Ditching the formula was essential for Doechii while she was in the studio cooking up her latest mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal. She knows the appeal of a big commercial hit, something palatable and only barely creative — something almost anyone could do. But her musical interests are more deeply connected to delivering unique stories that find humor in dark situations. On the latest episode of Rolling Stone‘s The Breakdown, the Florida rapper explains how moving away from any preset expectations and carving out her own path led her to “Denial Is a River.”

“I was really afraid of how raw and honest I was being in that record,” Doechii explains. “And I know that a lot of my fans really, really love that record because I made it humorous, but it actually is very, very dark.” The song was inspired by a journal entry and the chronological flow of Slick Rick’s classic “A Children’s Story.” Doechii locked in with her engineer Jaya Love and created a gripping story about finding out her ex-boyfriend cheated on her with a man.

“This song is really just like people hearing how I am, the inner dialog that I’m having with myself. Like, OK, maybe you should really unpack that,” she said. “This is an inner dialog that I’m having with the voices in my head. It just seems like I’m less crazy because I do it with a funny voice.” The approach gave her structure, but didn’t take away from her strengths as a lyricist.

Love, who watched the record pour out of Doechii in the studio, shares: “I wasn’t surprised to hear how honest she was. The only surprising factor of it was just how quickly it came about. But the contents of the song were not surprising at all.”

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Doechii was in the process of creating an album when an unexpected creative detour led her to Alligator Bites Never Heal. She needed that experience to break away from being codependent on her label and the opinions of everyone else around her. She had to figure out her formula for herself. “That was my version of like, all right, I’m gonna let everything go. I’m getting sober. I’m not talking to nobody. I’m not talking to my label. I’m finna be in my house. I’ma paint and I’ma write, and I’m not talking to anybody,” Doechii says. “That’s me exploding, when I exclude myself and I shut down and I get in my hermit.”

What she learned in the process was that making music was a way to streamline her healing process. “I have to make music for therapy. And for me, that’s my formula,” she says. “If it blows up on TikTok, it blows up. But I can’t make music from that place. It distracts me, and then I’m not able to tell the truth. Sometimes, those formulas that fit for pop and radio and TikTok and the internet, you’re making music for moments. Instead of making music for therapy, you dilute your message. You dilute your creativity. You lose something — you lose the story.”