Jazmine Sullivan Delves Into Post-Breakup Blues With ‘Girl Like Me’ Performance on ‘Fallon’

Jazmine Sullivan delivered a mesmerizing rendition of her single, “Girl Like Me,” on The Tonight Show Tuesday, January 12th.

The track finds Sullivan unflinchingly exploring the second-guessing and self-flagellation that follows a break-up, and contending with internal and external pressures to become a different kind of woman. With just a guitarist and bassist accompanying her, Sullivan delivered a characteristically stunning vocal performance, letting her voice run up and down as she crooned, “Boy, you must wanted something different/Still don’t know what you was missing/What you asked I would’ve given/It ain’t right how these hoes be winning.”

“Girl Like Me” appears on Sullivan’s new album Heaux Tales, and the studio version of the track features guitar and backing vocals from H.E.R. The record makes her first since her celebrated 2015 effort, Reality Show.

“I wrote Heaux Tales to give voice to every woman,” Sullivan previously said of the record in a statement. “We’re deserving of respect whether we work as a CEO of a company or if we’re strippin’. It’s about a woman deciding how she wants to present herself to the world and not being told or influenced by anyone but her gotdamn self. The truth is, women of all ages have been called a ‘heaux’ at some point in life, whether deserved or not, by some man trying to put us in our place — a place designed to keep us under control, out of the way and usually beneath them. Women are over feeling ashamed about the decisions we have made, or chose to make, in regards to our bodies.”