Jeff Himmelman, the author of "Yours in Truth," a biography of Ben Bradlee, wrote this week's cover story about the singer-songwriter Frank Ocean. Himmelman last wrote for the magazine about the solar-power industry.
You originally decided to approach the story as a fan of Frank Ocean's music first and as a journalist second. How did that work out?
I was a bit naïve, honestly. This was my first profile of a "celebrity." I figured that my enthusiasm for Frank's music would give me access to a side of Frank that he wouldn't show to somebody who pounds out profiles of musicians for a living. As the piece makes clear, I was wrong about that, and Frank let me know it right away. He knew, much of the time, that he was frustrating me, but we both knew why he was doing it, and I have to admit that I respect him for it. As a journalist, you want somebody to answer all of your questions. As a human being, you understand why he won't.
Most of your interview time with Frank seems to have been spent driving around. What else did you two talk about in the car?
For a variety of reasons, the car trip was the only easy time I spent with Frank, the only time we got out of interrogation mode. The thing he told me in the car that struck me the most — outside of what is in the piece — was that at a certain point in 2011, when he was doing the vocal tracking for "Channel Orange," he and Om'Mas Keith persuaded Def Jam to rent a house for them so they could get out of the studio and change things up a bit. They ended up in this beautiful modernist mansion in Beverly Hills that they called San Ysidro, where there was a pool and a maid and a recording situation all set up for them to do what they pleased. It's hard to imagine a nicer spot. Frank told me that if he could go back now, he would enjoy it — have parties, have friends over more often, really max it out. But back then, before his Tumblr post and openness about his sexuality, he was too depressed to enjoy it. There he was in a mansion in Beverly Hills, making a major-label record, but unable to feel what he should have been feeling. It's like "Super Rich Kids" come to life. It also shows you how genuinely sad he was.
That Tumblr post revealing his heartbreak over a man is part of what brought him to public attention in the first place. How did he approach talking about this part of his life?
Frank's managers made it clear that he doesn't like to answer the same question twice. Amy Wallace of GQ did a great interview with Frank in December of last year, in which they talked in-depth about how Frank identifies sexually and all the rest. So those questions had been asked and I took care to avoid them. But, interestingly, when we were talking in the car Frank made his way around to his Tumblr post without any prodding from me. The reference was so vague that at first I didn't know what he was talking about. I think, generally, Frank is more comfortable sharing what he wants to share in his music (or on his Tumblr) than he is in an interview setting. If you go back and listen to "Oldie," off Odd Future's last record, which was put out in March 2012 — four months before Frank's Tumblr post — he raps about halfway through the track and says, "I'm high and I'm bi — wait, I mean I'm straight." He was announcing it, playing around with it, but nobody could connect the dots yet. More recently, after "Channel Orange" had been out a while, he released a track called "Blue Whale" on his Tumblr, in which he says, "I wasn't much into the type that my bros like/So I never really had no wife and that's all right . . . I ain't supposed to show my love . . ." which says more about how his sexuality feels to him than you will ever get him to say in person.
It seems from your article that Frank's cryptic or cold approach to interviews is stylistically at odds with his intensely personal music. Is this a pose of some kind?
No, not at all. Whatever Frank is, he's not a poser. I think your question kind of answers itself. It's precisely because of how open and confused and emotional and brave his music is that he can't afford to channel all of those emotions in person. He wants to keep the space where he creates his music, where he writes from, safe. One way to do that is not to talk about it too much. Frank's managers told me that his favorite word is "cleanly" — in his music, business interactions, whatever. He wants things to be cleanly. I joked about it with him at the BMW shop because that's basically what he was saying the entire time to the people working on his car. And you can hear that in his music, in the kind of spare sensibility at work even behind some of the lushest arrangements on the record. Keeping it clean for him means confining his emotional openness to media he can control. Completely unhinged people can make great music but tend to die at 27.
Of course, his fans are curious about what his feud with Chris Brown might be about. Can you enlighten them at all?
The initial feud broke out on Twitter because Brown gave Frank a backhanded compliment about "Nostalgia, Ultra," and Frank wasn't having it. But why and how it escalated from there isn't something I'm qualified to say. I really like Frank's statement about the whole thing saying that he'll "choose sanity" and won't press charges. I wish he had released it while I was still writing my story. But one thing you can rely on with Frank: He will talk about it when he is ready and not a minute before.
Ocean was nominated for six Grammy Awards this year. Did winning them seem important to him?
No. Could that have been a pose? Maybe. But I didn't get the sense that it was. I'm sure he wouldn't mind winning, because he's a competitive person who wants to be the best at what he does, but most people realize that saying somebody is "the best" in music is kind of a silly enterprise to begin with.
Most important question of all: Did you do any lasting damage to his BMW after scraping the front at a dip in the road?
Happily, I don't think so. As I was apologizing for the 15th time, he told me there was some kind of guard on the front end of the car and that it should easily have been able to absorb what I did. Maybe that was just a gracious attempt to make me feel better, but I believed him.
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