Raw, Relentless, Resilient - Amber Riley

Amber Riley tapped into the conference call line shortly five minutes after I did. She immediately expressed her excitement to be the cover girl for Bleu Magazine’s first issue dedicated to women. I instantly agreed that she was the perfect girl to fit the bill. When we first kicked off the conversation, I wanted to catch up with her about her mental health, considering that we’re Black women in a pandemic that disproportionately impacts our community. For Riley, every day is a journey for her mental health, but with the support of her team, she’s been doing as well as can be expected.

“I have my pocket full of goodness, as I like to call it. The things that make me happy and get me going,” Riley states. Whether it be meditation and therapy or playing with her dog while watching funny movies, she finds happiness in a plethora of activities and has mentally reached a point where it’s even the little things that get her moving throughout the day. However, she admitted to me that this wasn’t always the case.

Towards the beginning of the pandemic, her mental health was in a weird space. Like the rest of us, her world was rocked when it all went down. Fortunately, Riley had a few incredible women in her corner to keep her mental health at bay during times of social distancing and creeping depression. 

“At the brink of my mental breaks, my sister and my mom were my rock. I’m talking about coming and sleeping in bed with me, making sure I get in the shower, trying to force me to eat,” she said as she counted all of the ways that she felt support. “They did everything right. When I had panic attacks, they stayed calm. They let me talk about what I was feeling all the time. They let me say crazy stuff, and it helped me snap back into reality. They were just perfect.”

Not once did they ever make Riley feel like a burden during her time of mental healing and battling her depression, who she named Keisha. “Keisha’s a bitch. She’s never going to be a person that I like, but she’s got to be a person that I deal with,” she described. 

Though it may be controversial to some, Riley states that she personified her depression as a way to separate what she’s dealing with from who she is as a person. “I don’t claim this. I’m not going to walk around saying, ‘I’m depressed, and I have anxiety.’ No, it’s what I deal with,” she passionately states. She understands taking care of herself with “the cards that I’ve been dealt,” maybe a little bit more than the average person. “We all know depression and anxiety; it’s like a filter. It makes everything hazy. It’s hardly ever good when you’re dealing with it. I remind myself that even if I don’t feel that all of these things are good, the reality is I do. I’m not letting that pull me back.”

Riley barely had enough bandwidth to go to therapy and unpack her deeper issues between not getting enough sleep and working out consistently. “Not to say that therapy is the cure-all, because it’s not, but nothing is a cure-all. There’s always going to be turbulence in our lives,” she states. “Paying attention to the way that you feel and finding great ways to cope, that’s good for your body and good for your mind. Not coping with outside things could be potentially harmful.”

Although the pandemic put many of us in a whirlwind of a scramble, Riley found it beautiful that many people turned to arts and entertainment for comfort. As an artist herself, she saw a surge in her innovation. “I know on the music side of things, it made a lot of people more creative, and it made us push what we would consider as normal. It made me think outside the box and figure out a new creative outlet,” she said. She even credited the pandemic for helping her writing skills – journaling, tinkering with scripts, poetry, and songwriting—all of the things.

When it came to Riley’s songwriting, while we may not have been in the booth with her, we know that she put out one hell of a debut EP in the middle of a pandemic. Her self-titled six-track EP takes listeners on a true soulful journey with sweet melodic symphonies, but she said that curating the project was no cakewalk. She described the experience as “disheartening” due to the lack of audience interaction, but she was grateful to break through the industry and introduce the world to RILEY. Yes, Amber Riley’s pseudonym and not-so alter ego.

“I never got the opportunity to sing my songs, and people sing my lyrics back to me. I didn’t get those certain milestones that I feel artists have when they put out music,” she said. “I’m hoping I will in the future. People really like my EP, and I’m hoping that they stick with me to see what I have coming out next.”

Coincidentally, RILEY shot and released her first music video for “BGE” a week before the official COVID shutdown. The “Ride” singer told me that she and her manager had to regroup and rethink logistics about marketing rollouts, social media advertising, and using all of their connections and resources. Aside from making music videos in a pandemic, RILEY has learned a lot about herself sonically and artistically since this time last year. “I think it made me extremely introspective, it made me extremely vulnerable, and that’s always amazing for writing,” she said. 

RILEY’s most vulnerable song to date is “A Moment,” which she performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! following the death of her co-star and friend Naya Rivera. When she was writing the song, she experienced significant breakthroughs in therapy and was able to gauge what was happening in her mental space. “It was the last song that we wrote for the EP, and I just laid it all on the line. I cried that entire session, and honestly, it’s the biggest song for my EP. It got the best reception,” she said.

Not only did she find a love for her music, but she found love in this hopeless place called quarantine as well. While some relationships have fallen by the wayside, she and her boyfriend-turned-fiance Desean Black have withstood the test of time. “I think our friendship kept everything pretty tight and close together. We have our moments where we want to kill each other. Let’s be real. Nobody’s around each other and is happy all the time. Let’s not tell that lie,” she laughed. She credits his mental strength, motivational nature, and discipline as key additions to the relationship that have helped her grow as an overall being within their relationship.

As far as her confidence and maturity, she credits herself – and rightfully, so. “You can say what you want about the way that I look, but you are not going to be able to deny who I am as an artist. You can’t deny the voice. You’re not going to deny my opinion,” she said powerfully. “I’m going to come with it 1,000%, and that’s all that I can do. I’ve grown in confidence as an artist, and I’m super proud of myself for that. I’ve had major insecurities about if the way that I look would hold me back from being the artist I want to be. The answer is yes and no, but I’ve grown so much and have worked so hard to be the artist that I am, to ever become undeniable.”