Kendra Morris, courtesy Rosie Cohe.

Kendra Morris is obsessed with time.

“Time is really the only thing in life that’s irreplaceable,” she said in a recent interview.

When writing her new album, I Am What I’m Waiting For, she asked herself how she’d react if everything ended tomorrow. Would she feel like she’d done it all? For Morris, the answer was a “no,” and that pushed her to try new things.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked herself, and then she wrote a song about it. Morris, who’s primarily known as a soul singer, tries out all kinds of different sounds on the new album.

After releasing 2022’s Nine Lives, Morris found the itch to write returning, but she wanted to work with other producers and write about something other than love.

“That was my challenge for this record; to just write about the basic nuances of life,” she said.

She turned to Torbitt Schwartz, better known as Little Shalimar of Run the Jewels.

Morris worked to let go of perfectionism and embrace the spirit of “messy” while recording the album. She sometimes recorded vocals while sitting on the floor in her basement. She and Schwartz often used first take vocals—“because sometimes those are the most emotional”—even if they weren’t technically the best.

She said her father, an illustrator, taught her to see the art in everything. When recording, Morris said, she didn’t want everything to sound too perfect.

“[The art] “is in your mistakes,” she said. So she told Schwartz she wanted everything a little grimy. They ended up with tracks that ranged from dance pop to garage rock, but all of it was drenched in soul, which has always been her favorite genre.

She’s become a prolific visual artist in her own right, in high demand for animating music videos, after making her own. Lacking a real budget for that sort of work pushed her to learn how to make them herself. The time around when her daughter was born, about half a decade back, was particularly fruitful.

“The doctor said, ‘Sleep when the baby sleeps,’” she said. “But I was like, ‘If I’m not tired, I’m going to do something creative.’ That’s how I got into doing a lot of visual art stuff.”

After being featured on tracks by Czarface, the members of the band asked her who created her animation. Morris told them she’d done it herself.

“So I wound up doing the video for ‘Bomb Thrown’ for them [and MF DOOM], which did really well,” she said. After that, other artists came calling, and suddenly Morris had a side career.

She didn’t want to waste time during the pandemic, either. She started doing “Karaoke Happy Hour” on Instagram. Every night for an hour, she would sing to whoever was watching her live stream.

“It got me a lot through a lot of anxiety issues,” she said, laughing. “You can find pretty much any song you can think of on YouTube,” she said.

Morris is always keeping her eye out for ways to fill her “pockets of time.” One such way was when she joined a one-off band with Este Haim and Scarlett Johansen. All the players met at the home of producer Dave Sitek (TV on the Radio) in Glendale.

“We spent 10 days just floating around in the pool and making songs,” she said, likening the experience to being at summer camp. This was before Haim had even released their first album. While they knew the band wasn’t meant to last beyond these sessions, Morris said they’re all still friends.

“I think what I love most about that experience was it was just all of us looking to hang out and make music.”

Kendra Morris is still grateful for the support her parents gave her back when she first decided to make music her career. She said she never expected to be a star; she just wanted to make a living, and she’s been able to do that. Now she’s looking forward to getting back out on the road and playing her new songs. Her tour starts Sept. 6 and will take her across the U.S. and to Europe.

Follow Rachel Alm at Twitter.com/thouzenfold and Instagram.com/thousandfold.