EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Keri Hilson Opens Up About Her Hiatus, Industry Challenges & New Music

**Tawanda** (0:07)
Welcome back to The TMZ Podcast. I am sitting in the seat doing my absolute best, trying not to fangirl out. I think I'm doing a good job, I think, I hope. Because I am sitting next to someone who is just, I mean, I know the word icon, I don't even think that does justice to who I'm sitting next to right now.
Without further ado, I will not keep you guys on pins and needles. I am sitting next to the one, the only Ms. Keri Hilson.

**Keri Hilson** (0:34)
Ms. Keri, baby.

**Tawanda** (0:35)
Oh my gosh.

**Keri Hilson** (0:36)
That's what I thought was about to come out.

**Tawanda** (0:37)
Girl, now I should, Ms. Keri, baby, is in the motherfucking studio.

**Keri Hilson** (0:43)
Oh my God.

**Tawanda** (0:44)
Okay, see, now I don't fangirl out. See, I was trying to keep it cool. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are so happy to have you.

**Keri Hilson** (0:52)
I'm happy to be here.

**Tawanda** (0:52)
Thanks for having me. We got to talk about some things. Let's do it, we need to talk. We need to talk, which is very coincidental because you have a new album. Actually, I guess it's like a three-part project that you have dropped, We Need to Talk. You had Love in April of last year, Drama in September, and now we just got Redemption. Congratulations.

**Keri Hilson** (1:11)
Thank you.

**Tawanda** (1:11)
We have been waiting for this for a moment, a minute.

**Keri Hilson** (1:15)
Yes, that is true, and it feels good that people were waiting. So I love hearing that. I love knowing that it was an anticipatory project. So that's really cool.

**Tawanda** (1:26)
So true fans of yours know that you clearly dominated the late 2000s. There was not a time, a MySpace post, a Facebook, nothing where Keri Hilson was not played. There was just, you were just dominating. And then you took a hiatus and it wasn't just like a small hiatus. It was a legit long hiatus.

**Keri Hilson** (1:48)
Yes, it was.

**Tawanda** (1:49)
What prompted you to do that?

**Keri Hilson** (1:52)
I think it was, not I think, I know, that it was professional and personal. Like sometimes you feel like you need to kind of step back and see clearer.
And then too, what I do is a creative job. But with any job, you definitely sometimes feel like you just need a vacation for a while. And I had been pursuing music. I joined my first girl group in 10th grade at 14 years old. So I had been pursuing music already for over a decade by the time I took my break. So you know, you need to live some life as a creative. You need to have things to talk about, to have things, lived experience, to be able to pour that into your art. And so it was, I would say, tenfold. It was a lot of compounded reasons why I needed to kind of step away. But again, professional and personal.

**Tawanda** (2:47)
You just said you had been in the industry before that hiatus. I feel like maybe before a lot of people knew who Keri Hilson was, they probably did not know that you were in this girl group and getting placements at a young age.
Did you learn a lot about yourself? Because at the time you took your hiatus, again, you'd been in the industry for so long. Did you do any soul searching, deep diving and learning about who Keri was, I guess maybe what, 10 years after being in the industry?

**Keri Hilson** (3:14)
Yeah, it was a lot of soul searching, a lot of experiential discoveries in relationships, who I am as a sibling, who I am as a daughter, who I am as a human, who I am as a Christian, who I am in general, as a partner. There were so many things that I had yet to discover because I had dedicated so much of my life to my job and creating.
So yeah, I was coming into my womanhood, and just very much attempting to see the world in a new way. Yeah.

**Tawanda** (3:52)
People, so people seem to think that, you know, at a peak in your time, that the industry blackballed you or forced you out, forced you into a hiatus, certain situations here or there, whatever.
Do you feel that that was the case? Do you feel like fans who believed that had a reason to believe that?

**Keri Hilson** (4:17)
I guess, I guess I can see why that story would have been created, because it made an existing story kind of prolong itself. It kind of incapped, you know, and then this is the end, but they made up the ending. Like, I very much stepped away, the blackballing was not real.