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n an evening in late August, just as Donald Trump is getting booked on 13 felony charges at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, a sherbet sunset in the western sky casts Santa Monica Boulevard in a Nicki Minaj–pink blush. But Minaj has no time on this day for politics, nor for the soft summer tints gathering outside the windowless sound booth of a Los Angeles recording studio. She is under pressure to hand over a mastered version of “Last Time I Saw You,” a teaser release from her upcoming fifth studio album, and she is nitpicking.

The verses sounded a bit muffled to her ear, so the team sent the track to a mixer, who brightened up the whole thing. But now it’s ping-y and “radio-ish,” she feels, and she swears she hears an ever-so-slight buzz underneath the beat, though no one else is picking up on it. A scholar of her genre and a rigorous wordsmith, she is also a painstaking listener of her own music; she combs through her recordings, rewrites verses, changes up her tone, adds drums, subtracts them. (There were 27 versions of “Anaconda,” her 2014 hit, before she blessed the single.) She presses her engineers to punch up certain words and ensure that every syllable of her raps is clear and comprehensible. Nicki Minaj wants to be understood. “I’m a bit…particular,” she concedes. “Sometimes things that the best engineer in the world wouldn’t hear, I hear. And you know what? I am always right.”

“Last Time I Saw You” is a strikingly melancholic track for an artist for whom bombast and humor have been the most conspicuous modes. It’s a song about losing someone—a rare layover in the irony-free zone that her fans will remember from “Moment 4 Life,” the breakout love song from 2010’s Pink Friday, her debut studio album. “So the hook is”—she starts singing, softly, her eyes closed—“I wish I’da hugged you tighter the last time I saw you / I wish I didn’t waste precious time the night when I called you / I wish I remembered to say I’d do anything for you / Maybe I pushed you away because I thought that I’d bore you.”

Here is a song steeped in two new, rather adult flavors: regret and uncertainty. “It’s a song about guilt,” she explains. “And I don’t think people make a lot of music about the experience of guilt. But if you talk to any human being on earth about it, they would know exactly what you mean. That ‘I wish I had’ feeling. Once I wrote the hook, I started to think of people that I love and see every day and still take for granted. You know what I’m saying? So I hope the song does a good thing. It’s like, remember how you wish you could have? Well, you can’t. You can’t go back in time. So try to make sure you have different experiences with people that you love. All the grudges, even just being busy and caught up, like when you’re chasing and working and being an adult.” She pauses, and her eyes spin slightly upward, as they often do when she is considering the best way to explain herself. “I’m not saying I want this to be a sad song. Actually I want people to feel happy when they hear it. Happy­-sad. Then again, look at Adele. That woman has made me cry a million times, yet I want more.”

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