Isaiah Rashad Turns a Leaked Tape and a Suicide Attempt Into His Best Album

Isaiah Rashad's new album "It's Been Awful," released earlier this year, was set in motion by the 2022 leak of a private video showing him having sex with men — a leak that nearly ended his career and was followed by a suicide attempt. In a new profile by Elena Bergeron of The New York Times, the 35-year-old rapper describes how that crisis produced what the Times calls the best album of his career.

The profile opens backstage at the YouTube Theater in Los Angeles in late September, where Rashad's label, Top Dawg Entertainment, surprised him with gold and platinum plaques for more than a decade of hits. His mother played old-school R&B. His brother and producer Tim Vance hunted for a misplaced copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's "Klara and the Sun." Rashad greeted the interviewer with a question of his own: "What's two things that nobody knows about you?"

What did the leak actually do to him?

The leaked tape — footage Rashad says he filmed and shared with "the wrong person" — hit Twitter, spread across blogs, and became a flashpoint for debates about homophobia in hip-hop. Rashad didn't pursue legal action. He worried instead about the people close to him, including his grandfather, who died of a stroke the day after the footage went public.

Not long after, Rashad crashed his BMW M3 into a wall in an attempt to end his life, and wrecked an X6 given to him by T.D.E.'s chief executive. He can joke about it now, insisting he has only ever wrecked two cars: "I don't like saying that out loud for my insurance. It's not a trend."

He first addressed the tape publicly on "The Joe Budden Podcast," describing his sexuality as fluid at the time. He now uses the term bisexual and has discussed it with family.

What was the road back?

The leak came at the end of a long slide. After his 2016 LP "The Sun's Tirade" debuted in the Top 20, Rashad fell into debt supporting friends and family while his drug use grew to include crystal meth and cocaine. "I was doing a lot of compartmentalizing, ignoring stresses, ignoring a lot," he said. By 2020, his label bosses had repeatedly threatened to drop him and forced him into rehab. His T.D.E. backer Anthony Tiffith Jr., known as "Moosa," eventually bribed him back into the studio at $200 per finished song, which produced 2021's "The House Is Burning" — an uneven album that leaned on hip-hop clichés.

"I'm learning how to make confident music without being a misogynist," Rashad said of his current approach, "because that used to be the easiest way to do anything."

How did openness shape the album?

Rashad made Vance, who produces as Keem the Cipher, his main collaborator on "It's Been Awhl." The pair kept a rigid daily routine: up at 6 a.m. to work out, drop the kids at school, walk at the beach or the Huntington Botanical Gardens, then hit the studio.

The sessions were raw. Rashad cried while recording "Act Normal," a song about finding his father's porn stash and discovering sex addiction runs in his family. Vance pushed him musically too, notably on the art-pop "Boy in Red," a collaboration with SZA with Prince-ian delivery ("Maybe stay the night, then I could be your boyfriend / And if that doesn't work, then I'll just be your girlfriend").

The through line, Rashad said, has always been "brutal honesty." Fans stay hours after shows to tell him how his solo-drive songs carried them through disasters — or to ask him for life advice.

"I'm not mad that it got taken out of my hands," he said of being outed. "Making this album would've been way harder. It was always my intent to, like, talk about all my [stuff]." He added: "I'm still learning how to be happy. I've seen people survive. I've seen people have some money, I haven't seen what people do just being happy."

The open approach stretches back to his start. Rashad worked at a day care, a call center, and the breakfast shift at a Chattanooga Hardee's before his 2014 EP "Cilvia Demo" broke through. "I feel like it trained me socially to give a [expletive] about people," he said. Dominic Fike credited the EP as a heavy influence on his own 2018 breakout, "Don't Forget About Me, Demos": "There's songs on 'Cilvia Demo' that sound like folk and country to me."

What does this change for Rashad's future? He told the Times there won't be another five-year gap between albums — he's already working on new material before his first-ever shows in South Africa. "All I really want to do," he said, "is talk about whatever it is in my mind."