From couch to couch to a debut album

Kehlani grew up in Oakland, California. According to an NME profile from January 2017, her father died when she was a baby and her mother was in and out of prison. The article does not link those facts directly to what came later, but it sets out a childhood without much stability.

Kehlani first drew attention in 2011 as a finalist on America's Got Talent, as part of the group PopLyfe. The NME article says that only five years before the interview, around 2012, she was essentially homeless, drifting from couch to couch. It puts her at about 16 at the time, working from the timeline and her age of 21 in the article, and it does not state the place or a cause, or say how long the period lasted or how it came to an end. It also gives no direct quote from her about those years.

What the article does make clear is that she kept working through them. Her 2015 mixtape You Should Be Here earned a Grammy nomination. The NME headline presents her debut album as a way of turning hard times into something positive.

That debut album, SweetSexySavage, followed in 2017 and established her as an R&B star. At the time of the interview, she was living in New York, a long way from the couches she had slept on as a teenager. Her story is a short one in the sources, and the profile is more focused on her music than on the years without a home.