'I was wanting to escape myself': JoJo explains how she mined toxic patterns to create the soul-pop album of her dreams

• We launched the Stay Insider Sessions to connect with artists while the world practices social distancing.
• Next up, JoJo explains how she went from a 13-year-old chart-topper to a "recklessly honest" soul singer.
• Her fourth studio album "Good to Know" was released on Friday. It's the first set of new songs released on her own label imprint, Clover Music — and, to hear JoJo tell it, the first time she has felt completely in control of her creative output.
• The songstress described her new album as a "delicious journey" and "a way of holding myself accountable."
• "I really want to look back at that time in my life and be like, 'Remember when I just kept doing the same thing over and over again? That s--- was crazy," she said. "I have distracted myself, I have settled, I have gone against my gut — and I want to find that peace and that comfort, and that confidence in myself."
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Insider launched the Stay Insider Sessions to connect with musicians while they, like many of us, are grappling with isolation and unprecedented downtime. Next up: JoJo.

JoJo is sitting composedly on the carpeted floor in her Los Angeles home, pondering a concept I think about fairly often — but a concept that, I imagine, is far more complex for someone who has been famous since she was a tween.

How are you different, I asked, from the person your adolescent self thought you'd be in your late 20s?

"I think I'm more spiritual than I ever considered being," she decides. "And I thought I would have a lot more money."

"Success to me looked like things," she explained. "When I was younger, I never thought that I would have had to go through a lot of uncomfortable things, personally and professionally. You just don't think about that. You don't think about the adversity that you're inevitably going to face, whatever path you go on."

"But I'm proud of the way that I've created a life for myself and with people," she concluded, "and that I can look in the mirror and be like, 'Damn, you're strong, but you're still soft, and I'm proud of you.' You know?"

Throughout our conversation, conducted via Zoom, the 29-year-old singer-songwriter was consistently warm and disarmingly honest. Even though she had big plans for 2020 — most notably, a tour that's now been postponed — she says she's "really thankful" to have her mom as her quarantine buddy and, of course, for the opportunity to connect and share new music with fans. She even filmed a music video in her friend's front yard.

"We were able to follow the quarantine guidelines," JoJo told me, referring to the video's director, Zelda Williams. "She wore a mask and shot me for a few hours, and I just channeled my inner Sports Illustrated. I sprayed myself down with tons of sunscreen and lotion and I'm just there doing my thing."

"It made me feel a little bit normal," she continues, before pausing and chuckling. "I mean, that's really not a normal thing to do. But it was fun to play and to channel that 90's feeling from the song into a visual."

JoJo, born Joanna Levesque, was propelled into the spotlight at 13 years old

JoJo's debut single, "Leave (Get Out)" — which she initially balked at, insisting it was too pop for her taste — was released in 2004. With her powerhouse vocals and the song's irresistible kiss-off lyrics, it shot to the top of Billboard's Pop Songs chart, making JoJo the youngest female solo artist ever with a No. 1 hit.

With her follow-up single, "Baby It's You," and her second album's lead single, 2006's "Too Little Too Late," JoJo had three top 40 hits before she had even turned 15.

"I felt a lot of correlation between the way I felt about myself and achievement, or the way I felt about myself and people freaking out over me," she said. "That's a dangerous place to get your self-worth from. I mean, it's not like it was this big, unhealthy thing. It was something very subtle, but pervasive."

But unrest had already begun quietly brewing at her label. JoJo's perceived achievement, it seemed, was a limited quantity in her teenage years.

In the years following her sophomore album, she says she turned in "hundreds" of new songs, but none were ever heard. Blackground Records "was no longer a functioning record label," she says, but still wouldn't release her from her contract.

When JoJo was 18, she decided to sue. During the highly publicized legal battle that followed, she wasn't able to make money by releasing music.

Although the young icon had already starred in popular movies like "Aquamarine" and "RV," alongside actors like Emma Roberts and Robin Williams, she never seriously considered rerouting to forge a career in Hollywood.

"I fell into a serious depression when I wasn't able to release music, when I realized that I didn't own my voice, and that I was basically told that I should give up on the dream that I started out when I was a little girl," she told me. "So I didn't pursue acting seriously. I was too sad."

Finally, her lawyers managed to find a loophole, which released her from her contract after seven years.

Despite her traumatic, hard-fought battle to break free from the music industry's trappings — from the contract that claimed ownership of her brand, voice, and likeness from an obscenely early age — she still emerged triumphantly, emphatically, as JoJo.

