For years, Victoria Monét made her living from songs that became famous in other people’s voices. Ariana Grande recorded several of them: “thank u, next,” “7 rings,” “34+35,” “positions.” Monét also wrote for Brandy, Chloe x Halle, Fifth Harmony, Selena Gomez, BLACKPINK — a client list most songwriters would kill for, and one that paid her bills for years before her own name meant much to anyone outside the industry.
The first real disappointment landed before most listeners had even heard of her. She’d connected with Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins on Myspace, of all places, and got invited out to Los Angeles to audition for a girl group he was putting together, Purple Reign. She made the cut, left Sacramento, signed to Motown along with the rest of the group. No album ever came out. Motown dropped them first.
We got dropped unfortunately, but I kept writing songs, and I was able to build a lot of relationships. —Monét
Monét recounted the experience in a 2014 interview. By then she’d stayed in L.A., kept writing, and landed a second deal — solo this time, with Atlantic. That one didn’t break through either. She put out a two-part EP called Nightmares & Lullabies, and by the time it was finished, songwriting had quietly become the more dependable half of her career.
None of that was unusual on its own — plenty of writers make their money off other people’s records. What’s less common is refusing to let that arrangement calcify into a whole career. She kept releasing her own music anyway: four EPs between 2014 and 2018, each one showing real range without ever quite telling a stranger what a Victoria Monét song was supposed to sound like. Meanwhile the Grande collaborations kept landing on records that were playing everywhere.
At some point that gap — between the songs everyone knew and the ones with her name on them — had to either close or keep widening forever. Monét chose to close it, and paid for the attempt herself: studio time, videos, live shows, funded out of songwriting money, with a girl group and one failed record deal already behind her and no particular reason to expect this would go differently.
“I really had to take a leap of faith.” She said that to Paper in 2020. Her earlier records, she explained, had mostly been squeezed in around sessions built for other artists — sessions where somebody else’s label and somebody else’s audience were already waiting. Making Jaguar meant protecting more of that time for herself.
Platoon put the album out in August 2020. It opened at No. 174 on the Billboard 200, hit No. 20 on Top R&B Albums, topped the Heatseekers chart, and fell off the Billboard 200 after a single week. By chart math alone, it barely registers.
But Jaguar answered a question her earlier EPs never had — horns, strings, layered vocals, live instrumentation, all of it pulling her love of funk, disco and soul into something that still sounded current. Producer D’Mile built that bridge with her. Even the visuals, brown and gold and warm, matched the temperature of the music rather than just decorating it.
“I combine lineages.” She told Vulture. Not a hunt for some untouched sound nobody had found yet — more like finding her own footing inside music she’d already inherited.
She and D’Mile wrote material for Jaguar and Jaguar II across roughly the same stretch of time, which is probably why the sequel doesn’t sound like someone circling back three years later to chase whatever’s trending. It sounds like the second half of a thought.
A lot happened in those three years. Her daughter Hazel was born in February 2021. Around eight or nine weeks later, in the middle of postpartum depression, she wrote “On My Mama.” She’s since said, in an Apple Music interview picked up by Blavity, that she didn’t believe the confidence in her own lyrics while she was writing them. She wrote them anyway, partly to talk herself into feeling that way.
The song sat until June 2023, then climbed to No. 33 on the Hot 100 — her first solo top-40 hit — and went to No. 1 on multiple radio formats. Jaguar II followed two months later, through Lovett Music and RCA. It entered the Billboard 200 at No. 60, the R&B chart at No. 6, moving 15,000 equivalent units in its first week. Her first headlining tour sold out fast enough that some shows got bumped to bigger rooms mid-run.
Then the Grammys: seven nominations, three wins — Best New Artist, Best R&B Album, Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Best New Artist, for someone more than a decade into her professional career, sounds almost like a typo. Monét saw it differently.
As much as I was ready the first year I moved to L.A. to be an artist, it wasn’t the time. —Monét
Those years weren’t wasted, in other words. They paid for the records. They introduced her to the people she’d eventually need. And they taught her, the slow way, exactly how much a solo career actually costs.
How She Actually Made These Decisions
Songwriting Paid the Bills so the Riskier Thing Could Survive
She didn’t walk away from songwriting in some triumphant leap. She kept doing it, plainly, because it worked.
