationships and my shortcomings, but this was just super raw in a way that I didn't really have a reference point for.”

“When I played ‘Joanna’ for my best friend she started balling,” she tells me. “This is a woman who's known me since I was seven years old on the playground, we met and were best friends ever since. She just hugged me and was like ‘I'm so proud of you.’ I do think when you're able to be self aware, it feels good.”

“I just didn't know how it would be received. But I knew that I loved the song and I was proud of it.” We talk about other women who have reclaimed their stories publically - she tells me she just watched the Hillary Clinton documentary. “It feels good to see someone be self-aware. It feels good to be like okay I'm in on what y'all are talking about too, I'm not oblivious.”

"People are amazing. We can wake up and decide to change the trajectory of our lives."

Released this week, Good to Know is JoJo’s fourth studio album and embraces that same sense of self-awareness, grappling with her attempts to evade herself through love, sex and substance abuse. As the album unfolds she returns to the same sentiment that broke her into pop stardom; the power that only comes from being alone.

Her optimism is infectious; “I really do believe that people grow, people change. I've seen it,” she tells me. “I've seen it with my Mom, I've seen it so many times. People are amazing. We can wake up and decide to change the trajectory of our lives.” We talk about parents, therapy, addiction, relationships, sex and work throughout our conversation, but the phrase she keeps returning to is one of gratitude: “I’m so thankful for that.”

JOJO: I was in a place where I had been running from processing a lot of my feelings. I‘d been in relationships for two years here, one year there since I was fourteen. Before I started making this album a year and a half ago I wanted to stop participating in the toxic patterns that I’d been in for so long. I was keeping doors open and going back to partners that I knew I didn't have a future with, just filling up my time with distractions and sensations.

Good to Know is me processing that and allowing myself to just feel. I felt a lot of shame and guilt for the way I handled the relationship that I was in last. I cheated, I was dishonest and I really beat myself up for it. This album is feeling those things and writing through it, trying to figure out what the production sounds like for someone who is still discovering what it means to be a woman and to be comfortable in their own skin.

Therapy. Getting consistent with therapy was something that I'm fortunate I have the opportunity to do. Anybody who can, I strongly recommend that you find someone who you click with. It's just nice to have somebody hold up a mirror to yourself and make you take a look.

Definitely, I was fortunate enough to meet a therapist when I was about 21 who I really connected with. She specialised in relationships and addictive tendencies. She didn't diagnose me as having anything. We came to the conclusion that I was clinically depressed and then I talked to a doctor about that.

For years we sought to get to the root of where my beliefs and behaviours came from. My limiting beliefs, being so hard on myself and just feeling completely out of control. It's one thing to not have control of your voice because of a contract, but it's another thing to lean into that and be like, “well, since I can't see a future with my career let me just make things worse by making strange decisions with men.” She's someone who encouraged me to change the way I spoke. She reminded me that there's a lot of power in what comes out of my mouth.

My self talk was so negative: “I am broken, I am lost, I am damaged, I am a bad girl.” She was like, “First of all, none of that is true, and the way you're speaking about my friend Joanna, I'm offended by that.” I started to really think about the things that come out of my mouth and of course they start in your head.

She asked me to do some ‘I am’ affirmations. I listened to a lot of spiritual thought leaders. Reading Autobiography of a Yogi by Prahamanansa Yogananda and people like Wayne Dyer, Tony Robbins and Marianne Williamson...

Exactly, that insatiable need for something outside of yourself because you are not enough. That's the hamster wheel that I was on. I just felt if I didn't get that fix, it could be a text from a guy, it could be the validation of feeling desired, getting a positive response about a song or a project, or just that comforting hit of overeating. You numb yourself.

I relate to what you said because I come from a family where addiction runs rampant. Being from New England, Massachusetts, from a blue-collar background, it's just very common. So I wasn't immune or exempt from that experience. My addictive tendencies… there's not just one thing. I would self soothe by overdoing things period. Love addiction, or being in a toxic relationship, or drinking too much, or doing a lot of Adderall, or overeating. I really started overeating when I had done this extreme diet that I was told to get on, and then things just mess with your mind and you cope how you cope.

Alcohol was a gateway to allow myself to do things that I wouldn't do otherwise, for example, cheat on my boyfriend. I looked at these behaviours, I journaled every day, I meditated, I was abstinent through the process of making this album. I didn’t want to be the same person going into it as I was coming out of it.

I had lots of resistance. There's so much comfort in going back to things that you know, people or habits or whatever. I had to ask myself what's the instant gratification that could come from going backwards. What's the long term effect of that and what do I really want? I really want true success, which is happiness, which is fulfillment, which is being able to look at yourself in the mirror and love who you see. I want to be the best partner to myself.

"I'm still so young but I'm old enough to know better and be clear about who I am and the type of woman I want to be."

