8 Things to Know About Kehlani, R&B's Current "It Girl"

Kehlani Parrish is in an Uber trying to order Chick-Fil-A. She's a month away from kicking off her tour in support of her 2015 mixtape, You Should Be Here — a collection of songs so good, even Billboard wants to call it an album.

The 19-year-old's personality and voice first turned heads on the sixth season of America's Got Talent as the frontwoman and only female member of Poplyfe. Following the show, the singer took judge Piers Morgan's advice to shed the band and pursue music as a solo artist — she shed her last name, too.

Kehlani has since released two mixtapes, collaborated with Chance the Rapper and BJ the Chicago Kid, and blossomed into R&B's current "it girl." Scroll through the eight things you should know about Kehlani below, and check out her music here.

She has gumption.

Kehlani was 12 years old when she performed as a singer for the first time. It was at a showcase in her hometown of Oakland, California, and the other performers, twelfth-graders, were six years older than her. Kehlani's guts and spunk pushed her to take part in the showcase, despite the age disparity.

"It was this showcase in Oakland, where this guy came to my performing arts school and just said, 'Anybody who wants to do this showcase can hop in this audition.' It was me and twelfth-graders, and I was a sixth-grader," she says. "I just got into the vocal class because I was out of dance because I had some knee issues. A lot of those kids were there for a couple of years and I had just switched over. So I was low-key like, 'Not only am I super young, but I’m the new kid in the class, so they already don’t consider me a singer, yet. I’m still the dancer that transferred.'"

Her debut tour is almost completely sold out.

With the exception of four dates, Kehlani's You Should Be Here tour has sold out.

Because her debut "album" is that good.

Billboard named Kehlani's You Should Be Here project the "year's first great R&B album." Even though YSBH is a mixtape, Billboard is right. Rarely does someone barely out of her teens imbue a project with such confidence, and that's what Kehlani did on YSBH.

She had the ultimate reaction to hearing herself on the radio for the first time.

"I was driving back from the Bay to go back to L.A., and we didn’t have an AUX cord," she says. "We had the radio, but it kept getting too static-y, so we turned it off. We pulled into a gas station, and I’m half-asleep. My song comes on and I start yelling, 'I’m too sleepy, you guys are playing games. Who fixed the AUX cord? There was an AUX cord the whole time?' They’re saying, 'No, this is the radio!' I’m saying, 'Oh shit. Turn it up!' It’s two, three in the morning at this random gas station in who-knows-where. It was crazy, it was tight."

Her style game is 100.

Lani Tsunami beasting in these streets.

She can dance as well as she sings.

Kehlani fell in love with dance before she fell in love with music. Problems with her knee led the singer to stop dancing for a while, during which time she started singing, only to find out that she can do both equally well.

She writes love songs about men AND women.

Kehlani is openly bisexual, and uses "he" and "she" interchangeably in her songs.

"I didn’t put a song that had anything to do with homosexuality on You Should Be Here," she says. "I felt like I put it out there on Cloud 19. Sometimes I don’t have any of those songs. Sometimes a lot of the songs will be about girls. Sometimes I make songs about girls and I say 'he' or I’ll make songs about guys and I say 'she,' or sometimes they’re exactly what they’re about. I feel like it just allows me to get a lot more perspective."

She promotes strong female images.

Kehlani was raised in a single family home, where she learned what it meant to "be a strong woman."

"That made me a really strong woman," she says of her upbringing. "Therefore, my music comes off preaching about being a strong woman. I think, as musicians, our music should be who we are. Sometimes it’s not — it’s someone else's. All heartfelt music and all honest music, it’s who we are. Of course our upbringing has everything to do with it."