12. A football-playing tomboy,
Gray didn’t have a boyfriend until eleventh grade.
His name was Pete,
and he taught her about the birds and bees.
The first time they made sweet love,
it was to the strains of Eric B. and Rakim’s “My Melody.”

13. Many people have noted that
Gray sounds like jazz giant Billie Holiday.
She keeps a photo of the singer in her bathroom. ꄊ刨he had, like, a really thin voice,
but she explored it and turned it into a style.”
Critics have tried to top each other describing Gray’s pipes.
Her favorite? “Betty Boop smoking a joint with Sly Stone.”

14. The first man to turn her head, however, was Michael Jackson.
This was “before he fucked his face up,” she says.
The first CD she bought was by Prince.
Gray liked Purple Rain so much she painted her bedroom magenta.

15. As a musician, Gray is a triple threat.
She started piano lessons at age 7,
hated every minute of them,
and quit when she went to boarding school at 14.
Today at Chez Gray are guitars,
a piano and two drum kits.
Macy plays them all.

16. Stately Gray Manor is located in suburban Encino, California.
“Beverly Hills is overrated,” Gray notes.
“The houses are like $8 million,
and they’re two inches from the next house!”

17. “I did therapy when it wasn’t cool.”
She was 14, at boarding school with a bunch of white kids.
“I kind of bugged out.
Then I got kicked out. That scared my mother.
So I went to therapy. I don’t anymore,
but it seems like everyone in music does.
I don’t have a lot of faith in therapy.
When things come up that I can’t figure out, I just avoid them.”

18. She was expelled from school.
Gray says a staff member busted a move on her.
“Boarding schools are cesspools!” she warns.
“Don’t send your kid to a boarding school.”

19. She has three kids of her own.
She has two daughters, Aanisah, 6, and Happy, 3,
and a son, Mel, 5. Aanisah, Mel and
some of their friends sing on The Id’s “Hey Young World II,”
featuring legendary old-school rapper Slick Rick.

20. Gray’s dream duet will never happen.
Unless it’s one of those Natalie Cole?
and?
Nat King Cole deals.
Gray’s preferred partner?
The late Biggie Smalls.

21. At age 17, Gray wrecked her stepfather’s car
three times in two weeks.
The last time she crashed,
she plowed into a pickup truck.
Not wanting to go home after that,
she went to the bank, withdrew $200,
threw her typewriter in the trunk and started driving to California.
When she pulled over to sleep somewhere in Kansas,
the cops found her and sent her home.

22. These days, Gray drives a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon.