Kelela Is Ready For You Now

Before Kelela could make her ingenious debut album, she had to learn how to live and love in an oppressive world. And that takes time.

It’s rush hour in Midtown Manhattan, but Kelela is safe from the frenzy. She’s nude and lying across from me at the oasis-like Juvenex Spa in Koreatown. We’re sliding around sudsy tables as two women lather every inch of our brown bodies. I start to drift as my legs are lifted, ready to be scrubbed. Suddenly I hear a crash of water. My eyes fly open and I catch a glimpse of Kelela. She’s serene and mermaid-like as the masseuse rinses her off with water from a bucket, glazing her curves — she is sparkling. She looks back at me and sums up the experience with a simple evaluation: “Girl.”

Recently, she’s been feeling “spent,” so instead of conducting our interview during a museum visit, as we’d initially planned, this slightly overcast day in August is devoted to restoration. “Sometimes I’d feel like I hadn’t done that big thing yet in order to deserve doing nice things for myself,” she says as we take a dip in a tub full of floating lemons. But today, she’s taking the time.

On the way to the spa, Kelela had explained why she was so excited about getting a body scrub. “There’s just something about the way that the Korean women handle my body that makes me forget I’m black for a moment,” she told me in the chilly backseat of a rented SUV. “They don’t touch me in a white way. They aren’t so careful with me.”

elela is living between Los Angeles, and London but comes to New York every once in a while. Earlier that morning, at a small table in the Lower East Side’s Russ and Daughter’s Cafe, we share halves of a whitefish and wasabi bagel, a snack that she hasto eat every time she visits the city.

The occasion for our chat is her ingenious debut album, Take Me Apart, soon to be released on Warp. Kelela is never one to rush — she worked for four years on her first mixtape, 2013’s Cut 4 Me, then followed it up with just six more tracks on 2015’s Hallucinogen — and …

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