Exzenya: "Every note, every breath, carries the moment when love turns to revulsion"

Exzenya is a globally based, genre-defying artist whose music blends pop, r&b, rock, jazz, latin, soul, techno, indie, and more. Known for her bold, emotional, and unpredictable sound, she crafts each song with intentionality, range, and narrative depth. Committed to authenticity, Exzenya writes all her lyrics and records every vocal live with professional coaching. Her tracks are fully mixed, mastered, and registered with the U.S. "Copyright Office", reflecting a dedication to quality and originality. Her visual identity mirrors this approach: most cover art features real, enhanced photographs of Exzenya, while only one—Drunk Texting—uses a custom AI-created character edited by her to align with the song’s emotional arc. Exzenya’s work represents a 100% human, handcrafted artistic vision—music made with heart, voice, and authenticity.

Your background in psychology and Applied Behavior Analysis clearly shapes your writing. In "Ugly When You Love Me", how did you translate psychological concepts like manipulation, disgust, and emotional dissonance into specific musical and vocal choices?

To translate concepts like manipulation, disgust, and emotional dissonance into musical and vocal choices, I start by visualizing the entire experience like a film playing in my mind. I don’t write from abstraction — I step into the scene the same way an actor prepares for a role. I study the moment, the dynamic, the psychology, and the emotional reality until I can feel it in my body.

From there, the psychological concepts start to shape the sound. Manipulation has a different rhythm than affection. Disgust has a different physical sensation than longing. Emotional dissonance sits differently in the chest than trust does. Because of my psychology and ABA background, I’m trained to notice micro-behaviors — vocal tension, breath changes, tone shifts, pacing, avoidance, hesitation, irritation.

So my vocal choices come from embodying the state. When someone is in that final moment of revulsion — when the manipulation stops being confusing and becomes disgusting — their voice sharpens. Their tone flattens. Their patience disappears. They speak more directly, more clipped, less forgiving. I mirror that in the performance: a sharper tone, a more irritated delivery, less warmth, less softness.

Musically, the production reflects the internal mood: tense, pushing forward, with no romantic cushioning. The structure follows the psychological unraveling — the exhaustion, the clarity, the "I’m done" energy.

Everything works together to capture that exact psychological turn where love curdles into disgust and the emotional truth finally reveals itself.

This single feels like a new chapter in your dark-pop evolution. Which aspects of your artistic identity remain constant, and which did you intentionally dismantle or rebuild for this release?

The part of me that rarely changes is my focus on human behavior — the way people think, react, feel, and connect. I’m always drawn to the full spectrum of humanness: love, lust, frustration, humor, impulse, contradictions, consequences — all the things that make us who we are. That curiosity is the thread running through everything I write.

What I rebuilt for "Ugly When You Love Me" was the emotional stance. In some of my earlier songs, there’s room for softness or uncertainty. In this one, I stripped all of that away. The point of view is clear, direct, and grounded in the moment where you finally recognize how distorted and manipulative someone’s version of "love" has become.

So the constant is the psychological truth and my interest in human emotion.

What evolved here is the perspective: this time, it’s about clarity, disgust, and calling things for what they are.

You publicly commit to 100% human-created music — no AI, no Auto-Tune — which is rare in today’s landscape. How has that choice influenced both your creative process and your relationship with listeners, especially within such a digital-forward genre?

Staying fully human in my music isn’t about resisting technology — it’s about preserving something that feels increasingly rare. I’m learning that many people don’t even recognize a natural human voice anymore, because so much of what we hear now is reshaped, tuned, or digitally altered. And when that becomes the norm, artists who choose to stay real end up competing against artificially enhanced performances without the audience even knowing there’s a difference.

For me, the voice carries the psychology of the moment — the breath, the tension, the humor, the cracks, the anger, the softness. Those textures are part of the emotional truth of a song. A program can change pitch, but it can’t create a real feeling. There’s a moment in "Till I’m Drunk & Confused" where I laugh mid-line — a small, natural laugh that came out because I saw the whole scene play out vividly in my head as I was singing. I always see things like a film running behind my eyes, and in that moment, the visual made me laugh. You can’t fake that kind of instinctive response.

I don’t fully understand how Auto-Tune or AI manipulation works, and honestly, I don’t need to. What I do know is that when listeners connect with my music, they’re connecting with something that’s actually me. My real voice. My real emotional reactions. My real interpretation of the story. And I would hope that people can still feel the difference, even in a digital-heavy world.

You enter the industry with a perspective shaped by maturity, leadership, and global entrepreneurship. How have your experiences as a founder, CEO, and mother of adult children informed the strategy behind "Ugly When You Love Me" and your larger conceptual projects?

My perspective comes from living many different roles at the same time — founder, CEO of several businesses, international entrepreneur, mother of adult children, and someone who spent years working with individuals with developmental disabilities. All of that shapes how I understand people, how they communicate, how they mask, how they manipulate, and how they reveal the truth in the smallest ways.

Those experiences give me a very grounded understanding of human behavior. I’ve seen what emotional conditioning looks like, what denial looks like, what genuine care looks like, and what it feels like when someone finally hits that moment of clarity. That point of realization — where something snaps into focus and you finally see a situation for what it truly is — is exactly where "Ugly When You Love Me" lives.

On the business side, running companies taught me how to build systems, analyze data, and think long-term. That’s why my music strategy isn’t accidental. Every release, every rollout, every campaign is handled with the structure and discipline of someone who has led organizations, not someone guessing their way through the industry. I approach my career the same way I approached my businesses: with intention, organization, and a long-view perspective.

So the psychology shapes my storytelling, and the leadership shapes my execution. Together, they’re the backbone of how I create and how I bring these larger conceptual projects to life.

Many of your songs examine emotional and behavioral cycles — from attachment patterns to digital-age communication. What is the psychological through-line connecting “Ugly When You Love Me” to the broader themes in your catalog, and how do you hope listeners experience it beyond the narrative itself?

There is a clear psychological thread that runs through everything I write. Every song, no matter the storyline or intensity, connects back to human behavior — why people act the way they do, what we tolerate, what we deny, and what finally pushes us into truth.

"Ugly When You Love Me" sits in the moment when clarity hits. It’s the realization that something you once called love has shifted into manipulation, disgust, and emotional imbalance. It’s that point where your mind and body finally agree: this isn’t love anymore. It’s repulsive, and you can feel it in your bones.

Across my catalog, I explore all parts of these emotional and behavioral cycles: attraction, denial, reinforcement, conflict, escape, humor, anger, desire, reflection, and the strange choices people make when they’re hurting or hopeful. Some songs are serious, some are funny, some are sensual, and some are raw. But every one of them traces back to the psychology of how humans connect, detach, hide, reveal, and repeat patterns.

Beyond the narrative, what I hope listeners experience is a deeper understanding — not only of themselves, but of other human beings. I want people to recognize emotions they’ve lived, but also develop more compassion and awareness for the emotions someone else might be carrying. My goal is for the music to create that internal click: “That’s how I felt,” or “I understand why someone else might feel that way.”

That’s the real through-line: helping people see the patterns, relate to them, and walk away with more empathy than they came in with.

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