"I've achieved so much as JoJo, and it just felt like it would've been weird and off-putting and distracting actually if I was [to change my stage name]," she said. "I've worked really f---ing hard to be here. To start from square one with a new name? Nah, I don't think so."

'Good to Know,' JoJo's fourth studio album, is the music she's always wanted to make

JoJo signed to Atlantic Records in 2014 and released her first album in 10 years, "Mad Love," in 2016. She recently told Nylon that she's "proud" of the final product, but the creative process was a struggle: "I felt misunderstood and I didn't feel heard."

Shortly after its release, she left Atlantic and teamed up with Interscope to create her own label imprint, Clover Music.

"The concern was definitely, 'Do I want to sign another contract?' Because contracts are wack," she told me. "But at the end of the day, labels still have more money than I do. So it's nice to have that partnership and to have all the different departments working together. I believe in collaboration."

"Good to Know," JoJo's fourth studio album, was released on Friday. After she re-recorded her first two albums and closed that door, hearing JoJo talk about her new music is like hearing someone talk about their first-ever tropical vacation after they spent years saving up to afford it.

"It's always nerve-wracking to make something and then share it with people," she says, thoughtfully. "But I'm really focused on delivering for the people who I know love me. I'm not a pizza, and not everybody's going to love me. I can't satisfy everybody."

'I was wanting to escape myself at that time'

From the very first moment this album takes shape, like an interstellar storm cloud forming in your brain, JoJo says exactly what she means: "Feed me love, sex, and drugs" are the very first words you hear her sing.

"Bring me more, it ain't enough," she continues in her signature pitch-perfect warble. "Tell me I'm pretty, yeah, I need that / Think I'm too sober, where the weed at? / Pay me attention."

"Bad Habits" is a shimmering, seductive intro track — but also smirking, almost sinister. Of course, that effect was intentional.

"That's where I was in the beginning of the album process," JoJo said. "I wouldn't have defined myself as a dark person necessarily, but I was wanting to escape myself at that time. And I was just in this toxic pattern of an on-again-off-again relationship, and dipping out of that and just getting out of my mind. So I think that that line just sums it up, and yeah, it's a bit of a slap in the face."

Next comes the one-two punch of "So Bad" and "Pedialyte," a pair of buzzy confessionals — about dreaming of sex with an ex-boyfriend and cyclically unhealthy drinking habits, respectively — with hard, thumping beats.

Later, JoJo agonizes over a relationship that ended poorly on "Think About You," which she describes as the album's most personal track. She also describes it as a "thick head nod," a tagline so punchy and apt that it leaves me deeply jealous. (I tell her I might use that phrase in future reviews, and she laughs heartily.)

"The song spilled out because I was going through this thing where I couldn't forgive myself about the way my last relationship ended, and I just had a lot of unresolved feelings," she explained. "So I just was thick in there, in my feelings, and that tempo felt right to me."

"I actually sent it to the guy who I wrote it about," she tells me later, "so now I'm just going to be in my feels when I perform it."

I ask her what he thought of it, and she grins sheepishly.

"He was like, 'It's just really interesting to hear your side of it.'"

'Remember when I just kept doing the same thing over and over again? That s--- was crazy'

The focused, 11-song tracklist consistently blends raw, diaristic lyrics with catchy, pop-infused melodies.

Whether it's the softer swoons of "Gold," the sexy self-love anthem "Man," or the heady slow jam "Lonely Hearts," "Good to Know" is the work of an undeniable star and her unabashed self-examination — like a combination of Kehlani's serpentine R&B and Demi Lovato's confessional album "Tell Me You Love Me," with the vocal chops to rival both.

When I ask whether writing this album was a way to move beyond her potentially questionable habits, or whether it helped her accept her flaws as they are, JoJo chuckles and admits: "I think it's a mix of both."

"I think it's a way of holding myself accountable," she explains. "I really want to look back at the time in my life and be like, 'Remember when I just kept doing the same thing over and over again? That s--- was crazy. I don't want to do that again. I'm really not interested in it.'"

"I have distracted myself, I have settled, I have gone against my gut — and I want to find that peace and that comfort, and that confidence in myself," she continues. "With a song like 'Man,' it's something that you act out, bigging yourself up until you really believe it."

"But then," she concludes breezily, "with just grossly transparent vulnerability — that's just my default mode. I'm recklessly honest in my daily life. So it's easier for me to write that way."