Those sessions put her in rooms with producers, engineers and vocal arrangers operating at the top of pop music. Working with Grande — a relationship that started before Grande hit her commercial peak — gave Monét a close look at how a hit record actually gets made, finished and pushed into the world. It also paid for everything she’d eventually spend on herself.
That came at a real cost. A day spent on someone else’s session was a day she couldn’t spend on her own catalogue, and a good song given away wasn’t hers to release later. Sometime around Jaguar, she started holding more of that time back. Not walking away from the work supporting her — just refusing to let it eat everything.
Only after Doing Every Job Herself Did She Start Handing Them Off
Before there was a real team around her, touring meant doing basically every job herself: hair, makeup, booking flights, hiring the sound engineer, handling payroll. She learned what those jobs required because, for a stretch, there was simply no one else to do them.
Delegating, once it happened, wasn’t a luxury upgrade — it was practical. It gave back the hours for the parts of the job that couldn’t be handed to anyone else: writing, recording, performing.
The Network Behind Her Breakthrough
Rachelle Jean-Louis started managing Monét in 2018, back when the solo career had almost no institutional backing at all. Her job, in effect, was organizing a business Monét had already been running by herself, badly, out of necessity.
D’Mile brought a different kind of consistency. He co-wrote or produced most of Jaguar II, and he’d worked with Monét long enough to understand exactly which older references she wanted to pull forward. Grande stayed close too — not just for the songwriting credits, which were considerable, but because Monét had watched a genuinely global pop career operate from about as close as anyone gets. Platoon and RCA arrived at different moments for different reasons: Platoon backed Jaguar while nothing was proven yet, RCA showed up once the sound already had an audience behind it.
The guest list on Jaguar II reads the same way — chosen, not just booked. Lucky Daye brought a contemporary R&B presence to “Smoke.” Buju Banton, an artist Monét grew up hearing through her mother, showed up on “Party Girls.” Earth, Wind & Fire joined Monét and Hazel on “Hollywood,” closing a loop back to the band whose sound had shaped Jaguar in the first place.
It’s a small network. Small enough that you can actually name everyone in it and say what they did. Nobody here was asked to be the whole answer.
The Strategy You Can Apply
Prove It before You Enlarge It
Jaguar didn’t need a strong chart position to answer the only question that mattered at the time — would anyone actually come back for more of this sound? For a founder or an independent creative, that same test usually looks smaller than expected: one product, a short pilot, a service offered to a narrow group of people who actually pay attention. Put a finished thing in front of real people and watch what they do with it, not what they say about it.
Set a Deadline for the Test
Give that first version an actual end date instead of letting it drift in development forever. Ninety days is often enough to find out whether customers reorder, clients renew, or readers actually subscribe rather than just click once. Decide beforehand which of those responses would count as a real signal — deciding that after the fact just means you’ll talk yourself into whatever result you got.
Take the Result into the Room
By the time RCA got involved with Jaguar II, Monét already had a finished record, a real audience, and a sound nobody had to explain to them. That kind of proof doesn’t guarantee good contract terms — those stay private, and nobody outside the deal actually knows what RCA offered. What it does is change the nature of the conversation. You’re not asking someone to imagine a career. You’re handing them something they can listen to right now.
FAQ
Why was Victoria Monét eligible for Best New Artist after working in music for so long?
Grammy eligibility tracks when a performer breaks through publicly, not when they started working. Monét had years of songwriting credits and several EPs behind her already — but Jaguar II was the project that put her in front of a much bigger audience as a solo artist, which is the thing the category is actually measuring.
Was Jaguar II a commercial underperformer, given it only peaked at No. 60?
By Billboard 200 standards, yes, that’s a modest number. But the same album gave her a first top-40 single, backed a sold-out tour, and won three Grammys. Judged as a breakthrough rather than a blockbuster, it did exactly what it needed to.
Does Victoria Monét own her masters?
Not something that’s been made public. Jaguar II came out through Lovett Music and RCA, but that credit line doesn’t tell you anything about who owns the masters, how royalties are split, or whether there’s any equity involved.
Which Ariana Grande songs did Victoria Monét help write?
“thank u, next,” “7 rings,” “34+35,” “positions,” “Be Alright,” “NASA,” “Needy” — all with other credited writers alongside her, not solo compositions.
What actually changed Victoria Monét’s career?
No single moment did it. Jaguar gave her an identifiable sound. “On My Mama” gave her a crossover hit. Jaguar II landed with better distribution and an audience that was already waiting. The Grammys just made official what had already been true for a while.
