While touring with Destiny’s Child, Rowland said she told security to make sure Lovett didn’t come backstage. The father and daughter, however, reconnected about five years ago. Rowland said she felt the need to reach out to her father after giving birth to her son Titan. Around the same time, the singer was also dealing with the death of her mother.

“I said, ‘I really need to know him. I want to meet him,’” Rowland said as she reflected on her effort to reconnect with her father. “I think I … had these feelings of like, ‘Oh my God, I have no parents.’ And it was like, no, you do, you have one left.”

The pair then decided to meet at a hotel in Atlanta.

“Before I walked in, I had all these thoughts of what I was gonna say. ‘Cause, you know, it was hurt in there, it was disappointment in there, it was curiosity in there. There were so many questions,” Rowland said.

As she sat down with her father for more than two hours at the meeting, Rowland said she mostly listened and learned about his own painful childhood.

“He’s telling me about his dynamic with his father, and his father’s father, and it’s nonexistent, too,” the singer said. “So how can one learn how to be something when they weren’t taught?”

Christopher Lovett

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