Shenseea Says Mother’s Death Is Why She Moved To America: “I Couldn’t Stay There”

Though being in the United States is fitting since she’s signed to Interscope Records, Jamaican singer Shenseea has revealed that her move to the ‘land of opportunity’ was heavily influenced by the loss of her mother, Castilyn Eleanor Williams.

The matriarch, who lived with her daughter, transitioned in June 2020 after a brief hospitalization.

“I know you guys hear me talk about this a lot, but the death of my mom was really traumatizing for me and I couldn’t stay there,” Shenseea said during an Instagram Live over the weekend.

“I moved from where we were living at the time and it was still like, you know, it was still too much. So, I just left the country and brought my baby and my little core family with me, and we just took off and said that yow, we’re gonna start over and tuh, this is the start.”

In June, Shenseea had shared that she bought a new home in the US, flaunting it on Instagram with photos of the stylish interior and mature orange trees on the property. “New house 🏠 who dis? 🔑,” she had captioned the photos.

Yet the journey to this point has been a rough one for the Waistline singer. In May 2020, a month before her mother’s demise, they revisited her childhood home in the inner city, where she opened up about her mother’s sacrifices to be a provider.

“Mommy was a single parent and worked live-in jobs, so, during my high school years, I moved back and forth between relatives just to get a place to stay,” she wrote in an Instagram post at time. “Then drop out a college (financial problems). Me get a nine-to-five and help me mada build a board house just to call our own. Yes, we were in the ghetto BUT a long time me have ambition…”

With that ambition, she aspired to elevate her mother’s life through her music career. “Mi disappointed seh mi just a really start [to] show her [a good] life,” she later shared in a livestream. 

Now in a new country, Shenseea is focused on familiarising herself with people and places and exploring new sounds for future releases. 

“I just wanna say thank you to everybody who’s on this new journey with me…” she said.

“My style of music is gonna be so different now because you know I make my big move from my country, so, I’m now an immigrant and it’s so hard because I barely know anybody, so, it’s a whole new life for me and I know many people can relate to that… I’m figuring it out as I go and it’s really hard because I’m trying to adjust and trying to find the new me of who I want to become as an artist, so, I’m here experimenting and doing a little bit of this, doing a little bit of that, whatever I can do.”

In 2018, the singer, who has never met her Korean father, said she’d be open to a meeting.

“It’s not a must [to meet him] but I know I would not be in tears. We could find out about each other. I would not shun him,” she told the Jamaica Star. “Everything I’ve been through [including not having a father] really made me the person I am and I love who I am, although I have to work on things like forgiving people,” she added at the time.