Frank Ocean Talks Starting Family & Leaving Def Jam In New Interview

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Frank Ocean Opens Up In A ‘Dazed” Magazine Interview

It’s rare the elusive Frank Ocean opens up about his personal life to the public. But more recently, he’s become a little more transparent. It helps when his own friends are interviewing him.

In the summer issue for Dazed magazine, Frank had everyone from Billy Porter to Janet Mock to Big Freedia ask him a question and in most cases, his answers were direct and to the point and in other cases, he gave a little more details.

One detailed response came when Frank described getting out of his Def Jam contract with the album Endless and releasing his album Blonde on his own. Rapper JPEGMAFIA posed the question:

JPEGMAFIA: How did it feel fu**ing over a label like that (Ocean released Endless in 2016 to fulfill his contract with Def Jam, releasing Blonde independently one day later)? Old white ni**as do that to us all the time, but how did it feel giving them a taste of their own elixir? And what did you build in the video for Endless? Can I live in it?

FRANK OCEAN: Eyy, Peggy! You know, it’s funny talking about it these days because I couldn’t really tell anybody anything for a couple of years. Couldn’t tell anyone at the label, obviously. But I also couldn’t talk with anyone at Apple because the industry is too small and it would’ve gotten back to the label for sure. So I kept it to myself and a few in my circle. I carried my hard drives around with me when I travelled because I used to not store anything online. Those drives became a physical representation of the stakes. If the files had leaked, everything would have worked out very differently for me. When August came around and both projects were uploaded I felt the euphoria, yeah, but mostly I just needed to sleep. I probably slept something like 15 hours. To answer your second question, I built a 12-foot staircase with my fucking bare hands some days before! It’s in my storage, you want it??

Frank, who came out as loving a man in 2012, also discussed navigating the industry as a queer person with Billy Porter:

BILLY PORTER: How are you navigating being queer in the music business? Do you feel marginalized? If so, why do you think this is the case?

FRANK OCEAN: I navigate it pretty smooth so far. If anything my personal life needs the GPS sometimes.

Another interesting moment came when Raymond Buck asked Frank about the future, and he had a simple answer:

RAYMOND BUCK: What’s left for you to achieve?

FRANK OCEAN: Building a family.

Well, well…

Seems like Rihanna and him are on the same wave when it comes to familial dreams.

For more of what Frank has to say, you can check out his full interview(s) here.