Ebony Riley left Detroit, where she grew up, to pursue modeling in 2011. Bright-eyed with her life packed in a few suitcases, a young Riley auditioned for America’s Next Top Model, hoping to get her big break.
Her entry into stardom didn’t come with the reality TV show like she had hoped, however. Riley didn’t get cast to be on the show, which she considers a blessing in disguise, partially because it pushed her to work harder but also because modeling wasn’t really her passion — music was.
Earlier this year Riley dropped her debut EP ebony on Interscope Records. The soulful R&B project was four years in the making and rocketed her into the music industry shortly after its release. In February, the same month ebony came out, Riley landed a spot on Complex’s 2023 R&B Artist to Watch list. In June, she opened for Jazmine Sullivan and Ari Lennox in New Jersey before performing at the 2023 BET Awards’ L.A. Basement Showcase.
“When I was in front of Jazmine’s crowd, I had never been on stage before. But you know God worked it out,” she tells Metro Times in between gigs on her current tour. “I thrive off the energy so for me it’s like, once I’m up there it’s a whole different little beast that come out.”
In a long-awaited homecoming, Riley performed in Detroit for the first time on Aug. 11 at the Majestic Theatre with Coco Jones. She’ll also perform in Detroit this weekend at the Afro Nation festival.
“The Detroit in me gone help me thug it out,” she says about performing at the Afrobeats festival, which is expected to draw tens of thousands of visitors each day.
Riley may be new to the music industry, but she’s also a 10-year fashion model veteran, appearing on runways for Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta, and Bottega Veneta. She was even featured in Vogue France as part of a fashion campaign for Beyoncé’s Renaissance album. She now lives in New York, but has traveled around the world including Kenya and South Africa.
Still, throughout all the runways and magazine features, Riley couldn’t ignore the burning itch to sing.
“Fashion wasn’t really my thing, it was more of an opportunity presented, and of course, it was like OK, yes, I would love to do that," she says. “It seemed fun, but in reality, it was just like, I didn’t feel fulfilled.”
Now she’s a completely different person than her childhood friends might remember.
She wasn’t making music when she lived here, and decided to pursue modeling because she thought it would help her overcome her insecurities. Clearly, it worked.
“I wasn’t really seeing myself being able to be in the forefront, and I feel like God put me in the modeling industry just to get me over the insecurities of how I look,” she says. “But I found my way back to music because even with the modeling, I was blessed and I was grateful but… I was living somebody else’s dream.”
ebony feels like a combination of ’90s R&B with baby-making beats, heartfelt singing, and lyrics about love and heartbreak on tracks like “Deuce Deuce.”
“I’m a ’90s baby so I had the best of both worlds. I grew up on the older stuff that my mama came up on as well as the current music at the time,” she says. “So I came up on Mary [J. Blige], Toni [Braxton], Barry White, Lauryn Hill, Destiny’s Child... I feel like we had the last era of really good fucking music.”
Given her inspiration is from ’90s music, Riley says she doesn’t feel like she quite fits in the current era of R&B. Instead she wants her music to be timeless.
“I’m kind of inspired by everybody but I don’t feel like I sound like anybody,” she says. “I fit in, in the sense of yeah, my shit feels current but I’m not on the same type [of] time. I want it to feel good like how music made me feel when I listen to shit from back in the day.”
ebony is a deeply personal project for Riley. She began writing the songs during the pandemic, but most of them are about the year she decided to move out of Detroit — a year filled with personal turmoil, heartbreak, and loss.
“Somebody save me, save me/ I never let a nigga slave me/ This is why I prolly lost the baby/ Now I’m ghost, Patrick Swayze/ You can not love these niggas, they be living wild,” she sings on her track “Save Me.”
“The shit that I went through drove me to focus and tighten the fuck up, and follow my heart, my dreams and not be focused on this heartbreak or this disappointment, you know, the little shit,” she says. “It’s like God put us here for a purpose that’s so much bigger than us, but we’re easily distracted by stuff that, in a couple years from now, we’ll be laughing at. I want to laugh at it right now. I don’t want to… be in pain no more from stuff that literally ain’t got nothing to do with me.”
For Riley, performing at Afro Nation is a full circle moment, not only because she’s returning to Detroit but because, she says, Detroiters will get to see a more positive side of African culture, a common sentiment of many participating in the festival.
“The imagery that we were taught in America was not that Africa is the most beautiful place and all the amazing things about Africa,” she says. “So going there and seeing it, I was like damn, why did they hide this from us? And now I’m coming back to the city that made me. Honestly, the reason why I’m grinding the way I am is because a lot of us don’t make it out. So I’m really fortunate that I’ve been blessed with these opportunities.”
Ebony Riley will perform at Afro Nation on Sunday, Aug. 20 on the main stage. Afro Nation takes place from Saturday, Aug. 19 to Sunday, Aug. 20 at Bedrock’s Douglass Site; 501 Winder St., Detroit.
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