The following afternoon, the 27-year-old is back to work, rehearsing for a performance of “Q.U.E.E.N.”, her Electric Lady duet with Erykah Badu, at this year's BET Awards. She has to cram because her appearance on the show was booked at the last minute, only after Prince himself phoned BET President of Programming Stephen Hill directly and demanded Monáe be added to the lineup. Hill placed her as the closing act. Prince, who makes a rare guest appearance on the new album, has been a supporter since Monáe's debut Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) EP in 2007: After her first show in L.A., he circled the venue in his car and asked her to hop in when she came outside. Monáe is someone who inspires this kind of loyalty from fellow artists. Especially fellow secret-headquarters types: In June, Star Wars mastermind George Lucas flew Monáe out to his Skywalker Ranch in California to give an intimate performance on the property.

But even with untouchable power players in her corner, Monáe's position in the music industry at the moment is a curious one. On one hand, she’s got Prince making the case that she should be on stage at the biggest annual televised celebration of black music. On the other hand, she kind of needs Prince to make the case that she should be on stage at the biggest annual televised celebration of black music. It is sometimes easier to like the idea of her—a whirling, twirling, fantastical funk robot in a tux, a firecracker of a live performer, a young woman who runs her own tight creative ship—than it is to forge a natural connection with her music and persona. With The Electric Lady, she has a chance to change that.

Before the rehearsals, Monáe and company are sitting around with iPads in Wondaland's basement recording studio, reeling off a whirlwind of tasks. (Someone has what looks like a Gmail account pulled up on a large computer monitor, but there’s a “W” where the “G” should be. The team uses WondaMail.) Most of the effort is currently going into the editing of a minute-and-a half promotional teaser for The Electric Lady. They fiddle with the length of the clip in increments of seconds.

“It’s too long! Don’t give all that away, they need to wait until the album,” Monáe protests, in reference to a new track being used in the background of the teaser, which pictures her perched on a couch, explaining the concept of the new album: “The Electric Lady was inspired by paintings. Every night I would perform, I would paint on a canvas while I would sing… this image of a female body, a silhouette, every single night.” The soliloquy sounds familiar—the night before, she’d stood in the middle of the party and addressed her friends with the same speech, but with an extra little nugget of information. “I came up with the title in therapy, actually,” she blurted out, seemingly by accident.

Therapy, she tells me, has become an important part of her life since the release of her debut album, 2010's The ArchAndroid. “It was like I had a computer virus in my brain and it needed to be fixed,” she says.

“I didn’t like the idea of therapy at first,” she continues. “In the black community, nobody goes to therapy. You go to your pastor or you go to the Bible. There’s a stigma.” Monáe, who grew up in a devout Christian family, still says grace before meals. “But I think God blesses us with brains to find medicine, to find cures, and I don’t believe in not using that. Therapists are there to listen.” She also talks about grappling with a split from a boyfriend in between albums, offering a rare revelation about her love life (she’s been known to tell interviewers that she dates cyborgs). “I really wanted to grow into this person who could handle everything,” she says, “and I didn’t know that that’s just kind of impossible.”

Sometimes the struggle to regulate her own controlling impulses can wind up breeding different sorts of controlling impulses. At the teaser meeting, and at other points during our time together, she's constantly walking that line. After a long deliberation over the length of the video, the crew decides to split the difference. “Let’s move on,” Monáe concedes. She’s perched quietly in the corner, slouched over her white iPhone 5 with furrowed brows, appearing distracted but piping up decisively at key moments to offer the final word on the topics at hand.

Later on, Chuck and Nate lead me into a small guest room to screen a rough cut of the video for the slyly doomsaying single “Dance Apocalyptic”, which finds Monáe shedding her standard tuxedo getup for an all-white ensemble and loose hair. There are a couple of stray wine glasses in the room, and the bed is unmade. Monáe, they confess, might be upset if she knew I was in here—she wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see the mess.