I'd always liked singing, but I assumed that making music professionally was an unlikely goal (because my mom's voice was so much better than mine).

In college, on the urging of my roommate, I performed one of my pieces at a poetry slam competition and won. From there I connected with the hip-hop scene, and was asked to join the hip-hop collective Doomtree not long after.

I've become more comfortable as a collaborator. In the beginning, I was so sensitive to criticism that I rarely shared unfinished work--which makes it tough to partner with other artists. But as I became more confident in my own skills, it got easier to share work-in-progress. "Decoy," is the product of the production team of Lazerbeak, Andy Thompson, and me--and we've all gotten really comfortable auditioning ideas for one another, leaning into one another's strengths, and throwing away perfectly good ideas in the pursuit of better ones. 

Oh, man. Teen Dessa was definitely not winning any style points for loitering. As a teenager in South Minneapolis, I spent a lot of time at the Mall of America (where I worked my first job at Dairy Queen), smoking weed at the park, or lurking around the Walgreens parking lot with my friends (and up to no good at all).