I had experienced a lot of wild shit in my career from an early age and I felt so out of control. I felt disempowered and discouraged from finding my own agency. I found power in relationships so there was a lot of resistance that came up. Still there's not a perfect path to it and especially in quarantine, I'm sure a lot of us are really wanting comfort and maybe finding ourselves slipping back into old habits. I'm at a point in my life where I'm 29, I'm still so young but I'm old enough to know better and be clear about who I am and the type of woman I want to be.

When I describe the album I talk about the journey that I took personally, but I also want to express that the album is mad sexy. It's sensual, it's full of bops, the bass is hitting hard and the production is ill. It's not this overwhelmingly deep sad thing by any means, that's not how I've experienced life. I've experienced a lot of duality. Highs and lows, pleasure and pain, things that tend to go hand in hand.

Even in a song like “Gold” where I'm talking about this transcendent sexual experience with somebody... that shit is mad fun obviously, to be having electrifying sex that takes you to another place, but it can also be toxic. I'm interested in exploring things that are true on both sides even if they sound contradictory. I know that I'm the host of contradiction, that's just the truth about what it is for me to be human.

It was actually very cathartic, but it was also uncomfortable. It made me question whether I’m a terribly selfish person for just writing about my own experiences, but I realised it's our responsibility. I didn't want it to come across as self indulgent but I knew that I needed to write through what I was thinking. So many of these songs were about one particular person, one particular relationship. Instead of writing an album hoping for someone to forgive me, to accept my apology, to know that I've changed. I shifted it at a certain point to have it be about the things I have to practice; awareness, forgiveness, acceptance. It's not something that I'm just going to do once it's something that I'm going to have to do again and again.

I think it brought us closer, I know that she saw a lot of herself in me. She had me at 28 and she’s just moved into my home in LA from Boston. Her being the exact same number of years older than me than I am right now, it's really powerful.

I'm an only child and she's a single mom so we've always been close, but we were put in a pressure cooker for a good ten years. She was protecting me as a mother and a manager, looking out for me and doing a great job. But at 18 when I came of legal age I wanted to assert my own independence, find what I believed in and what was important to me. She grew to really hate the music industry which I totally understand. There were people who wanted to get in the middle of our relationship, to get closer to me so they could have more control. That must have been such a horrible feeling for her as a Mom. Our relationship has just gotten a lot closer as I've come to understand that she was doing the absolute best with what she had.

"I'm just unfuckwitable you know what I mean... I know I was conveying that at a young age but now I can really back it up."

She didn't learn how to love herself there was no blueprint for her she had a really tough deck of cards handed to her and that's what the song proud is about: "You know somebody dealt your cards / it wasn't fair at all / don't be ashamed of your scars" That song proud is directly to my mom, I'm so proud of the woman she is today. She's really inspiring. There are some things that we went through that I'll never speak on because it's too personal. I'm just so thankful that we're here together, especially after my Dad passed away a few years ago she really stepped into a whole new light in my eyes. She didn't know how to love herself and then therefore couldn't teach me how to love myself, so we're now two women on this journey together trying to figure it out and heal ourselves and heal each other. It's been a lot of wild shit that we both went through individually and together.

I was really looking forward to going out and touring. Connecting with the listener is the more natural thing for me, I feel more in my power and in my purpose that way. I just hope that my intention for it is coming across. I took a drive and listened to it last night actually, and I was like damn this really is some dark shit in some of it. I guess there's a small sliver of me that wonders if people will think I'm a 'bad woman' - whatever fuck that means. I don't like the label of good or bad but I used to really judge myself: I've done bad things in relationships, I've been really selfish.

These are things that cross my mind, but for the most part I don't want to obsess over it anymore. I just want people to make it their own now.

It's interesting the way that you ask for things differently when you're prepubescent versus when you're an adult. Telling someone to get out versus saying “this is how I feel, I've arrived at this place, I've thought it through, don't talk me down, don't gaslight me.” It's just different.

There's this thing in astrology called the Saturn return which happens at the end of your twenties. It's when your planets are aligned in the same way that they were when you were first born. I think it’s really interesting, a lot of us around this time start feeling like a truer version of ourselves. I feel more like myself and I hope to continue on that path.

I didn't question myself when I was thirteen, first coming out, but time and the industry and just life makes you put up walls and makes you question yourself, it made me take on a lot of negative shit.

I'm a boss now. I had no business really having that type of conviction or maturity. I was always an old soul but I didn't know where it was coming from. Now it makes sense because I've paid all my dues. I'm able to really stare down any situation and know that I have a strong sense of self. I'm just unfuckwitable you know what I mean? I know I was conveying that at a young age but now I can really back it up.

I love partnership, whether it's in business or in love or in life. I'm not looking for a man, I think that's the key to ending up with what you want, just releasing it and then trusting that things are going to happen in the way they're supposed to happen. I'm not dating for sport anymore. I want to be more intentional with it because I would like to have a family one day, I want it all. I want the money, power, sex, family, friends, business. I want it all.