Ennis Hawkins opens this chapter with "The Art of Being Alone," a candid account of how a six-year creative habit evolved into something both sustaining and difficult. He writes about addiction to making music as honestly as someone describes an old friendship: with grit, gratitude, and the ache of recognition. The song is a short report from the inside about what it feels like when the thing you love becomes a shape you must learn to live beside rather than be consumed by, and the voice behind it is steady, conversational, and direct.
The origin story is simple but weighty. Hawkins started making hip-hop six years ago and carried that practice through college and beyond; along the way the drive to keep writing became not just a discipline but something habitual. The song names that habit and the complicated gratitude that comes with it: grateful for time, grateful for resources, and aware that passion can harden into a kind of dependence. Rather than moralizing, the writing documents the sensation of living with an urgent call that won’t be ignored.
Sonically, the arrangement gives the words room to exist not by ornamentation but by restraint. Small musical gestures underline particular moments of confession and resolve; they create a shape that allows the story to breathe. Hawkins’ voice is the primary instrument here, carrying the mixture of urgency and calm that makes the narrative credible. It’s a personal inventory delivered without drama, the kind of report you might get over a coffee between people who matter to one another.
The emotional work the song performs is about recognition and choice. It makes the listener feel the hold of a habit that has done good and harm, and it suggests that naming the problem is the first move toward deciding what to do with it. That honesty is what gives the song its quiet force: a refusal to hide complexity or to pretend the answer is simple. Instead, it models an active curiosity about how to live with what you love.
For Ennis Hawkins, The Art of Being Alone is not an endpoint but a reckoning on the path forward. It marks a moment when the artist can look back and identify both the roots of his practice and the places it needs gentling. That sense of ongoing work, not dramatic redemption but patient tending, is what makes this release matter now.
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