OAKLAND — “I feel very accomplished right now,” Tierra Umi Wilson says shortly after her December performance at Oakland Arena, where she opened for one of her biggest role models, Jhené Aiko. The 24-year-old Seattle native, now living in Los Angeles, overcame technical problems that first delayed her set and then stopped opening track “sorry” midway through, but she looks it at from another perspective.

“If anything, it gives you a version of the show you never could have expected,” says the neo-soul artist, better known as UMI, decompressing at a café backstage. “I always use it as an opportunity to connect with people differently. When I was up there, I was yelling and asking, ‘What’s your name? What’s your favorite color?’ … Keeping some kind of communication and connection makes it feel seamless. It makes the show feel special. I found somebody with a birthday, too. If the mic was out any longer, I would sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ That was the next step in my head. I’m thinking ahead.”

UMI, who identifies as queer and uses both she and they pronouns, has been going with the flow for much of her time in the music industry. She started like many by posting covers online when she was in high school and starting to grow a following. Born to a Japanese mother and African American father—something she has in common with Aiko—she found influence in soul and gospel music from her dad’s side of the family and Japanese music and art from her mom’s.

She moved to L.A. to attend the University of Southern California, and while still a student there, released an EP, Interlude. Another single, “Remember Me” became an unexpected streaming hit. UMI surpassed it with 2019 hit “Love Affair,” which officially put her on the map. By the end of the year, she was opening for Conan Gray and had left school to pursue music full time.

RCA signed her to its Keep Cool imprint in 2020, releasing her fourth EP, Introspection, and 2022 debut long-player, Forest in the City. UMI, an independent artist again, didn’t slow down in 2023, preparing both new EP, talking to the wind, and getting much of the work done for her next album, which she said should be released later this year. Then, of course, there’s that collaboration with V of BTS.

“The whole EP is about creating without a plan or living life without having to know all the answers, and reflecting on how I’ve started to feel life is like Google, where I [search], ‘How to be happy,’ and I’m supposed to get an immediate answer,” UMI says. “Life is more one step at a time and revealing, and the wind reminds me of that.”

She’s already released the EP’s first two tracks, “happy im” and “why dont we go,” describing the former as about giving in to love and the latter as being about following your feelings without worrying about what-ifs.

The two highlight the richness of her smooth vocals alongside lush, unrushed instrumentation—both of which have become a kind of signature in her sound. The remaining two songs on the EP will show UMI creating solely for the love of art, avoiding the business planning part of the music industry—which fits the EP’s theme.

These next two songs are the most recent ones she’s written, and she didn’t want to sit on them to make sure she has something in the can just in case.

The EP will also set up her next album by showing how she’s evolving as an artist, she adds. As of early December, the album is 70-percent done, she explains, but she needs to finish some of the songs. She expects to write three songs spontaneously.

“I like to be really transparent about my journey. I’m not someone who just likes to hide and then drops something,” she says. “I like people to know where I’m at, where I’m going and how I’m feeling. It’s a bridge between me now and the album.”

UMI says that with the new album—to which she refers as a “folk fusion project”— she’s zeroing in closer on the music that she knows she wants to make, but that experimentation within her space also plays a significant role. On this album, she’s also made a concerted effort to intertwine the folk music she listened to growing up in the Pacific Northwest with her sound.

In that way, just as she did on 2022’s Forest in the City, UMI is blending the feeling of being in nature into her music.

“My essence is not being stuck to one sound or one type of topic, but it’s very multidimensional. When I realized that, it was giving me the freedom to be myself more,” she says. “Folk music reminds me of Seattle. I’m from literally up in the fields and the mountains, so folk music, acoustic music reminds me of being outside looking into the mountains.”

She’s lived in L.A. for about seven years now, but whenever anyone asks, she still identifies as a Seattleite. Had she never moved, she’d still be making music, she asserts, but it would be more insular, with her writing, recording and mixing on her own rather than surrounded by a talented team of industry creatives.

Coming home always hits hard, she says, but she wouldn’t want to go without the near-year-round sunshine of SoCal. That’s also played into the songs she writes. When she was younger, UMI dealt with frequent anxiety. From her mother, a practicing Buddhist, she learned about spiritual meditation.

These days, she incorporates it into her performances. At her Oakland show, she began by leading the entire arena in a meditation and breathing exercise, explaining her intention was to “instill light and love, and to uplift.” She concluded with a prayer.

“The core element of meditation and the practice of it is developing the ability to focus on one thing, to choose what you focus on and take control of your mind,” she says. “When I’m creating, when I’m performing … everything else disappears, and I enter a meditative state. My hope is when I do my shows and share my meditation experiences, I give people an opportunity to just focus on that for that moment. … The more we can do that and have experiences like that, the more present we can be and the more we can enjoy life for what it is.”

She acknowledges she was nervous before the Oakland performance with Jhené Aiko; it was her first time on stage after an extended break, it was a big room, and one of her idols was in the building. On top of that, she had the technical difficulties to get through.

“I feel like I have conquered a big part of [anxiety],” she says. “I no longer say I’m an anxious person; I say anxiety is moving through me. That gives it an opportunity to pass and not be my identity. I hope I can teach people that.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter. Follow photographer Matt Pang at Twitter.com/mattpangs.