What does she make of social media now? “I hate it,” she says – apart from TikTok, which is “a nice place. When we last spoke, in 2017, she said she would post on Instagram, then close it without endlessly scrolling. It is a nerve-racking time when an artist sets out to heavily promote an album months before anyone can hear it, part of which involves playing the social media game. She is here for this interview and then a shoot for a German magazine.
When we meet, she is early, sitting in her car outside a photo studio on a north London industrial estate and leaning over to smile at me from behind the wheel. She now tends to split herself in two: there is Jorja, the performer (she uses air quotes the first time she speaks about herself like this, pastel talons swooping), and Jorja, the girl born down a quiet road of red-brick terraced houses. With all due respect to the West Midlands market town, it is not where you tend to find young pop-R&B stars, let alone one with 3.7 million Instagram followers who has worked with Drake, Stormzy, FKA twigs, Burna Boy and Kendrick Lamar and walked in more than one fashion show. She moved back to Walsall, where she is renting a cottage while waiting for builders to finish doing up a 400-year-old farmhouse she bought in 2019. Back home, bro, there’s trees everywhere, whereas here I felt trapped.” “I realised it was the smallest thing: not being able to see the sky.
“I got really overwhelmed in London,” she says. She hadn’t done badly: two Brit awards and Mercury prize and Grammy nominations followed her atmospheric 2018 debut album Lost & Found. It was early 2021, about five years since the singer had left her home in Walsall at 18 to try to make it big in music.
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