Ezekiel Samad and Corinne Richards first met in college. Though everything was kept platonic at the time, the friendship they developed persisted after graduation sent them on their separate paths: her dreams of an opera career came true and he found himself working up the ranks on the business side of one of a top Chicago newspaper. But they kept in touch and when a failing marriage took her to Illinois years later, where her husband had been offered a job, the inevitable happened. They finally fell in love.

They walked down the aisle with one divorce apiece, a lot of experience, and a lot of love between them. Their first daughter, Maryam, was born a few months after the wedding. When Nadira came along a few years after, the family had moved out to the suburbs and settled into a house bigger than they needed. She describes her earliest memories as “kinda like a fairy tale” but something shifted before she was old enough to grasp when or why. Her father had a crisis of faith that reverberated throughout the entire family.

As he became more and more conservative, Corinne grew restless. Nadira grew up hearing the fights over her mother’s career, the iron fist her father wanted to wield over everything and, most of all, she and her sister. The two girls spent their much of their childhoods exposed only to what he approved of. No television, no movies, no “outside” friends. He played music with no words and now read them scripture before bed instead of fairy tales.

Maryam did take after her father: an obedient, bookish child who was speaking four languages before she was ten and recite scripture from memory in two of them. Nadira, though, she had a question for everything.

She wanted to know he wanted their hair covered, why they couldn't watch cartoons, why she couldn't eat the pizza at her cousin's birthday party. The more she pulled away, the closer Ezekiel tried to keep her. It didn’t work. And once puberty hit, there was no going back: Nadira was off like a rocket. Everything became a fight. Watching her daughter miserably struggle and fail to fit into the world as Zeke wanted it to be became enough for Corinne to send their youngest away shortly before Nadira started her junior year of high school. She couldn't have been happier to go.

The day she left to live with Corinne's sister and mother in Queens was the last time her father would speak to her for years. Her parents would divorce before she graduated, but Nadira flourished in the new environment. The two formidable women now in charge of caring for her only encouraged her, giving her more liberties and trust than she’d ever had. She took an interest in art and creative writing, and fell in love with movies and hip-hop — everything that had been off-limits back home.

She enrolled at NYU, hoping to one day write and direct her own movies, but the ducks lined up in a different row: a music major, the friend of a friend, who’d heard her singing along to something convinced her to do a few songs with him. She turned some earlier amatuer attempts at poetry into lyrics and those songs formed the basis of what would eventually become her first EP, but despite the encouragement from people who heard those early tracks, music was sidelined while Nadira juggled senior year and an internship at HBO.

While she worked two jobs to save the money for a move to Los Angeles, the first mixtape made its way to the ears of an indie label head: he liked what he heard, he wanted to hear more. She and the same old friend hooked up again to work with some of the new connections he’d made on a second collection of songs, Alpha, and set it loose on the internet. Within weeks, she was signed to TDE, flown out to Los Angeles for the last reason she’d imagined herself winding up there for, and had what felt like the world laid at her feet: they gave her the money, producer access, and support she needed to keep refining her sound. The Omega EP was released in mid-2014, her first official label release and the last before she started work on a full-length album.

Most of her focus since has been the development, relentless nitpicking, and mixing of her forthcoming studio album, but she’s slowly establishing herself as a songwriter as well as an artist in her own right, racking up writing credits and features while she awaits the April release of Exodus.