Frank Ocean is neither a recluse nor a liar. He has revealed his intentions, his creative process, and his desires to us for years, but most of us are not paying attention. Four years after the release of his critically and commercially successful debut album, 2012's Channel Orange, fans and media outlets are demanding a new release from the musician. Right now, his aversion to schedules is as much a part of his public identity as the music itself.

Ocean is a rare figure. He is an R&B musician who has crossed over to a variety of different audiences. Music nerds and cultural neophytes love him equally. When Ocean revealed he once fell in love with another man, he solidified his place among a new guard of LGBT artists who would neither conform to expectations from others nor hide from their most authentic selves: two intoxicating qualities.

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Channel Orange was a deep, gorgeous, and intelligently structured work. Melodies on tracks like "Lost" and "Thinkin Bout You" were crisp and precise yet still familiar, as if Ocean had been humming them in your ear for years. "Pyramids," which clocks in at over nine minutes, is an expressive narrative journey that spans different genres ('80s funk, synth-heavy R&B, hip hop) and tempos with ease. It is Ocean's most stunning, unique, and strange song, and it's a prime example of why listeners want more.

Ocean has certainly stoked the anticipation for a new album. In April 2015, he posted two images to his Tumblr with the caption, "I got two versions. I got twooo versions…" and a series of hashtags (#ISSUE1 #ALBUM3 #JULY2015) to suggest a new album and an accompanying magazine would soon drop. And yet July of 2015 came and went, and no new album or magazine were released. Fans were frustrated, and they would be disappointed again when further teased release dates, the most recent being July 31 this year, yielded nothing.

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But this four-year interval hardly deviates from the norm. With other R&B artists, a long wait between albums is par for the course. Maxwell's latest release, blackSUMMERS'night, dropped seven years after his 2009 album BLACKsummers'night. Before 2009, he had not released an album in eight years. And D'Angelo, whose critically acclaimed album Black Messiah dropped in late 2014, took 14 years between albums. In the naughts, we counted five years between Erykah Badu's Worldwide Underground and New Amerykah Part One. We respected these gaps as necessary to the creative process—partly because we didn't have a choice.

Now, modern music consumption has allowed us to skew the realities of the creation process. Because music can be consumed and discarded so easily, we now expect our favorite artists to release songs based on our own personal desires. We're no longer reliant on radio stations, MTV, and album drops for new music. It can be consumed in concerts or at festivals and continuously through streaming services. The proliferation of mixtapes, EP or album packages, one-off trend-chasing singles, and bonus tracks means musicians have to maintain their audiences by consistently remaining in the public eye.

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Despite the non-appearance of a new record, Ocean has done precisely that. For better or worse, he has made the push and pull of creativity a facet of his public persona. His idiosyncratic blog illuminates his multifaceted, diffuse creative process: Ocean posts photos of himself in the studio next to headsets or soundboards; he compresses a full day into one lyrical thought. Once, he posted a small paragraph's worth of a post. "Mind is pretty blank right now," he wrote. He described the type of music he was listening to at the time (New Order, Gwen Stefani). He wrote about the movies he watched. He wrote about the books he had been reading and the TV shows he had been watching, and at the end, he wrote something key. "I'm back to work these days," it said.

The blog post wasn't just a list of the types of media and entertainment he had been consuming. It also represented a part of the creative process most creators tend to obscure: Sometimes we get distracted. Sometimes we need to consume other things to find drive in what we're doing for ourselves. And sometimes that drive takes us in directions we might not anticipate. "Storytelling's a different thing," Ocean once told a reporter for The Guardian. "It's the more interesting part about making music for me, or making albums and songs and stuff. So much so that I might not make another album. I might just write a novel next. I don't know!"

In Ocean's blog posts, we can consume his creative process, one that seems to fuel and frustrate in equal measure. "What crosses my mind gets hit by a car," Ocean once wrote. That's the push and pull of creation. If we expect our favorite musicians to perform to the same level that made their music interesting in the first place, we must give them time to write, edit, and refine their ideas.

The "long wait" for a new Frank Ocean album is only a long wait in our minds.

The "long wait" for a new Frank Ocean album is only a long wait in our minds. Other artists have suggested Ocean's creative gestation will result in something spectacular. "I was more of a fan of him when I heard his newer music," said English musician James Blake, one of the few people who has heard parts of the awaited work in progress. "It's better. You grow, you improve, you nail a new message to the board. He's had time to mature. It's really cool to watch." We want to hear it too, so badly it hurts. But it's not for us to say when. We just have to wait until the artist is ready.

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