Jessie Reyez is learning to live in the moment

Jessie Reyez is unstoppable. She’s collaborated with Lil Yachty and Miguel, penned hits for Dua Lipa and, most recently, released her second book of poetry. Now, after years of laying the groundwork, the Canadian-Colombian is stepping into a radical, fearless confidence.

It’s midway through Jessie Reyez’s Berlin show, and the audience is utterly enraptured. A mixed crowd of R&B aficionados, hip-hop heads, girls who look like they spent high school filling spiral notebooks with poetry, their boyfriends, and anyone else who enjoys a dose of heart-on-sleeve soul-pop have packed the venue to the rafters – and for now, they’re completely silent. 

Reyez, clad in a white camisole, ruffled miniskirt and black platform boots, is perched at the edge of the stage with her guitar, ready to perform Figures – the 2016 megahit that catapulted her from relative obscurity in her hometown of Toronto, Canada, to worldwide superstardom. As concertgoers wave their phone torches in the air, they sing every word along with Reyez, sharing the pain of every relationship gone wrong, every moment they wished they’d had the last word but instead walked away dejected and disappointed. “Figures/ I gave you ride or die and you gave me games, love/ Figures/ I know I’m crying ’cause you just won’t change, love…”

Nearly all singer-songwriters deal in vulnerability, but few in recent memory have done so with the musical dexterity and lyrical aplomb of Reyez. Figures lit the touchpaper on a career that has seen her collaborate on multiple tracks with Eminem, write One Kiss for Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa, feature on the Beyoncé track Scar on her Black Is King visual album, and release three studio albums, each of which extrapolates on her signature blend of down-to-earth songwriting, hip-hop influence, soulful vocals and pop sensibilities. Her most recent, and the one she’s supporting tonight at Berlin’s Huxleys Neue Welt, is Paid in Memories – perhaps her most musically eclectic record to date: a 21-track smorgasbord of love songs, odes to heartbreak, joyous celebrations and emotional excavations, all imbued with a fearless confidence that has taken Reyez her entire career to cultivate.

After the show, I join Reyez backstage. She’s curled up in the nook of a big brown leather couch, picking through a bowl of fruit as her team bustles through the last tasks of the evening. Her demeanour, while inviting, is a complete 180 from the powerhouse who just got offstage – the one whose catchphrase, “I’m Jessie Fucking Reyez!”, was still echoing through the concert hall just minutes before. She’s the kind of person who makes a point of maintaining eye contact while she’s speaking to you, who talks with the same sort of directiveness she writes songs with. I get the impression that this openness, both in her music and her personality, is something innate and raw.

“I owe feeling comfortable in my skin to my mom,” Reyez explains, pausing to offer me half of an orange she’s been peeling as we make our introductions. “As a child, anytime I wanted to express myself in a way that wasn’t the norm for a little girl, she let me. If I wanted to only dress in boys’ clothes – now, gender is more fluid, people are more accepting. But when I was a kid? My mom had to bear the weight of people’s judgement, as well as shield me from it. And then, the icing on the cake was that she would encourage me to just be me. And I am so lucky, because I know that’s not a lot of people’s experience with their parents.”

Growing up in a first-generation Colombian immigrant family, Reyez was moulded not only by her parents’ unwavering support but also by the backlash she received from some of her peers. While her dreams always seemed within reach, the road to getting there was treacherous. “It was a double-edged sword,” she says, “because as much as I praise it, growing up with that freedom when you’re in school, you stand out, you become a target, you get bullied. But I think there are significantly more pros than cons, because the experience of having been given this creative liberty at a young age, and then being made a target for it, gave me the gift of thick skin. Now, I don’t give a fuck. And then, when you’re older and you look around, you realise that a lot of people weren’t able to preserve that freedom, even if they had it as kids.”

In many ways, Paid in Memories is a commemoration of that kid who dressed however she liked and didn’t take shit from anyone. She has a streetwise attitude, a mix of homegrown humility and larger-than-life flair, that helped her flourish early on in the hip-hop community. Much has been made about her collabs with Eminem, but 6LACK, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie and Rico Nasty were all early adopters. The album’s artwork features a questionnaire Reyez completed in the eighth grade, alongside a teenage photo of her beaming, with massive gold hoops in her ears and a flower in her hair. “Favourite celebrity: me,” it reads. “Ambition: achieve fame, go platinum, get rich.” (Check, check, check.) Musically, the record has a wide range of flavours: NYB is disco-tinged pop that sits easily alongside One Kiss; Jeans is a sultry, longing, guitar-based duet with contemporary R&B singer Miguel; and Ridin is a cheeky, raunchy romp in which Reyez goes bar-for-bar with Lil Wayne. Head N Headaches is a groove-laden earworm about casual sex and relationship regret, with a laid-back verse by Lil Yachty. It feels like a career highlight, with all her sensibilities coming together for a genre-hopping ride through her mile-a-minute psyche.

