A few days after Rebecca Black graduated from high school, the 18-year-old bid farewell to her family in Orange County and moved to Los Angeles, hopping on a path taken by so many other young dreamers, hoping for a voice and a place in the music business.

“Literally within a week of graduating I packed my bags and moved up here,” Black, now 19, says during an interview at the West Hollywood home studio where she’d gone for a recent songwriting session.

“And that was when I was able to really for the first time start to figure out the music I wanted to make, and really focus on it.”

Black, you should know, didn’t arrive in Hollywood with just suitcases filled with clothes and boxes bulging with personal stuff. She also lugged some unwanted baggage that had lingered since 2011, when the then 13-year-old found herself at the center of one of the biggest and most bizarre viral video sensations.

Many of you may have recognized her name. Many more will surely know the song “Friday” in all its Auto-Tuned glory and the video that accompanied it.

After the song and video were posted on YouTube, it went unnoticed for a month or two but then exploded, a pop culture supernova, soaring to tens of millions of views within a week or two as the world stood in judgment and more or less declared “Friday” the worst song of all time, and also asked who does this Rebecca Black think she is to do this and think she won’t face our scorn and derision?

Black pursued the musical opportunities that arose out of the fame and infamy of “Friday” for a few years, recording half a dozen or so new and better songs, and playing a handful of shows at venues including the House of Blues in Anaheim.

And then she stepped away from all that, went back to high school – she’d been doing online home school – and made YouTube videos to feed her creative impulse. She pointedly did not pursue more songs or an album or a tour.

Until now, which is why we tracked down Black at the home of songwriter/producer Scott Effman to find out where she’s been and what she’s up to five years after “Friday.”

“I don’t even like to say I took a bit of a break from music,” Black says, though that’s pretty much what she did.

She’d made friends with a bunch of YouTubers who had encouraged her to get into that game, and the summer before she enrolled at Villa Park High School for her junior year that’s just what she did, sharing her life and her personality with fans who knew her mostly for her songs or, truthfully, for that song.

YouTube went great – her main channel has 1.3 million subscribers and 268 million views, about 103 million of those for “Friday.” High school? Not so much, at least at first.

“When I would walk into the classroom on the first day of school, sometimes people would see me and just laugh,” Black says. “Or they would call attendance for the first time and I would be, like, dreading for my name to be called, and then everyone would be, like, ‘Wait, what?’”

Eventually she found a group of good friends and school life settled down, she says, but always in the back of her mind was a question: Can I still make it, someday, as a singer and musician?

Her parents agreed to let her try once she graduated from high school, and so in the summer of 2015 she moved to Los Angeles, signed with new management and teamed up with songwriter/music developer Shari Short and started finding out what she had to offer as an artist.

From October to June, she says, she worked on songs, often in small studios with Short and other writers, producers and musicians, five days a week, learning that she had a voice with which to sing and also to speak her thoughts and opinions on every part of the process.

“When I was younger, I was too afraid to ask to be involved,” Black says. At 18, on her own, those old feelings still were there. “I felt like I couldn’t speak,” she says. “I felt like I was the most untalented person in the room.

“But within a few months, I was able to muster up a bit more confidence and feel a bit more better about myself,” she says. “I never want to sound too cliché when I’m saying this, but it’s true: I spent a lot of time, especially in the last year and a half of my life, trying to listen to myself and figure out what I really want. The kind of music I want to make, what I want to say in my songs, how I work, how I enjoy the process.”

• • •

“The Great Divide” is the first fruit of her fresh start in Los Angeles, her first single in three years or so, and a song Black says is her first to represent the artist she sees herself as today.

“‘The Great Divide’ was one of the first ones I wrote that wasn’t about a boy or something like that,” she says. “It’s about that moment when you know you’re about to do something that’s going to change your life for a while, but you know it’s for the best.

“It’s not an easy thing to do, but you know you have to do,” Black says. “I was just holding on to so much of my past and I was afraid of change. That day that we wrote that song was the day I was finally able to say, ‘I’m going to do this for myself. I know that I’m going to be OK. I just have to trust myself.’”

Short, who co-wrote “The Great Divide” with Black and two other songwriters, says the song brings out something deep and true from within Black.

“It lends to such a great performance,” Short says. “She doesn’t need Auto-Tune, she doesn’t need all this tricky stuff, so when people come to the show, they’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh!’”

Since then Black, Short and the others have written more songs.

An unreleased one titled “Wasted Youth” is online and, like “The Great Divide,” it presents a 19-year-old woman exploring the events and emotions of her current life.

In the new year, Black plans to release more singles, maybe an EP, taking her time to do it right this time.

“That thing that happened when I was 13, that was not normal! It was weird!” Black says. But that thing, “Friday,” provided more good than bad, opening doors and opportunities like those she’s enjoying today.

“I’ve had some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that girls my age would kill for,” she says. “That me as a 13-year-old would kill for.”

Her parents have been supportive through it all, Black says, even though it was difficult for them to let her go so young. But they trust, she says, and understand that this moment in her life is so important for her to experience.

“We made a promise,” Black says. “I’m going to try this out for me. I said, ‘Please allow me to just give it my all, and if it doesn’t work, OK.’

“But I can’t live my life thinking ‘what if?’”

Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com