Bonita Jalane Is Done Kissing Frogs And She's Not Looking Back
The Brooklyn-born, Atlanta-bred singer-songwriter on healing through music, finding purpose, and why the frogs were never really about the frogs.
Atlanta had no business being this nice in early March. The sun was out, the air had that little warmth in it that makes you forget winter was ever a thing. It felt like the city was in a good mood for no particular reason. We pulled up to Chil Studios and Bonita Jalane was there, already smiling, already present in a way that some people just aren’t until they’ve had their third coffee. There was no easing into it. No awkward first five minutes. She showed up excited and brought the kind of energy that makes your job easy without you having to ask. And with a day like that behind us, it felt like the perfect backdrop for everything she had to say.
Bonita Jalane is Brooklyn-born, but she’s been in Atlanta for a while, so she calls herself an “apple peach,” which is one of the coolest things I’ve heard all month. Music was never really a choice for her either. Her grandfather toured the chitlin circuit. She was in a choir at five years old, traveling to Japan and Canada, and already holding notes most kids her age aren’t even thinking about. By her mid-teens, she’d decided to pursue music seriously, and not long after that, she was laying hooks for the likes of Dipset. Just casually! As one does.
Fast forward to 2025, and ‘Kept Kissing Frogs’ – the album – drops. For Bonita, frogs is an acronym. Forgive, Release, Overcome, Grow. The “frogs” on this album aren’t bad exes. They’re the hard things: depression, fear, betrayal, the stuff you have to move through to actually become yourself.
“Instead of me calling depression or somebody betraying you ‘snakes’, I turned it into frogs. In order to get to the next level, you gotta forgive, release, overcome, and grow.”
She wasn’t kissing frogs looking for a prince. That was the “work” that had to be done and the process to get where she is now. That reframe alone made me want to go back and relisten to the whole thing differently.
Her influences are thee ones. Dinah Washington, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Lauryn Hill, Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald. Bonita is pulling from people who treated singing like a calling, not a career, and you can hear that in what she does. There’s weight behind how she moves through a song. Sonically, I hear Jill Scott. I hear Teedra Moses. On songs like “Somebody”, you hear how Bonita blends modern R&B production with classic soul influence.
When I asked her which track off Kept Kissing Frogs she’d want someone to start with, she said, “That’s like separating a mama from all her kids,” which is a perfect answer. But she landed on “I Love Myself.” She talked about it like an affirmation you say to yourself when you’re running low, when you’ve been giving grace to everybody but yourself.
Her dream collab? Lauryn Hill. She reasoned that it would be healing and that a song like that could move across generations. Bonita is clearly thinking about legacy and not just virality, which in 2026 is genuinely refreshing to hear from an artist that we’re just discovering.
What she wants you to feel is nostalgia. She wants you to feel like there’s more out there for you. She’s not making music to be a soundtrack; she’s making it to remind people they have a purpose worth showing up for. Whether or not Kept Kissing Frogs does that for you will probably depend on where you are in your own process right now. But give it a real listen. Bonita Jalane is just getting started, and she sounds like she already knows exactly where she’s going.
Stream Kept Kissing Frogs now.
YAMS Magazine is built for people who take R&B personally. Keep up with Bonita Jalane at @BonitaJalane.