PAUSE Meets: Saint JHN

Most people may not know this but you’ve written tracks for DSVN, Usher and Jidenna – just to name a few. Was it always in the plans to be a songwriter and stay behind the scenes or was it just a means to an ends to get to where you are now?

That was never in the plans. I was never trying to be a songwriter. I didn’t even really know what that was. I thought I was good enough to be a songwriter because I thought I made good songs but I didn’t really know what the craft of being a songwriter was or the business of it. When I got into it, it was just another opportunity whilst I was hustling.

It was a way for me to hustle my way out because it was the first time anybody gave me an opportunity in music. Every time before that I was trying to pitch/sell myself.

Number one record in the UK. What does that mean to you?

I’m elated, I’m super excited. You work your whole life in any form, in any craft, you want to be somewhere near the top, or at least mentioned among the best within the conversation of the elite, you just want to at least be there and I’m in a conversation in a way that I at least want to be. Number two is a good start, it’s a pre number one, I’m hyped.

You sit in a very unique space as an artist, you blend genres, you merge hip-hop, rock, trap, funk influences together, where does it all come from?

I think it’s taste and that’s all I’ve got. All I’ve got is what I think is good, if I didn’t think it was good I wouldn’t do it. I suppose I am merging genres or blending things that are a bit uncommon but I’m not thinking about it from that point of view. I’m just making this sh*t because I think it sounds good or I think whatever sounded like it before was boring or I can do better or there isn’t enough. All I’m trying to do is impress myself on a daily basis.

I love that, because the music that you make, for me, is the music that I wish was made more. It’s the music I need to hear right now.

Yeah, that’s how I feel about it, that’s why I make it.

You seem to be moving at your own pace, how do you manage to do that in an industry that’s so obsessed with trends and going viral at every given opportunity?

I’m not in the music industry, I make music, but I’m in the art space. Everything that I make has a tangible feeling to it, has an emotionalism to it. I’m just making art, I’m expressing myself. I just paint with sounds and sometimes I paint with fabrics other times I paint with pictures.

You also did what people deem as the impossible by bringing Biggs Burke back from his 15-year hiatus. How did you get him to sign you and how did you two connect?

You’ve got to ask him that, I don’t know how I got him back. He was all the way out, he was gone, when we first met he had just done an interview two weeks before and he was like he’s never coming back to music but if he did come back it would be for me and we hadn’t even met at that time, we didn’t know each other and then coincidence. The universe ruled it, serendipitously we met and we hit it off because we’re cut from the same cloth right.

I grew up on the ideologies that he helped build and I didn’t know that at the time. I knew the structure, Roc-A-Fella was him, Dame and Jay, but I wasn’t thinking about it, so when we met we got on so well and he had so many questions for me, how come this guy like me? Where is the symmetry at? He asked me a thousand questions because he couldn’t figure it out and I couldn’t figure it out, I’m just answering the questions but we’re alike in so many ways. This is the story, the new iteration of the story.

Seems it was all already written. What do you think he saw in you specifically?

I will never be so blatantly disrespectful to assume what anybody sees in me. I can tell you what I am, I don’t know what you see. I think what is an obvious thing, that’s a common thread is integrity and I think for people that come from places like us that’s the very first thing you look for and that’s what you hold on to. When we have conversations and we talk about people that are either like us in mind, in spirit and energy or people who are not like us, he’ll remind me, they’re not like us you can’t judge them by our standards. We’re built of different construction and that’s willpower, a foundational thing that you come from. When you don’t grow up with much or when you don’t have any money or resources and you got to figure out how to build something yourself… Those are the common threads, but to answer that question you have to ask him yourself.

What does it mean for you to have a hip hop legend like Biggs in your corner?

It’s reassuring, it reminds me that I’m not crazy. To know that the man who built something that I got to watch on TV from a distance. My pops wasn’t actively involved in my life and my older brothers were so disconnected from me, so I got to watch my heroes from the TV but at least I know that they’re a couple of blocks away so I knew they were real. All of the superheroes I knew were real, so for me, it’s comforting to know that my madness ain’t crazy.

How did you end up on Beyonce’s Brown Skin Girl?

It started in Jamaica, we started making the record in Jamaica. Brown Skin Girl exists now, it’s 2020, me, Wiz, Kid, Blue Ivy. The first person I think I sent it to was my mum, then I sent it to Tyty and I can’t tell you what happened when the doors were closed and I wasn’t around. I can tell you about the dream I dreamt. The dream I dreamt, I wasn’t there, Biggs sent it to Jay, Jay’s dancing around in his living room in his pyjamas. This is my dream right, he was like Beyonce you got to hear this and they’re dancing together, they’re singing together and she’s like ‘I’m adding everything I want to add to this, I know how to make it even better’ and she does and then Blue Ivy comes downstairs and everybody’s dancing. It’s the Carter family dance but that’s just in my mind. I don’t know how it happened, all I know is I got a call that I’m going to be on the record which happened like moments before it came out. I heard the record with my voice on it when it came out. That felt like it was going to happen because someone told me it was possible and it happened.

Cosmic. You dreamt it into existence. On that whole thing, what are your thoughts on that, when you just know that something’s going to happen? You know it so deep inside and then it becomes true?

I know what I believe. What I believe isn’t enough to know that someone else is going to do something else. I know, no matter what happens I’m going to end up where I’m supposed to end up, and I’m going to have the things that I need in my life because I put the energy out to get them and I work really hard. I’m willing to sleep behind the things that I love.

I didn’t know Beyonce was going to take the record, I didn’t know it was going to end up on the Lion King soundtrack, I didn’t know Blue Ivy and Wiz Kid would be on the song, all I knew is that I’d made a song that would change my life. I knew that definitively. I knew that because it meant something to me, and that future generations that look like me that didn’t have a song like that necessarily before, and now they could play it.

I know that one day if some young mother or father would play it for their young daughter or young son and they came from a place like me with the energy I came from, I think it would mean something to them growing up and I didn’t have that so that was a success to me. I don’t mean to colour it in a way like ‘if you do this it’s a success’ but that was a success for me. I’ve made hundreds of songs and when I made that song I felt like I did something and I don’t always feel like that.

I think you put that perfectly. So, who are some of your favourite artists at the moment?

It’s too broad, I live by songs. I like the music people make. I don’t always identify with where they’re coming from or what they’re trying to say or what they really stand behind.