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Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted before the onset of the wildfires in Los Angeles.
Coming into your own is a sweet triumph, especially for Muni Long.
After years of writing for stars like Mariah Carey, Ariana Grande and Rihanna, the R&B star born Priscilla Renea Hamilton became a household name thanks in part to the mega-smash "Hrs and Hrs" — a track that won Long her first golden gramophone (for Best R&B Performance) at the 2023 GRAMMYs.
"Success in general makes me fearless," the Florida-born star says from her Los Angeles home. Her followup, Revenge, has a bravery and intimacy fueled by that success — which in turn resulted in four nominations at the 2025 GRAMMYs.
Revenge is more personal and diaristic than Muni Long has ever been, fueled in part by the end of her marriage and recorded both just prior to and immediately after the birth of her son. Her immaculate, intimate lyrics and powerful vocals led fans and critics to herald Revenge as an R&B classic. To wit, the nomination for Best R&B Album is Long's first GRAMMY nod for a full LP, while three separate tracks also earned nominations: "Made for Me" for Best R&B performance, "Ruined Me" for Best R&B song, and "Make Me Forget" for Best Traditional R&B Performance.
Read more: 2025 GRAMMYs: See The OFFICIAL Full Nominations List
If success helped build and expand to Revenge, one has to wonder what this stronger response means for Long’s future — and the future of what she sees for R&B. "When I first started, I couldn't jump off the cliff with all these deep harmonies and chord changes and flavors," she says. "Now that I've caught people's attention, I can settle in."
Ahead of the 2025 GRAMMYs, the vocalist spoke with GRAMMY.com about finding validation and confidence, working with Ariana Grande, the nature of experimentation in R&B, and how affirmation and philosophy audiobooks help keep her inspired.
Congratulations on your nominations! After your success last year, were you expecting this to happen?
I think I halfway expected it. We've been paying attention. We know the kind of year that we've had as a team. This was our goal. We wanted to make the best R&B album of the year. And so to a certain extent, yes, it was expected, but four [nominations] was not. I wasn't expecting to be nominated for three different songs. That's pretty cool.
It's just affirming that the album as a whole was received well, especially in this day and age when people feel like albums don't matter. It just kind of makes you realize like, no, it actually does matter. If you actually put forth a concerted effort to make something really good, and not just throw it together and call it a project…
We're telling a story, we've got transitions, different flavors. I think we did a really good job. Everybody that worked on this project deserves to celebrate these nominations. I didn't do it alone. There were a lot of people who believed in what I wanted to do and worked to help me figure it out. So it's a great moment for all of us.
Does it feel different after winning last year?
Yeah, people like to toss you out after you've had your moment. [Laughs.] Like, "Okay, cool, what's next?" But it feels like I am being actually received. People want to see more from me. And because I know how special my peers can be, that's very, very cool. I'm glad that they like what I'm doing because I don't know what else I would be doing.
When you have something as personal as Revenge get that reception, what does that drive you toward in your next project?
I think success in general makes me fearless. It’s like, my feelings are valid. I'm gonna just be myself. When you have success when you’re doing you, the only natural course is to continue doing that and go even further.
How do you feel your solo material interacts with your creativity when you were working with megastars like Rihanna and Madonna? It’s all a part of you, but do you wall the two sides off?
It's not really you. It's almost like being a makeup artist and I'm doing someone else's makeup; iIt doesn't make me beautiful. I can do the same thing on my face and it's like, "Oh my God, you’re so beautiful." It's different. You never get that sort of recognition. There's so many ingredients added to the soup after you finish what you're doing as a writer.
But when you're an artist, it's like, "This is my vision. This is what I want to say. This is how I want to present it to the world. This is how I perform it." There's so many other elements that go into the realization of the art out there in the world. When people see how I decide to come out on stage and what my performances look like on late night television — versus award shows or even in an intimate setting — how I choose to dress, my artwork, all of that stuff adds value to the overall body of work.
I need to ask about your work with Ariana Grande too, having just seen Wicked.
I haven't seen it, but I want to! Everyone’s talking about it.
Did you work directly with her on "Imagine?"
Yeah. We all went to New York for a week. I write really fast, so we wrote that song super quick, and she came in and cut it immediately. And then we went to the room the next day and it was me, Justin Tranter, and another writer, because we wrote face-to-face. And same thing, she came in, heard it, "Oh my God, I love it," and then she went right in and started cutting.
R&B is so much bigger than just the perceived, stereotypical notion of what the genre can be. I love how deeply you explore and solidify yourself in different strands of inspiration. On "Type Questions," for example, the way you were sparked by 50 Cent's "21 Questions" is such a clever twist. Did your exploring and inspiration for this album differ from that past work?
We’re still just piecemealing it. I'll write a couple of songs over here and write a couple of songs over there. But then we find a direction.
