By Kuya Allen
For Okay Coleman, 001 is less of a debut and more of an arrival point. The project uses the elevator as a spiritual middle place a space between where you have been and where you are going to explore love, grief, attachment, release, and the quiet weight of unfinished endings.
We sat down with Coleman to talk about the dream behind the project, the role Pasadena plays in his heart, and the trust it takes to finally go all the way in.
1. The elevator is such a specific container for a project about love, loss, and spirituality. Most people experience elevators as this in-between space, a moment of suspension between where you were and where you're going. What made that the right metaphor for what you were trying to say with 001?
I arrived at the idea of the elevator as the setting of 001 almost intuitively. An old dream I had in 2022 with my late aunt inspired me to explore the significance of elevators in my life and in the world.
In this dream, my aunt used the analogy of an elevator to describe a spiritual middle place — an in-between space, a moment of suspension between where you were and where you're going — where the elevator becomes the medium itself. In 001, the elevator is the medium of my world, the storyteller of where I was and where I am going.
I’ve also been doing a lot of research to tell the story of elevators as one of the most impactful inventions in our world today. It’s a storyteller whose story hasn’t fully been told yet.
2. You and Angelo LeRoi have been making music together since childhood. There's a specific kind of trust that only exists between people who've known each other that long. How does that relationship change what's possible in the room?
As friends, we’re very comfortable with each other. Over time, we’ve built a sort of DNA or shared signature musically. You begin to understand not only each other’s musical choices, but also the influences and personal or private experiences that shape what I want to say or what he wants to play.
Because of that, we’re constantly studying music together, which keeps things exciting and pushes us to think outside of the box creatively.
3. You describe the project as moving through love, attachment, and release. That arc sounds less like a breakup record and more like something you had to work through internally. What were you actually trying to let go of when you made this?
This is a good question. For a portion of the project, I was really working through letting go of my fear of going too deep emotionally. Understanding that an ending doesn’t always require closure or ideal circumstances.
Then there’s also hurt — hurt from things not ending the way I wanted them to. There was no closure. We never had that conversation. I should have said certain things.
@matt.rica
4. Pasadena doesn't get talked about the way other SoCal cities do, but it shaped you. How do you think about where you're from when you think about what you make?
Pasadena shaped my heart and how I view the world. It teaches you a lot about community — what it means to be in community with other people and to help each other out.
I dropped *000 Waiting Room* before this project, and one of the songs, “You Don’t Care,” is specifically about Pasadena. I’m speaking to how many of us from there felt after the fires — our experiences with politics, our sentiments, and how the city and even the country responded. I felt like the city did not care.
Before that, I released “Do What You Have To Do,” which reflected on grief after the fires. It was a spiritual track about letting God guide me through that process.
5. 001 is your first full-length body of work. There's something significant about deciding it's time to say everything at once. What made this the right moment to go all the way in?
That decision actually came after all the music was already finished. It had been time to release another project for a while. It was really my manager, Taz, who encouraged me to push the original date and focus on delivering the full vision, making sure we really went all the way in.