In September of 2024, electronic music producer Jennifer Lee sent an email via her TOKiMONSTA artist account announcing that she was postponing the release of her album and canceling her tour dates in order to be there for a family member who needed her. My first thought upon receiving it was, “She is the only musician who would do something this selfless.” Jenn shared this decision on her social media as well, and three weeks after, she posted that her friend Regina, who was like her family, had died.
Five months later, the postponed album, Eternal Reverie, is getting its release. One week prior to its drop date, Jenn is sitting with me at a café near her home in Los Angeles and wondering if it is still too soon. “I’ve been doing a lot of press interviews and I’m constantly crying in front of strangers,” she says as she dabs at her eyes.
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This is our fourth interview in six years, and I hope Jenn doesn’t think of me as too much of a stranger. Besides having great admiration for her as an inventive musician and as a businesswoman running her own Young Art Records for a decade, I have a big soft spot for her as a person. She is intelligent and thoughtful, polite and generous, warm with the necessary boundaries for someone who has a public-facing career. There is nothing disingenuous about Jenn, but even so, it’s unlike her to reveal so much about her personal life.
“There’s a part of me that never wanted to bring [Regina] up,” she says. “I didn’t want to turn my friend’s death into a gimmick. But she’s so much a part of this album and my identity. She also would not want me to be lamenting and being super depressed, potentially harming the rest of my career. I’m pushing forward with this album to find perspective. Death is all about perspective. We can either face it and understand it or squash it further down inside us. I’m using these opportunities to share how wonderful she is and how I wouldn’t be the musician I am without her.”
Death is an active presence in Jenn’s life, more so than the average person. Ten years ago, she was diagnosed with the extremely rare neurovascular disease moyamoya. She had to decide between the very small odds of saving her life with risky brain surgery or certain death. She had to write a will. She underwent two surgeries with multiple complications. After surgery, she had to re-enter the world in small steps. She had to relearn how to communicate, and receive communication, including understanding music.
Prior to our first interview in 2019, I watched the “Music” episode of the Netflix series Explained, where Jenn shares her moyamoya experience in-depth (there is also a Great Big Story episode about it). During that encounter, I was the one crying, overly emotional from learning about what she’d been through. It was awkward, to say the least. Jenn was sweet, consoling me with pats on the shoulder and assuring me that she was fine now.
Lune Rouge, the album that came after Jenn’s surgeries garnered her a Grammy nomination for best dance/electronic album. “I use every album as a journal,” she says. “Lune Rouge represents my whole moyamoya journey. Eternal Reverie will forever be remembered as the year I lost Regina. Grieving is really hard, but putting this album out, I hope, will make me face the discomfort. I’m sad, but I’m trying to sit with it in a way that will allow me to heal. I don’t have perspective yet, but I hope it’s a growth journey, and at the end of it, I will be a stronger, more robust person. But it’s really tough.”
Despite how personally challenging a year it was for her, Eternal Reverie is a joyful album. There are fun disco moments on “Enjoy Your Life” and “Corazón,” spacey soundscape on “Say Tell Me” and gentle introspection on “Infinite Embrace. As with all her albums, there are notable collaborations, among them Anderson .Paak and Rae Khalil on the playful “On Sum,” Kaelin Ellis on the midtempo moodiness of “For You,” Gavin Turek on the saucy “Lucky U,” and Cakes da Killa and Gawd on the house shuffles of “Switch It.”
Last year also saw the release of “Die Trying,” Jenn’s song with K-pop girl group aespa on Netflix’s Rebel Moon: Songs of the Rebellion EP. She partnered with Candy Crush Saga to create the track “Floating” using the game’s sounds for their Music Season tournament campaign. She was featured in a slick AT&T commercial. Plus, Young Art Records marked 10 years of independently released music from the likes of Keys N Krates, Rochelle Jordan, and SHIMA.
Jenn is celebrating her label’s aluminum anniversary with a party during Miami Music Week. She is scheduled to perform at the second weekend of Coachella at the Do Lab. That is the first of her festival dates, which are interspersed through her Eternal Reverie tour, purposefully booked into venues smaller to recapture the intimacy of her early gigs.
“I feel like I’m entering uncharted territory,” she says, which is surprising considering Eternal Reverie is her seventh album. “You get too psyched out if you start thinking about successful versus unsuccessful. My outlook is, ‘I want to share music and my intention is about the art not the finances.’”
I tell Jenn that the first time we talked, she said something that really stuck with me about how when she was a hobbyist musician, it allowed her to focus on it as her art. She says that was the whole point of Eternal Reverie, to take her back to the era when music wasn’t her source of income, or sustenance, or pressure. Music was just for fun and exploration.
“After many years, music starts to feel different,” she admits. “The necessity to think about the future, which also involves surviving financially, the absence of visibility, social media being very hard on your self-esteem, all leads back to, ‘How’s my music going to do?’ When you focus too much on that, the art becomes less art. It becomes product. I always wanted to make sure music was something I appreciated because it’s a gift, and to be a musician is a big fucking gift.”
Even with Eternal Reverie being released in a week, Jenn reverts to talking about Regina more than she does about the album. The two are inextricably linked. Thinking or talking about one means remembering the other.
“When I put out Lune Rouge, my major lesson was, ‘If I were to die tomorrow, would I be happy with how I lived today?’” she says. “I guess the universe shoved that lesson back in my face through Regina. That’s why talking about death is important. Understanding that you will die makes life so special. When you’re at that point [facing death], you can’t go backwards in time. You don’t want to live in fear of that. That’s not the message. The idea is, try to do what makes you happy. I know what it’s like to almost die. I should live in the moment.”
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