ASSATA TROI TURNS 5 YEARS OLD 🌹

WOW… IT’S BEEN 5 YEARS SINCE THE RELEASE OF ASSATA TROI 🥹 🎼

Not so fun fact: I named this album after my baby girl who unfortunately passed away before she could make it here to bless us with her physical presence 💔🕊️❤️‍🩹 I wanted to carry what would've been her name with me always….so I named my FREER debut, Assata Troi 👑

I didn't know how challenging this next phase would be… but I knew I was ready to say goodbye to my secret keeper, my bad influence, codependent friend; PAIN. So I put it all in this body of work and on Juneteenth 2020, for the first time in my life I sought FREEDOM 🗝🔓 ⛓️

Written by BL Shirelle

I released my FREER Records debut, Assata Troi, on Juneteenth, 2020 — in the middle of a global pandemic, at the height of national reckoning, and in the quiet wreckage of my own life. That album was not just a musical project. It was a cry, a prayer, and a choice. Before Assata Troi, I had dropped two mixtapes: Restricted Movement in 2016 and Restricted Movement II in 2018. They were both full of heart. But Assata Troi sounded like evolution. It sounded like growth. It sounded like I had finally sharpened the tools I’d spent years learning to hold.

Working with Die Jim Crow between 2016 and 2020 changed my entire musical acumen. I was growing as an artist—but also, I was unraveling and rebuilding as a human being. I was deep in the process of unlearning, grieving, questioning everything I thought I knew. In 2018, my wife and I were expecting a child. A daughter. We named her Assata Troi. She passed away before she could be born. Her name meant: She who struggles is a warrior. And that felt like both of us. Like ALL of us.

Photo: Fury Young

It was a declaration that beyond the fight, there is beauty. Beyond the trauma, there is transformation. We saw her as the one who would break the cycles. A chance to do better, be better. After we lost her, I spiraled. Quietly. Loudly. Spiritually. I self-medicated with pills. I’ve battled addiction in my life since a young age — weed at 11, xanax at 13, syrup (promethazine and codeine) at 14. I’ve tried nearly every pill. I was a street kid with a soul full of grief. In the wake of losing my daughter, I slipped.

I was also under pressure — rising roles at both of my jobs, approaching life off parole, carrying the weight of being the “strong one.” My wife was going through her own separate journey with the loss. I ended up back on pills (xanax to be specific). During this haze, Assata Troi was being made. In real time. A mirror I was scared to look into — but couldn't stop facing. Somewhere in the cracks between “productive” and “falling apart,” I overdosed on something. A bad pill. I still don’t know what was in it. It stole three days from me. Three whole days of mindless motion.

Assata Troi: Behind The Scenes

Until I came to: screaming in the middle of Roosevelt Boulevard, the deadliest city highway in Philly. Out of my moving car. Mouth open, spit flying, fists clenched, soul unraveling. And then — this older woman pulled over, rolled down her window and said, “Baby, are you okay?” And her voice  plus her eye contact pulled me back to Earth. Like a hand reaching into the water when you're too far gone. I don’t know what was so special about her – she damn sure wasn’t the first one to try and help me in these 72 hours. 

I got back in the car. Didn’t say a word. Drove in silence. Got home. Slept off whatever had possessed me. When I woke up, I wrote the first song of the album, “SIGS.” (Shit I Gotta Say). The beat was so hard, but for whatever reason, the loop was unorthodox, and I couldn't catch it for a while. I remember spilling my heart out, trying to find my way back – before the trauma…could I even fathom that person? Just saying all the things that haunt me in my own life, the things that I always knew in the back of my mind, but I may not say:

SIGS - BL Shirelle

“I’d have to rewind the times / before the rhymes
I’d have to rewind the time / They locked me for that dime
I’d have to rewind before the first time I sold to mom
I’d have to rewind my mind to times I don’t want reminded
I'm a victim of recidivism / I'll only be civilized in the prison system.”

That last line was my truth at the time. 

I didn’t know how to be free. That’s what addiction does. That’s what grief does. That’s what generational trauma does. I’d seen so many people lose their minds… this was surely the closest I’d been.

