It is 11am LA time and Diana Gordon is feeling, as she puts it, “hazy”. We were meant to start our interview half an hour ago, but Gordon’s sleeping pattern has gone out the window, a symptom of lockdown’s anxiety-tinged paranoia. There is a more practical reason, too. The day we speak, the 34-year-old singer has just released Wasted Youth, her second EP under her own name: a low-slung, eight-track collection that fuses her love for female-fronted 90s alt-rock and cranium-rattling trap. “I’ve been editing videos until 4am every day,” she says softly. “I woke up at 7am to post the EP and then I fell asleep again.”
Gordon has been her own boss since 2016, when she co-wrote three songs on Beyoncé’s Lemonade, including the bitter kiss-off Sorry. The infamous lyric “He better call Becky with the good hair” was all Gordon’s doing. “I still laugh at that to this day,” she says when I mention the tabloid speculation over the mysterious “Rebecca” at the heart of Jay-Z’s alleged infidelity. Working with Beyoncé gave Gordon the confidence to be herself after years of releasing more pop-leaning music under the moniker Wynter Gordon. While 2016’s The Legend Of, her first single under her real name, found her playfully bragging about her new status (“I just gotta fat cheque from Beyoncé”), the poem she released to accompany it was more sobering. “My real name is Diana … and it’s time for me to get to know her,” it read.
Born and raised in Queens, New York, Gordon’s upbringing was tough. She didn’t know her father, while her ultra-religious mother wasn’t “able to handle being a single mum with six kids”. It fell to Gordon and her sister to keep the family together. Her mum banned secular music from the family home, so Gordon would gorge on it at her best friend’s house, educating herself on Tracy Chapman, Sarah McLachlan and Alanis Morissette.
As a teen, Gordon landed a place at New York’s prestigious performing arts school LaGuardia but it didn’t work out so she started working “a lot of jobs”. One of these was as a coat-check girl in a nightclub owned by a friend of Mary J Blige. “I gave him my CD, he let Mary hear my music and she gave me a beat to write on,” she explains. The result was Gonna Breakthrough, the near-title track from Blige’s 2005 album The Breakthrough.
Signed to Atlantic and renamed Wynter, Gordon continued to write for others, before finding success singing the hook on Flo Rida’s hit Sugar in 2009. She remembers being styled for photoshoots and it being the first time she’d worn make-up, or high heels. “The way I grew up, I wasn’t allowed to explore,” she says. She quickly found herself stuck in an EDM cul-de-sac, with 2010’s solo track Dirty Talk landing her a UK Top 30 hit. As a kid, she says, she dreamed of being a “power woman” like Whitney or Beyoncé but “you don’t think of being the voice on an EDM track. Well, maybe somebody has that goal, but it wasn’t mine.” There was also a more practical problem. “At that time, and still, I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol, I didn’t do any type of drugs. When you’re out at 5am at a dance festival and everyone else around you is on some shit... I was just tired.”
By 2012, Gordon walked away from her deal. While she had made good money, she had been burned by managers giving themselves production credits and, thus, 50% of the profits. By 2015, she was lost. “I was having anxiety all the time,” she sighs. “I had all these dreams of getting my family to a better place and now I felt worthless,” she says. After five days without sleep, her anxiety got so bad she was admitted to the psych ward of a hospital. “The doctors sat me down and told me I was suffering from PTSD, that I needed to see a therapist and I needed to sleep,” she says. “They were like: ‘You’re going to be OK.’ That’s when I decided to move to LA.”
Los Angeles was where Gordon got the call to work on Lemonade after some songs she had made with producer Melo-X in a Brooklyn attic seven years earlier ended up being played to Beyoncé. More miraculously, a few months after Lemonade came out, Gordon found her older brother David sleeping rough a few streets away from her new home. A person with schizophrenia who had been in and out of foster care when Gordon was young, he’d been missing for 16 years. “In my heart I’d put him to rest because we’d been searching for so long,” she says.
Gordon poured all her trauma into 2018’s tender Pure EP, but for Wasted Youth, led by party anthem Rollin, she wanted to finally puff out her chest. “My friends are like: ‘Talk your shit, you’ve earned the right to say you’re great,’” she laughs. One, rapper Princess Nokia, recently sent her a Nina Simone interview in which she was asked what freedom meant to her. Simone’s answer – “No fear” – resonated with Gordon because “part of me wants to run wild, but I’m so used to keeping things together”. She is taking steps in the right direction, however. “More and more I give myself permission to be free,” she smiles. “To shake my ass when I want to. To curse when I want to. Just to be.”
Wasted Youth is out now
