Though Frank Ocean doesn’t exactly give up that enigmatic, mysterious persona in his recent in-depth interview with the New York Times, he does shed some light on his more recent whereabouts. It’s no secret that Ocean appreciates privacy when working — even one of his main collaborators on Endless, Wolfgang Tillmans, was in the dark for 15 months before the visual album’s release — and he felt the need to pack up and work halfway across the world from his former Los Angeles home in a sparsely furnished flat in London. “Within my circle, there was a lot of places I thought I could turn that I felt like I couldn’t turn to anymore,” Ocean explained about his decision to leave. When asked if he had run away or made a “sane escape,” the artist answered, “I always thought about it like, if your house is on fire, you need to get out of the house.” According to the Times, Ocean spent his time in London riding around on an electric bike and working in various recording studios. Then, once Endless and Blonde dropped last summer, instead of hanging around to bask in the accolades, he jumped on a plane to travel to “China, Japan, Oceania, France, just around.”
Before you buy your one-way ticket to London, stopping everyone riding on an electric bike just so you can see Ocean in the flesh, there is some good news to be had stateside. Ocean admitted that he looks closely at the numbers on his album sales, not only because he always wants to do better, but because seeing where he has more listeners “helps me in conversations about where we’re gonna be playing shows, or where I might open a retail location, like a pop-up store or something.” So how about giving us all an early holiday present and going on tour? We’d appreciate if you’d play at least a week’s worth of shows here in New York.
