The 'Cabin Fever' singer opened up to Apple Music about his new music and life amid the pandemic.
Jaden Smith is handling the coronavirus crisis like everyone else -- just trying to weather the storm and keep his head up. The 22-year-old performer recently spoke with Apple Music and dished on his recent battles with anxiety and his upcoming new songs.
"The anxiety is going through the roof for everybody, and it's crazy," the singer -- who now goes by the mononym Jaden when it comes to his music career -- told Apple Music's Zane Lowe. "And I never really knew what anxiety was until recently, either."
"I'm just stressed about everything, and it's really crazy," Jaden added. "It doesn't happen to me too much, but when it does, it happens. It's very strong ... Sometimes it's work-related, and then sometimes, you can really see that it's that true, genuine anxiety, where it's just like anything and everything."
For Jaden, he feels that "talking about it with people is the best way to get over it."
"We're all being aware of the different mental health issues in the world right now, because we're all being isolated with ourselves, so we are very much so being confronted with our thoughts," he shared. "Some people are okay with that, and some people aren’t."
As for his music career, Jaden reflected on his recent decision to go by just his first name, and said his sister, Willow Smith -- who goes by Willow professionally -- inspired his decision.
"I realized that Willow changed her name to Willow at some point in time. And that she was no longer Willow Smith," he explained. "Yeah, it took me a while. It took me a while. Because if you look Willow Smith up, it'll still come up. But then it took me a while to see that it was just Willow. And I was like, 'Yo. That's so strong.' You feel like you don't have to say your last name. You're just Willow."
According to Jaden -- who is the son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith -- the name change also served to help him compartmentalize his career, to a degree.
"I create different characters for myself... and it's like, Jaden, that's music, and Jaden Smith, that's 501(c)(3) [and] that's acting in movies," he said. "I wanted to just make that little distinction there, just a little bit."
With new music coming soon -- in the form of a new track, "Cabin Fever," and a forthcoming album, Cool Tape Volume 3.
"I'm just trying to make the kids happy right now, man. That's it," Jaden said of his forthcoming single. "I'm just trying to give them a little something something."
While he's looking to get his new album out before the end of summer, the singer admitted that recording amid the pandemic and quarantine has been "really hard."
"You can't get into the studio with anybody, you can't even get into the studio at all. So I have to record being inside of my house, and the engineer has to engineer me from his house, and he'll use this app to control my computer," Jaden recalled. "But it's happening, and we're figuring it out and we're just rolling with it in whatever it is, just to make it happen."
"I don't want to get anyone's hopes up of when and say, 'Oh, it's coming out of this time,' and then missing the deadlines, but I'm going to try to release it while it's still summer," he added. "I'm going to try to release the album within the summertime. It'll fit there really nicely."
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