I'm becoming more decisive about what I want the album to be. And again, I think that confidence comes from success, and building a trust and a rapport with my supporters and with the general public to where they know that if I'm gonna do something, they're gonna have a certain level of quality that they can rely on. So now I can go a little deeper with what I'm saying, and I can be more specific, and I can give a little bit more as far as the arrangement and the chords and the backgrounds. I had to allow people to kind of taste test first.
R&B is not what it was four years ago. When I first started, I couldn't jump off the cliff with all these deep harmonies and chord changes and flavors. I just couldn't do it without being kind of stuck and pigeonholed. I had to figure out a nice balance between what's being offered today and where I wanted to take it. And so now that I've caught people's attention, I can settle in to be like, What is my sound in the midst of all of this? How far do I want to push it? And then I can do that from project to project.
Trust and quality are important concepts, and something that people don’t always think about in such direct terms. Audiences love the outcome of the experimentation, but sometimes they don’t want to hear the process. Having written for so many artists across styles and genres, it's pretty clear that you're willing to explore and experiment, to gain an understanding of what quality means in different contexts.
I'm such a nerd when it comes to music. I don't know that I would ever get tired of making music. There's so many songs to explore. There's so much that I could be doing. I think I'll just always continue to push and find new songs to explore. I guess my taste level is so high that I just can't help but create things that have a certain quality. I just gravitate towards the finer items.
Watch Muni Long Explain Why She Keeps Her GRAMMY In The Box | Where Do You Keep Your GRAMMY?
Are you constantly listening to records? How does consumption play into your creativity?
No, I don't actually listen to a lot. I listen to the stuff that I do that I'm interested in. I just want to hear how people are interpreting and exploring music. Sometimes you listen to see if there's any new sounds to experiment with. I listen to a lot of classical music, affirmation audio books.
I go through a lot of audio books as well. Right now I'm reading something called My Big Toe by Thomas Campbell, which is the theory of everything. I have to listen to each chapter more than once. I love this quote from that book: "History repeatedly demonstrates that the appearance of impossibility is most often the result of limited vision." I say that all the time. When somebody says, "Oh, that's not how you do that," or "Nobody's doing that," or "You gotta do it this way," I immediately hear that they are not the person I want to be talking to. I'm like, "Oh, alert! Security!" [Laughs.]
It's not even about having a yes man, right? Somebody could tell you, "You know what? I'm not sure if you're ready for this right now. Let's table it. Let's go back to it." There's a way to say it that lets you know that you still believe in the possibility.
This might be a stretch, but I’m curious if your experience differentiating between the tone and intention of an audiobook versus a print book is something similar to songwriting — a conversation about control and interpretation.
Yeah. When I was writing for Madonna, she totally remixed a couple of the things that we did, and I was like, Whoa. Okay, cool. She made it her own. But I never think there's time to actually interpret what other people do [with my writing]. It's always fun to hear, and hopefully I'll get to hear it before it comes out. But a lot of times, I don't hear things until they are out in the world.
And having the ability to know when to hold on to things and when to let it go out into the world.
I definitely feel that. There's a sound now that has become associated with Muni Long. I'm even more careful about who I work with now, because if I give them my sound, that could have consequences for me, right? I’m also a little bit… one could say arrogant, but I would say overly confident in my ability to stand alone. I don’t want to align myself with artists who don't have the intention to be as good as they could possibly be. I don't just want to do your song because you have a bunch of followers. Do you have the integrity to take this song and are you ready to go? Are you committed to it?
Having a philosophy that you want to be with people who are going to push you and make you better as opposed to you dragging them up a hill, that's a smart way to be as an artist now.
I don't want to say you can't take as many chances, but it's so easy to just fall from grace these days. You have to really be conscious about the choices that you’re making.
How do you envision your next step?
I'm just going to continue exploring and having fun with it. Two things can be true at once, right?
I'm very excited about the acknowledgement and the positioning that I have. And I have to keep it organic. I have to remember why I started and the reason why I'm doing this, which is because I love it. That's literally it. The minute that I stop feeling like that, I need to adjust.
What about R&B as a genre? What do you see happening to the genre in the near future?
Every genre continues to evolve. And I think sometimes you have to go backwards to go forward. Some of these artists will dig into the crate and find some things that haven't been used in a while. The genre is expanding.
There's an artist named SAILORR who just had an incredibly big viral TikTok moment with her song "POOKIE’S REQUIEM." Every now and then there's these cycles, right? In the early 2000s, it was that super, super, candy-sweet pop. And in 2010, it was that rock-pop kind of genre, Gaga, Katy Perry. And then hip-hop took over. And now I think R&B and pop is back. There's cycles.I think we're gonna have a nice maybe five to seven years of this, and then we’ll figure out what’s next.