Loren LaRosa barely finishes her intro before Coco Jones is already laughing at herself.

“I hope I ain't doing nothing wrong,” Coco jokes at one point, half-serious, half-singing, before slipping into a quick line of “I am only human.” It’s playful, but it’s also the thesis of where she is right now: wildly successful, highly visible, and still figuring it out in real time.

On this episode of BET Talks, presented by Ally, Coco sits with Loren as an artist first. Not just Hilary Banks. Not just “that girl from Disney.” Not even just the “ICU” Grammy-winner. With Why Not More?—her official debut album—Coco is claiming the version of herself that survived the silence, went to therapy, lost people, and still chose to bet on herself.

And now, she wants more.

For years, conversations around Coco started in the past tense.

At first, the biggest thing about her was Disney’s “Let It Shine”—the beloved movie that turned her into a generation’s nostalgic favorite. Then, the reboot era arrived and she became Hilary Banks on Peacock’s Bel-Air, reintroducing her to a new audience and reminding everybody of the star power that never left.

As Coco tells Loren, that history is a blessing—but it also became a cage.

“At the beginning, the biggest thing about me was what I had done in the past,” she explains. “Now I feel like when people talk to me, it's very artist-centered… that was always the goal—for people to take me seriously as an artist.”

When Loren throws out the ultimate this-or-that—Let It Shine vs. Bel-Air—Coco gives the diplomatic but honest answer: “If there wasn’t Let It Shine, then there wouldn’t have been Bel-Air.” She understands why fans cling to the projects they grew up on. For a lot of people, those roles are comfort, escapism, happy memory.

But for Coco? They were jobs. Important ones, formative ones—but not the whole story.

“I want to show gratitude,” she says. “While also being like, I am 27.”

Why Not More? is her way of saying: thank you for loving who I was. Now let me show you who I am.

When people see a so-called “comeback,” they often imagine a strategic retreat. A rebrand. Time off.

For Coco, that’s not what happened.

“The break took me, honestly,” she admits. “The space in between was not by choice.”

Those years where we didn’t see her everywhere? That’s where the real work happened. No glam squad, no call time, no “you’re booked.” Just quiet—and a lot of uncomfortable self-discovery.

“The silence is where I could even hear my voice,” she says. “Oh, this is who I am. Oh, this is important to me. Oh, I do talk like this and I don't talk like that.”

The career gap that once felt like punishment became a reset. Stripped of the industry noise, she was forced to ask the question every artist eventually faces: Who am I without the job? And then the scarier follow-up: Who do I want to be next?

She didn’t fully feel that urgency until some of the people around her started to fall away.

“When you go higher, people act weird, dot com,” she says, half-joking but dead serious. “People from that section of my life dropped off. That’s when I was like, okay. I think I'm going to be the only one that I know for sure is not going anywhere. So I need to be the voice.”

If there’s a throughline to Coco’s adult career, it’s honesty. The vlogs, the YouTube videos, the “here’s what really happened” transparency—that wasn’t branding. That was survival.

At one point, she found herself in a toxic situation with someone who mentioned they were in therapy. It cracked open a door she didn’t know existed in real life, outside movies and TV.

“If this person can tell you about yourself, and you actually believe it, I need to hear what they need to say about me,” she remembers thinking.

Therapy introduced her to a whole new language about self-worth and limiting beliefs. She realized how much of her inner monologue was just… lies she’d accepted as facts.

“I can’t do that because I’m this. I’m too tall for that. I’m too thick for that. I don’t talk like that. I don’t sing that way. That’s not going to happen for me,” she lists. “It was so many things that I was like, oh, okay. And I didn’t even know until somebody… was like, wait, why’d you say that? And I’d be like, I actually don’t know.”

Now, therapy is a non-negotiable.

“Oh, hell yeah,” she says when Loren asks if she’s still going. “If I'm not operating as a good Courtney—my government name—then Coco is not going to eat. And if I'm going too hard as Coco, my personal life suffers.”

She’s clear on the balance: if Courtney isn’t okay, Coco can’t show up.

For Coco, Why Not More? isn’t just a cute title—it’s a dare to herself.

The album holds songs that capture older versions of her—like the wary woman on “Keep It Quiet,” begging not to be embarrassed. “I was talking out of fear,” she says. “Do not make me look crazy.”

Elsewhere, tracks like “Taste” reflect the opposite energy: a woman refusing to shrink into what people think she’s supposed to be. “I want to be free,” she says. “I don't want to be what people think I am only. I want to be this too. So I'm doing it.”

So why did it take this long to officially drop a debut album?

“I still didn't know myself enough,” she admits of her earlier projects. “And I was still really scared to mess things up… That’s not right. That’s not artistry.”

She needed a team that believed in her and the self-trust to believe in her own taste. Once those two things lined up, she was ready to be the through-line in her own story.

“Taste was like the scariest thing I did before putting out this album,” she says. “And I want to be scared sometimes. That’s the adrenaline, that’s the rush. I think that means I'm doing something good to me.”

Coco is very aware that her life could’ve gone another way. The in-between years, the industry politics, the silence—none of this guaranteed a second act.

So now that she has the platform, she thinks a lot about why.

“Why do I get to be here with this platform?” she asks. “Why did I make it, even after that time, and there were so many years of nothing? What do I do with this?”

She doesn’t pretend to have a perfect answer.

“I hope I ain't doing nothing wrong,” she laughs. “But, sorry, I am only human.”

What she does know is that she wants to inspire someone. That’s why she’s so outspoken about therapy, doubt, and the time it took to get here. None of this was overnight—even if it might look that way from the outside.

She’s also soaking up wisdom from women who figured out their own balance—like Alicia Keys, who joins her on “On the Other Side of Love.”

“The biggest thing was just to not lose your inner voice,” Coco says of their conversations. “It just gets loud. There’s so many distractions, great ones, terrible ones. But either way, they’re distractions.”

Stay present. Stay grounded. Stay you. That’s the assignment.

Coco laughs when she talks about being “chronically offline” and low-key terrified of stumbling across some new narrative about herself.

“When I leave my house, I'm technically on stage,” she says. “I can be filmed. I can be recorded. I can be seen and that can be a thing. So if you don't want to be seen, don't leave your house.”

But she also cherishes the years when not everybody was watching. The club days. The “aren’t you that girl from…?” questions over tequila instead of Twitter.

“I got to live and have fun and have relationships and breakups and experience life so that I had something to write about,” she reflects. “At the time, happiness was distractions and vibes. Tequila shots. Now, happiness is the things that don’t come and go—my family, my girls, my sister, my mom. Loving myself.”

Right now, Coco hasn’t fully locked into album two mode yet—but she knows the next chapter has to reflect who she is today: a woman in love, more healed, but still human and still messy sometimes.

“It’s going to definitely be more love,” she says, smiling. “More love in the room than toxicity.”

And even when there’s petty, even when there’s conflict, she wants the songs to land in the same place her life does now: “Oh, I love you. You get on my nerves.”

More love. More honesty. More growth. More Coco.

“I hope that with this project, you can see it for what it is,” she tells Loren. “It's me discovering myself. It's us discovering ourselves together. I feel like me and my fans, we've grown up together… Since Disney, the debut album, life is changing in all the ways. I just look forward to us growing together.”

The title asked a question—Why Not More?
The way Coco’s moving, we already know the answer.