“Luckily, coming into the industry, I was already protective about not being boxed in,” she says about her songwriting approach, which concerns itself less with fitting into a genre and more with always fitting a certain emotion, a vibe. “Which sounds like such an artist thing to say, because so many creatives feel that, but there’s a constant pressure to define yourself. Even with Kiddo, people would ask: ‘What genre is it?’ My first EP [in 2018], and I already disliked that people were trying to label me. So I would say, ‘My genre is Quentin Tarantino.’ He can have something classical playing over a scene that’s super violent, or a romantic scene playing over some fucking, like, aggy-ass music. Thinking of it like that gave me the freedom I needed.”

Reyez talks about the past a lot. Not in a way that seems wistful or melodramatic, but as if she’s taking stock of the moves it took to get her where she is today. This autumn, she’s releasing the second volume in her series of poetry, The People’s Purge: Words of a Goat Princess Volume II, which began with her asking her fans for writing prompts via Instagram. She calls poetry her first love, and her passion for words is clearly the thing that connects her to her past. I ask her if she’s a nostalgic person. She turns to her manager, who has been with her since the early days. “Am I a nostalgic person?” He nods emphatically. He speaks of her uncanny ability to remember minute details and to express exactly how a past situation made her feel. She turns back to me. “Well, I guess I’m a nostalgic person, then. The title, Paid in Memories, fell into my lap. We were in the studio, and one of the producers made a joke about something, getting ‘paid in dust’ – and it felt very apt. I’ve worked for this my whole life, and I didn’t come for money. So when I started seeing success, it was a weird thing for me to learn to wear. I couldn’t look at my bank account. I had a scarcity mindset and kept working like a maniac because I thought I was gonna lose it all.” As she kept releasing more and more successful music, she learned how to scale her life to her newfound fame. When Covid hit in 2020, she was on tour supporting Billie Eilish and was forced to finally take a break. 

“That was the year I bought my first whip,” she says, incredulously. “I’d been doing this for years, never even bought myself a whip. I’d buy shit for my family, I bought shit for other people, but that’s a whole other thing about self-love, because it’s almost like I didn’t count.” She started journalling religiously and got deep into reading Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle – she says The Power of Now in particular completely “shifted my life”. “If you’re forever living in the past, you’re not present, and you don’t even have the capability to make these memories, you know? Money’s not gonna do it. Money’s not gonna buy you happiness, but you could be paid in memory.”

On one of Paid in Memories’ highlights, Cudn’t B Me, Reyez sings – over a soulful electric guitar riff – about a man who did her dirty. Her tenacity in the face of his rejection is heart-wrenching, as she describes the woman he chose and how, despite her pain, she’s happy she’s not her. A recording of a voice message plays in the song’s outro – a friend attempting to lift her spirits with a sweet “you’re better off, babes!” monologue. The fact the message is from Sam Smith, one of Reyez’s frequent collaborators and dear friends, almost doesn’t register at first – they’re not listed as a feature on the track, which adds to the moment’s relatability (“It was very real, and Sam’s reaction to the situation was very genuine,” Reyez says). It’s a small detail in an album brimming with big ideas, but it stands out as central to its ethos. These little moments make up the bigger picture, and it seems that, with all her vulnerable, nostalgic, genreless, lovelorn music, Reyez’s ultimate goal is to share those experiences with her listeners. To pay them in memories, if you will.  

“Sometimes we feel so fucking different, and we think our experiences are all so unique,” she says, still curled up in the same spot on the couch, still looking me directly in the eyes. “You just feel so alone sometimes. I’ve been so lucky. When I was in the fucking pits, especially with heartbreak, I’ve had friends to tell me, ‘You’re gonna be OK.’ I had that, and I had music. When I hear Amy Winehouse’s visceral pain, it’s like rubbing Voltaren on a sore muscle. When people listen to this album, that’s what I want them to take away – a friend.”