If Frank Ocean wanted to play you a song, you'd drive across town in the pouring rain, right? That's how we've ended up at Jungle City, a sound studio in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. When we walk in, Ocean leading the way, Pharrell Williams turns down the music and greets him warmly. "Here you are," the prolific rapper and producer tells him. "You've walked in at the right time."

"Sweet," Ocean replies, picking up Pharrell's diamond-studded gold chain that sits—fat as a tow rope—at the edge of the mixing board. Ocean, dressed in a gray Supreme hoodie, jeans, and black Wallabees, smiles as he dons the weighty necklace—it jibes with the new Rolex on his left wrist, the Cartier Juste Un Clou bracelet on his right. In a bit, he'll Instagram a bejeweled portrait of himself, but first he unveils three new tracks, stored on his phone, that Pharrell pronounces "crazy, with a lot of comprehensive layers just sort of living harmoniously." When Ocean says he worries a rap number called "Blue Whale" is "risky because I'm rhyming," Pharrell shakes his head.

"That's not risky. That thought is dead," he says. "It's like, 'You know, I rhyme, too.' "

Turning to me, Pharrell says, "I always call him James Taylor. He's probably the closest thing to a writer's perfect emplification of the unconscious. All the songs are like movies. All you need to do is close your eyes."

Now it's Pharrell's turn to spin a track-in-progress. They listen, bobbing their heads slightly, occasionally both bursting into song. When the room is quiet again, Ocean says the song "feels like a Rubik's Cube melodically. You want something emotionally rich on that, you know what I'm saying? But if I listen to it enough, I could map a way out." Before we exit, they agree Ocean will come back later this evening to work on it. Pharrell is attending the first show of Jay-Z's eight-night run at the brand-new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, but he says he'll come back, too. "Ain't no afterparty more important than this."

"Map a way out"—it's a phrase Ocean will use more than once during the next four hours as we talk about his life and especially his last few months. He's still just 25, but it feels like he packed ten years' worth of living into 2012 alone, releasing a heralded album, Channel Orange, in July and headlining Saturday Night Live's season premiere in September. Throughout this period he has also been handling the reverberations of something he revealed on Tumblr just before Channel Orange's debut: his memories of an intimate relationship with his first love, a man—a rare admission in the macho world of hip-hop and R&B.

It's important to Ocean to be the master of his own identity: Last year he changed his name from Lonny Breaux to Christopher Francis Ocean, drawing on Frank Sinatra and the original Ocean's 11 film for inspiration. And yet he admits that the failed relationship he mentioned on Tumblr sent him spinning out of control, rocking him even as it improved his musicality, transforming him from a man with skills to a skillful man with something he suddenly was burning to say. What was going through his mind this summer, he tells me, was something like this: "If I'm going to say this, I'm going to be better than all you pieces of shit. What you going to say now? You can't say, 'Oh, they're only listening to him because he said this.' No, they're listening to me because I'm gifted, and this project is brilliant."