Lil Uzi Vert feigned disinterest, twisting his face and shaking his head, a bright mop of magenta-tipped dreads. “I hate interviews,” he said. Uzi, 22, claims he doesn’t let many people into his private life, and when we met on the edges of Weehawken, New Jersey — a Hudson River-lined town where he was staying the night during a tour stop — he was not so willing to speak freely. And why should he? “I don’t trust nobody. Nobody. Not even the people around me,” he said, his hometown friend Spike in earshot. “They just the people that I’m a little bit more familiar with. You can get familiar with people’s ways; you can learn people. But you don’t ever let your guard down.”

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That’s not all true, of course. There is one recent exception: Brittany Byrd, his girlfriend and creative muse. On “Paradise,” the airy bonus cut from his 2015 LUV Is RAGE mixtape, Uzi maps the highs of their relationship. That feeling of new love, as affirmed in the song, pushed the Philadelphia-born rager to truly open up for the first time. Paradise, it’s somewhere that I never been before, he confesses on the blissful hook. We lip lock until our lips are swollen/ Live in the moment good times are golden/ I’m not gonna lie you got me open.

The pair’s relationship, which is well-documented across social media, has been going on for about a year now, and on the day of our interview, they’d recently gotten back together after a week-long split. “I was being a little extra,” was all Uzi would divulge about the rift. Just days prior, he punctuated the initial break in a solitary tweet: the word “Single” was followed by a two-heart emoji and the copyright symbol (one user, @siarah_, expressed a pretty unanimous sentiment among fans: “NIGGA CALL BRITT RIGHT NOW & WORK THIS OUT… WE WERE ROOTING FOR YALL!!!!”). Less than an hour later, he released an inky lament called “Stole Your Luv” on SoundCloud, which contemplated the rigors of intimacy and dating.