"I had a couple of writers I really respected talk about how much of a calmer existence it was not to be an artist and be in the forefront and be that guy. "There's a point, I'll be honest, when I put a lot of my artist ambitions on a shelf somewhere," Ocean says. He got so good at creating these worlds for other people that he'd nearly stopped seeing a place for himself. I never felt like I had a crazy, natural talent for singing," Ocean explains. "The writing, for me, is the easiest part-I was looking for another word besides easy-but that's the part that's the most natural to me. Slowly, though, he began carving a place for himself in the music industry, writing lyrics for people like Justin Bieber and John Legend, fulfilling one half of his boyhood fantasy: making decent money.
To pay the bills, he held a series of dull jobs, in a cell phone store and in the insurance business. Ocean intended to stay six months he's been there five years. The drive, which he made with his then girlfriend, took just two days they stopped overnight in El Paso. Now 23, Ocean came to LA from New Orleans five years ago, after dropping out of college. "I didn't want it to be my hobby, I wanted it to be my career." "I knew the only way I could make it a livelihood and make a living off of it was because I was great at it," Ocean says. But not just to fulfill a nascent creative desire-he needed practice if he was going to get rich. He had been bit by the singing bug and wanted to make money to purchase studio time to record covers of songs by groups like Jagged Edge with an aspiring rapper friend.
Literally, it was like a movie, I had a wagon, those long red wagons, like a Radio Flyer-type wagon, and I used to buy my own soaps." Simonizing cars wasn't just a means of glimpsing the unobtainable. That was the start." Ocean, who was born Christopher Breaux (and goes by Lonny to friends), downscaled his material desires, and when he was 13, began going door-to-door, detailing cars for cash.
"I would just fall in love with all their cars. Though he comes from a middle class family, he obsessively read the magazine's classified ads, fixating on exorbitantly priced used Bentleys and Maybachs. Less interested in fiduciary smarts, it's a catalog of conspicuous consumption, highlighting tropical vacations, invaluable antiques and, as Ocean came to know, really expensive cars. When he was nine, Frank Ocean's godfather subscribed him to Robb Report, a magazine for the ultra-rich.