Ravyn Lenae Is Viewing Life Through a New Lens on Album “Bird's Eye”: It's 'Been Beautiful for Me' (Exclusive)

The singer-songwriter tells PEOPLE about her latest full-length triumph and teaming up with Childish Gambino and Jimmy Jam along the way

• Ravyn Lenae released her second studio album, Bird's Eye, on Aug. 9

• The album is written from a "bird's eye" perspective on Lenae's life from growing up in Chicago to finding stardom and features assistance from Dahi, Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, the legendary Jimmy Jam and more

• Manifesting "real change" in her life has been "the biggest blessing out of music and this album in particular," Lenae tells PEOPLE

For Ravyn Lenae, it's not only important to achieve a “butterfly feeling" whenever she makes a new song. It's imperative to her creative process.

Over the last near-decade, the 25-year-old Chicago-born singer-songwriter has recorded material “rooted in R&B and soul,” mixed with “funk, pop and indie elements” and occasionally packing a “country feel” as it does on her new sophomore album Bird’s Eye. Or at least, that’s how she describes it on a whim, as she admits her sound is a bit “hard to categorize.” What she can explain with absolute certainty, however, is what she feels inside when she knows she’s written something worthwhile: Butterflies.

“Usually, I know instantly, ‘There's something here.’ There's just a magical feeling that happens,” she tells PEOPLE ahead of the album’s release on Friday, Aug. 9. “It's a shared experience. So if I don't get those butterflies, then I don't even waste my time trying to see it through. That just doesn't make sense to me.”

That feeling should be all too familiar for fans of Lenae, a musician whose singular vocal register, songwriting chops and stellar ear for producers (Steve Lacy, Dahi, Kaytranada, Monte Booker) have set her apart from contemporaries since she signed to Atlantic Records as a teen back in 2016 and well before then, too. From her 2018 Lacy-produced and fan-beloved CrushEP, to her critically acclaimed debut album Hypnos in 2022, Lenae has given listeners enough reason to be excited for her latest offering. And for her, a lot has changed in just two years.

“It's been a more positive outlook, a more compassionate outlook, more sensitive. I feel like I'm a little more in control of my emotions and my response to things and just regulating myself in a way. And then I think everybody, when they get out of a long-term relationship, sparks fly and they figure out new things about themself and understand the things that aren't so good about them,” Lenae says. “So putting these puzzle pieces together about me is something I'm currently doing.”

Related: Steve Lacy Calls 2020 Car Accident a 'Wake-Up Call' That Changed His Perspective: 'Spiritual Thing'

Bird’s Eye is just that for Lenae, a puzzle. With an autobiographical approach to her latest album, each song has allowed her to return to specific pivotal moments in her life through her writing from — essentially — a “bird’s eye” lens. Notably, her latest single “One Wish” tells the story of her complex relationship with her father, as she writes about the moment he didn’t show up to her 10th birthday party.

“I feel like I’m taking a trip to all these parts of my brain, all these moments in my childhood, these moments in my early adulthood that are really defining me,” Lenae says. “That's really what music is for me. So these very big moments, mending things with my father and really using music as a tool to open up real dialogue and manifest real change in my life, has been the biggest blessing out of music and this album in particular.”

When she listens to the album, she's transported there.

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Helping Lenae on her journey during the 11-track effort are featured artists Ty Dolla $ign and Childish Gambino, who lends a verse to “One Wish” from the perspective of Lenae’s father. As a fan of Donald Glover — both on screen and on wax — Lenae calls the care he put into shaping his verse “beautiful.”

“We had several calls about what the song is about and met up and he wanted to get a clear vision of what the story is because he wanted to get it right so bad,” she says. “So seeing that fire in him and his genuine love for music was so cool. Anybody could just nail in a verse, but I can tell that he wanted it to be right so bad, and that made me feel like he really cared about the story.”

And just as much as Bird’s Eye taps into moments in Lenae’s early life for the first time, it’s also providing fans something of an update on how those reflections have shaped her as a person in the years since her 2022 debut LP. Bird’s Eye, she explains, is “half living in the past and documenting these moments through music," and the the other half "being excited and proud of where I am and where I'm going.”

Related: Donald Glover Explains Why He's Putting His Childish Gambino Stage Name to Rest: 'It's Not Fulfilling'

Another highlight from Lenae's album is her track “Pilot,” in which she discusses feeling “small to the world I’m in” in her mid-20s — a lyric and song that she used to help guide her approach. “For a lot of 24 and 23 and 25, I've felt really small but in a big way, in a way that has been able to almost bring me back to Earth and acknowledge all these pieces of my life, all these turns and twists in my story so far that have made me, me,” she says. “Looking at my life and the human experience in this broader sense has been beautiful for me. It's made me excited about life in general and my relationships with people and my growth.”

Throughout the album’s creative process, Lenae has leaned on some of her favorite work — including Janet Jackson’s TheVelvet Rope and All for You albums, and material by Fleetwood Mac and Gwen Stefani. Exploring some of those sounds with her was Dahi, the album’s Grammy-winning executive producer behind hits such as Kendrick Lamar's “Money Trees” and Mac Miller's “Self Care.” As Lenae explains, her collaborator “leads with his impulse and his intuition,” an approach that kept her inspired along the way.

“We would get some chords down and then I would grab the mic and start singing some melodies. And usually, I would sing one melody and then I would scratch it and then go to the next melody or the next 10, 20, and he would say, ‘Ravyn, the first thing you do is usually the best thing you do, but for some reason, you feel like it can't be that because it's the first thing,’” Lenae recalls of her studio time with Dahi.

“So having someone in real time check you like that and help you, I really lean into that magic of sometimes it is the first thing or the impulse. I definitely learned a lot from him.”

Now releasing an album full of dreamy jams like “Dream Girl” — created with Jimmy Jam, a full-circle moment for any Jackson fan — and “Love Is Blind” (which Lenae hilariously describes as “the most Ravyn Lenae song I've ever heard”), the singer-songwriter is well on her way to seeing her dedicated following blossom as a result of Bird’s Eye.

But being 25 years old will soon be something Lenae views from a bird’s eye perspective years down the line, too. And she’s ready to embrace that when she gets there.

“The older I get and the deeper I get into my career, those types of goals, it's something that’s on my brain,” she says of garnering a larger audience. “Wanting a song to resonate in a very impactful way is every artist's dream.”

Ravyn Lenae’s Bird’s Eye is now available via Atlantic Records.

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