His grandmother was Pentecostal Evangelical, and his mother and her siblings were teased as kids for being “holy rollers.” “I never sang or played in church,” Ocean wrote in one of his first Tumblr posts. “I remember being kind of intimidated by the idea of it actually. Church was the ’hood Juilliard to me. All the coldest musicians came out of there.” Eventually he left his mother’s church and struck out on his own, attending Catholic Mass for a while and then a small Lutheran school, though that was less about religion than discipline. “I got kicked out of every school I went to,” Ocean said. “The last school that kicked me out had a folder of [expletive] that I had done. They sent the folder in a manila envelope to my house.”

He was drawn toward music at first not because of any burning urge toward art or self-expression; it was about having a different set of opportunities. “It was about the freedom and the mobility that having money would allow me,” he said. Ocean stuck with academics long enough to graduate from John Ehret High School, then enrolled at the University of New Orleans to study English in the fall of 2005. But against his mother’s wishes, he went deeper into making music, writing rudimentary songs on an old Triton keyboard. When Katrina hit in August 2005, Ocean transferred briefly to the University of Louisiana in Lafayette but then quickly decided to leave. When a friend in Los Angeles promised to give him a deal on some studio time, Ocean packed up his car and set out.

“This is our life,” Chris Clancy said, with a mixture of pride and resignation. We were sitting in the dining room of the Clancy house in Miracle Mile, in Los Angeles, where two members of Odd Future had just shown up within minutes of each other. Each made obscene gestures at us from the front yard, then bounced into the house asking what was for dinner. Chris is an earnest, thoughtful guy, a 10-year veteran of Interscope records who worked with Eminem; Kelly, who co-manages Ocean with her husband, worked at Interscope for seven years and also serves as a kind of den mother. (Taco, one of the O.F. members who had shown up, was demanding that she cook him Japanese fried chicken.)

“Boys would come in and out, just like you’re seeing,” Kelly told me. In 2010, Ocean befriended Tyler Okonma, the outspoken ringleader of Odd Future known as Tyler, the Creator, and eventually Ocean started showing up at the Clancys along with the rest of the crew. The family vibe clearly appealed to him. “Frank would come in,” Kelly said, “but he wouldn’t say much. He was the quiet one. He wouldn’t ever say he was coming by. He would just pop up randomly and then kind of just sit there.”

When Ocean first came out to L.A. in 2006, his money ran out before he ever came close to getting his record done. To support himself, he worked as a “sandwich artist” at Subway, at Fatburger, Kinko’s, AT&T, and as a claims processor at Allstate, among other jobs. Eventually he discovered that it was possible to make money writing songs for other people; he knew he could sing, so he connected with producers and musicians who submitted tracks for major-label artists. The producers made the sonic beds and Ocean helped write lyrics and melodies, contributing to songs that would eventually be recorded by artists like Justin Bieber (“Bigger”), Brandy (“1st and Love”) and John Legend (“Quickly”).

Even then, he bristled at interference. “I had a problem listening to anybody,” he said. “I had a problem listening to A.-and-R.’s telling me how a song was supposed to sound, or what this artist’s vibe was.” As his profile grew, he began to work with producers and beat makers who liked his writing style and would let him use their studios free. Toward the end of 2008, he was making enough money to devote himself to music full time. He moved out of his apartment at 28th and Crenshaw and into a nicer place in Beverly Hills. In time he caught the attention of Christopher (Tricky) Stewart, the producer behind such hits as Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” Stewart helped Ocean make a go of it as a solo artist and get signed to Def Jam at the end of 2009.

The deal didn’t work out the way Ocean hoped. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said when I asked him what went wrong. “I think ultimately the problem with it was that nobody was ready to act on anything, any of the language [of the contract], except the language to keep me in it.” Def Jam never gave him a recording budget and basically left him on the shelf. After twisting for several months, Ocean decided to write and produce a record on his own. He solicited beats and backing tracks from friends, and he trolled the Internet for instrumentals to popular songs that he could repurpose with his own melodies and lyrics. (His piano skills at the time were pretty basic — today he takes piano and music-theory lessons every morning except Sundays — so he wasn’t going to write a record by sitting down at the keyboard.)