Doja Cat answered questions about aliens, ghosts and taking your shoes off on a plane during a November 6 visit to The Jennifer Hudson Show. The exchange also gave her a chance to explain why “One More Time,” from her album Vie, is the recording she would choose if she could listen to just one song for the rest of her life.
A question about life on Mars was enough to get Doja Cat talking about water bears. The singer had joined Jennifer Hudson for a quick round of questions during her November 6 visit, and the subjects were free to change whenever Hudson moved to the next one. The first answer touched on tardigrades, microscopic animals known for surviving extreme conditions. It was a playful association in a conversation about what might exist beyond Earth.
Then came the question of shoes on an airplane. Doja Cat initially said it could depend on the situation and how a person behaves. She drew her line at bare feet. If somebody was going to take off their shoes, she wanted them to be wearing socks. The qualification gave the question a more precise answer than the general rule Hudson had started out asking for.
Group chats presented a different set of numbers. Twenty people sounded like too many, and lowering the total to 15 failed to persuade her. At 12, she thought the conversation might be manageable. There was no wider claim about the ideal number of people to speak to at once. In the game’s terms, Hudson could keep making the group smaller until the guest could picture being in it.
Ghosts gave the exchange its longest detour. Doja Cat said she does not believe in them and took issue with the way they often work in horror films. She described the kind of scene in which a character catches sight of something and is then left wondering what they saw. For her, a ghost would have to do more than hover at the edge of someone’s vision before it became properly frightening.
Hudson asked what she would prefer a ghost to do. The answer was to give it a body. She imagined being able to hit one and discovering it could hit back. The exchange made use of the freedom the interview had given her from the start, the chance to be specific about something that was entirely hypothetical. She could object to a familiar scene in a film and suggest a version with a very different physical problem.
The final question in the round asked her to pick one song to hear for the rest of her life. Doja Cat chose “One More Time” from Vie. The reason she gave had to do with her voice. She likes where it sits when she sings the track and feels that the performance makes particularly good use of what her voice can do. That is a practical kind of preference, one that a listener can consider while hearing the recording back.
Vie was the reason for the wider interview. Her fifth studio album had opened at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, and she talked about the kinds of relationship experiences that gave her material for it. Love is a familiar starting point in her writing. Here she was interested in tensions that can be uncomfortable to own, including jealousy. She said she knows what that feeling is like and does not think of it as a healthy part of a relationship.
Doja Cat also recalled a character she had made up in fourth grade. She called him Michael and wore loose Dickies, a big T-shirt, sneakers and a hat to school. The clothes gave the character enough form to be recognised, and she said her teachers went along with the idea for about two weeks. After that she decided to give up the look. She still feels that something of the character is available to her when she wants to play with a persona.
That memory made a bridge to the short videos she posts today. She said Michael can still turn up in things she makes for TikTok. The story had started with a child choosing what to wear to school and ended with an adult describing a piece of her creative life she can return to. It also gave Hudson a chance to hear what an old character looks like from the point of view of the person who invented him.
Of all the choices in the rapid-fire round, the one about “One More Time” was the easiest to test after the interview. Doja Cat had said exactly what to listen for: the place her voice occupies in the recording. A viewer could go from the television exchange to the song and hear the quality she had picked out. The rest of the questions had left their answers in an imagined group chat, an airplane cabin and a room with a ghost that could finally make contact.