“When You Need Me” - BL Shirelle

I found myself alone at this moment. I was typically the friend people called for answers, a criminal connection or a good time. My friend group was really reflective of my choices, so as I prepared to walk through a door of destiny, I also shut some doors to help me move forward to a new chapter in my life. I told you all about it in a song called “When you need me”. It's about one of my best friends of 30 years. 

“I ain't got a friend
You never take responsibility
You ain't trying to fend
For your family, you too busy fucking trying to trend
If you can level up, then da bien
You begged me to get you some employment
Ain't even work long enough for unemployment
Keep getting booked. You a burden now, and this shits annoying
Oh, you mad I ain't send no pictures
Well, this your fifth bid, I'm waiting on your silly ass to get the picture”

We don’t talk anymore. That friendship ended. Many others did, too.
Because when you start growing, some people don’t recognize you anymore — And some people don’t want to. I was alone. But I was moving forward. That song marked the beginning of my separation from such individuals, becoming aware of those who only appeared when they needed something, brought negative energy, or projected their fears onto my own aspirations.

In those three days of psychosis, I don’t remember much. I’ve heard a lot about what took place, but I remember God.
I talked to God like my life depended on it — because it did. I grew up in the fire-baptized church. Sunday school. Holiness. Shouting. I stopped knowing what to call God when I realized the church didn’t know what to call me—a “gay woman?”, “a criminal?”... In that moment, I didn’t need a name – I just needed something BIGGER than me.

And God answered.

I haven’t touched a pill since.

This wasn’t just an album anymore. More a reckoning. A resurrection. A release.

Till I Go - BL Shirelle

I got off parole while creating Assata Troi, but still imprisoned by memory. Twenty years of constant incarceration is hard to forget. This album gave me the first real chance I’d ever had — to choose healing.

“I’d have to rewind the times….” to a song I wrote when I was 13 years old.
Back when I still had some innocence to lose.
Back when I was already doubting if God had a place for someone like me.

That song was the last song on the album, called “‘Til I Go.” I knew I had to put it on Assata Troi — not just because it held up, but because it reminded me: I’ve always been searching. And now, I was finally starting to find.

I barely changed a lyric from my 13 year old’s version:

“So if I praise my God until I go numb
And die and then I find out it was the wrong one
Am I condemned because I was speaking in the wrong tongue?
I'm just translating the lyrics of the song sung.

Only way will I know
I won’t know until I go
And if I go before you go
I promise try to let you know.”

Photo: Britni West

Assata Troi wasn’t just about grief—it was about lineage. It was about the chains that traveled through generations, and how I finally reached down and started cutting them loose.

I wrote “Conspiracy” thinking about mother-daughter co-defendants in prison.
Thinking about how my mom and I were locked up together when I was just a kid.
Thinking about how lifers in Pennsylvania serve LIFE for conspiracy—charges built on silence, fear, association.

I wrote “Generational Curse” to name the ghosts that haunted every woman in my family.

I thought about my grandmother, Margaree’s stress, my fathers’ flaws I see so strongly in myself, my son – who is impulsive, brilliant, high-risk, yet beautiful. Marked, targeted to one day fill a prison bed.

“Do it for Margaree and do it for Pearlie Mae
They blood pressure equivalent to this murder rate
With sugar levels that synonyms to attorney rates
I gotta update the price on my life insurance rate
Black matriarchs never late/  for their early grave
Getting calls before the morning break
Unsure if they gotta mourn my wake
It's a cycle that I swore I break
See my son's tortured traits
Praying he abort this fate…”

Generational Curse - BL Shirelle

Every word of that came from my depths.
That’s the part of this album that hits me the deepest.

Because it’s real. It’s not just about me. It’s about everyone before me, and everyone who might come after if I don’t make different choices.

And now, five years later, I can finally say it:

I had to raise myself the way I wanted to raise Assata.

With gentleness. With boundaries. With protection. With faith. With discipline. With love.

And Assata Troi—that album, that child, that moment — was the first proof that I could.