There's something different about Bebe Rexha right now. It's hard to name at first. She's back-to-back on interviews when we speak, 13 music videos deep into a three-day shoot, running all over LA, renting out burger spots for two hours, racing into the hills, bouncing between massive spaces and little rooms. By every external measure, she's the busiest she's ever been.

Her first album as a fully independent artist, Dirty Blonde, is out June 12. And the way she talks about it, you can tell this one is different. Not because of what it is, but because of how it got made. For the first time, she got to choose everything. The team, the collaborators, the creative directors, the singles. All of it.

"It's really important where you're at mentally. Most importantly, it's about how you're feeling," she tells me. "For the longest time, I was feeling misunderstood, and not celebrated. When you start surrounding yourself by people that believe in you, the new label, new management, new PR, new agents, it's a whole rebirth and fresh start. They're excited, and that energy spreads to you and gives you the confidence to take more risks and not take a traditional approach."

The album started as a dance record. That was the way in. "I was feeling a little bit more numb, and that was the only way for me to feel something," she says. But the deeper she got into it, the more the songs started pulling her somewhere else. They got heavier. More personal. The album turned into something she didn't fully plan, a document of a woman moving from numbness back into feeling, track by track.

She talks about building the visual album the same way. 13 videos, three days, full sprint. "We were running all over LA. We rented out a Burger Spot for like two hours. Super tight deadlines. And then we went into the hills, and then this massive space, and then another area that had all these different rooms in it." You can hear her smile when she says it. It sounds exhausting and also like exactly the kind of chaos she needed.

What made it work, she says, was having the right people around her. A creative director she actually connects with. Managers who are in the room. A team she built herself, one by one. "I always want a good DP. The director is important, but if I don't have good direction of photography, how is it going to be shot? Are they going to get the emotion I want? The whole team has to be built and curated."

That process took time. And it didn't always look like this. Ask her what she'd tell herself when she first signed, and she doesn't sugarcoat it.

"I was always really outspoken, and it got me in trouble a lot, because I wasn't just the quiet pop girl that was going to sit there and take direction. I wish I would have stood up for myself even more. When you have confidence issues, you second guess yourself. There were some singles I wish weren't singles. I wish some weren't the first single. What you put out to bring people into your world matters."

She's not bitter about it. It's more like she's just clear now in a way she wasn't then.

The through line across every era, the one thing that never changed even when everything around her did, is the writing. "My writing has always been the constant," she says. "I'm very involved with the writing and the creation of the music. That's something I'll never give up."

And the confidence piece, that one came slower. "I think the best people are sometimes a little delusional, and have a god complex. I've always been the opposite." She laughs a little. "It happens gradually. It really comes to a point where it's hard to say you don't care, like I want my music to be loved, everybody wants to be loved. But then it comes to a certain point where it's like I'm not going to give up parts of myself to be liked."

She shares something she heard recently about the first 30 seconds after you wake up, how the brain is still soft then, still open, and if you tell yourself something good in that window it goes deeper than it normally would. "You have to work on it," she says, "and then I promise one day the switch just goes off."

There's a song on the album called S.H.I.T., Sugar Honey Ice T, and she brings it up like she's been waiting to. "It's about really stepping into your confidence. I wanted a song where I can say I'm the shit. Sometimes you just need to say that. It's a very human thing. You don't have to do that every day, but you have to have moments."

She wrote it about the 4 a.m. impulse to call someone you know you shouldn't. About spending all this money on therapy and it still not being enough. About fighting yourself over a time difference because the person you want to call lives somewhere far away. "That is me encapsulated in a song," she says.

Both songs are true. The bravado and the 4 a.m. phone call. The Sugar Honey Ice T and the breakup. Dirty Blonde is the name of the album because it's the name of the woman. Gritty and glamorous. Both things, always.

What she's building right now isn't a comeback. Comebacks are about returning to something. This is different. She's not trying to get back to who she was. She's trying to become the artist she would have been if she'd trusted herself from the start.

The rebirth, the real one, isn't in the team or the deal or the 13 music videos. It's the moment she stopped asking permission. And started making exactly what she wanted to make.