Virginia’s JAYTHEDØN releases his third album, blond, and also introduces a new independent record label and clothing brand.
Back in 2021 we conducted an interview with Chesapeake, Virginia-bred recording artist JAYTHEDØN following the release of his debut album, SANTANA. In this new interview he discusses what he has learned since then, the inspiration behind the music on his latest album, blond, and expounds on this fresh era of creativity.
This interview has been slightly edited and condensed for clarity.
GROOVERELLY: The last time we spoke was right before your debut project, SANTANA. What have you learned since then?
JAYTHEDØN: I had to change my whole demographic of listeners. When I dropped SANTANA there was a whole story behind it that went over people’s heads. It couldn’t have been worse with SANTANA II. I thought it was a masterpiece when I dropped it. A lot of people were saying that there were a lot of skips on there, and that they didn’t get what I was trying to do. It got annoying, explaining the same story over and over again before someone actually listens to the album. I realized that I could scale back on the conceptualization, and still maintain a meaning in my songs. And that’s exactly what I did with blonde. I condensed everything down. That’s why it’s a lot shorter. It’s easier to understand. You’re just going to hear that straight music, but somebody who knows me or knows the stories I’m talking about, it’s like ‘Oh I see what you’re doing there’. It’s easier for someone to just pick up a song and say ‘I like this song, or I don’t like it’.
GROOVERELLY: How would you describe the era you are in, right now, in your creativity?
I feel like I retracted. I feel like I was less creative with this album. I think I put more of my creativity into what was outside the album. Trying to make the album more than just an album. I wanted blonde to be a way of life. It became a record label and a brand. I want somebody to say ‘I am blond’. Not because you have blonde hair or something but because you live that lifestyle. It represents just being yourself and staying true to yourself. That’s why in all the songs I was talking about things that happened in my life, and things that I was dealing with. And I name-dropped some people, definitely. It’s all about staying true to yourself. When you carry yourself like that, it means you’re real and you’re you. That’s why I say I retracted with this tape. Because with my other projects, it was solely about the meaning and the story I was trying to tell. [In contrast] blond is your story. This is definitely the most real thing I’ve ever put out. On the album, I say things that I don’t even tell my friends, and saying it blatantly. With my other albums, I was trying to create something that was like a movie or something in your head. With blond, it’s just me.
GROOVERELLY: When did you make the decision to start putting this project together?
JAYTHEDØN: I wanted to make another album right after [releasing] SANTANA II, but I was burnt out. I went through a period of making dumb songs and that’s when I started getting into auto-tune more. Originally, I was going to make an all autotune album because I thought I was hot sh*t when I was working on it. But I wasn’t. The line blurs between ‘this is fun’ and ‘this is good.’ I had to sit and think about why SANTANA II didn’t do well, too.
blond has gone through four full revisions. Meaning, the album was completely done and then got scrapped. It went from 28 songs, to 22 songs, and then became 31. What messed me up was that it took me so long to realize why my last projects didn’t do well-apart from my first one which did great. It was simplicity. The 31 songs then became 13 songs.
We also made a whole new genre called “Kremlin”. To touch on that briefly-there’s a place in Russia called The Kremlin. A lot of these beats are fast-paced, but the melodies are Russian-styled. At the time, we were listening to a lot of punk music and rock music. Originally I didn’t even want to be a rapper. I wanted to be a rockstar. I was trying to find a way to transition my listeners from my raps to my rock-inspired sounds. We listened to a lot of post-punk music, and a lot of Russian artists do that. We literally took parts of the Russian-style production, like clicks, claps, saxophones, and flutes. We made trap style beats out of those Russian drum kits.
GROOVERELLY: What do you want listers to take away from these new songs?
JAYTHEDØN: Mainly this album was me, in a way, exposing myself. Everything I talk about on the album happened before I dyed my hair blonde. I feel like when I dyed my hair, I was reborn. That’s what blond symbolizes-being rebirthed. I want my listeners to take away the fact that you can be yourself, and be what you want to be at the same time. You can become whatever you want and just because someone is saying you’re trying to be somebody else, it doesn’t necessarily mean that. I want them to know that if you see something cool, it’s okay to be like that. But you don’t have to change your whole entire life to model after anyone else’s. A lot of people confuse clones with inspiration. If you see somebody do something hard and you want to recreate that, it’s fine. You don’t have to be a carbon copy of what they’re doing but you have to find that balance.
GROOVERELLY: Where is your most comfortable place to record?
JAYTHEDØN: Recording blond made me realize that I don’t like recording when other people are there with me in the studio. I used to record at my house all the time. I recorded everything that I have, at my house. Blond is the first album I’ve recorded away from the house. I used to be comfortable with that. After going long periods without making anything, I’d try to bring that [feeling] back. But then I’d hear an echo or something in my room which would make me feel like I didn’t want to do it that way anymore. When we went to the studio to make “Malebogia”, I didn’t like it. To me it sounded weird and off. So I decided I was just going to remake it at my crib and use the stems that we did as a template.
I’m going to tell you how I recorded blond. My stylist, who also does my hair and signed to blond, had a hotel room. I spent multiple nights there recording. I brought my computer over and everything, just to see if it would work. At first I thought it wouldn’t. She would be sitting on her bed watching me record and it would come out a little better. But I still felt like it wasn’t it. One time she left to go pick something up, and I continued recording…and really started snapping. When she came back in the vibe went back to how it was and I was like, ‘I might just need to record by myself’. Then she was like, ‘I could’ve told you that. I saw it on your face. Do you want me to leave?’ I said ‘Let’s just try it.’ And it worked. So we kept doing it. Over multiple days I just pulled up and recorded after she left. But then, mixing the songs was taking so long because I had to work every single day. And I couldn’t really stay there for more than two hours or so. So what I did was-took a day, recorded part of a song, then came back the next day to finish it. Around that time I took a trip to New York for my birthday. So I was in New York mixing the songs on my computer. I didn’t even finish the album in Virginia. When I finished, we were able to listen to it in the car on the way back home.
GROOVERELLY: Tell me about Vang.
JAYTHEDØN: Vang means “blonde” in Vietnamese. The label is called blondvang. Vang has to do with everything around the album or whatever the main product is. The label, the clothing, all of that.
GROOVERELLY: Who are some of your favorite artists right now?
Lando Santana. He’s from Baltimore, Maryland. We have a song on the album. We’ve been cool for years. I’ve been listening to a lot of his music. 2Sdxrtball (Atlanta) and OO Daredevil. They’re hard. The last one: Nettspend.
GROOVERELLY: Who is an artist that you could see yourself working with in the future?
JAYTHEDØN: Honestly, to keep it a buck-nobody. When I hear beats, think of what I could do on them. Then I hear someone else hop on them. I feel like I have to match their flow in order to create cohesiveness. Also, I’m just tired of working with other people right now. But mainly I want to keep tweaking the sound I have until I feel it’s that perfect flow that I can do over and over again. I don’t think other artists are going to help me find that. I think it’ll make me stray away from it.
GROOVERELLY: What brings you the most joy and freedom, outside of music?
JAYTHEDØN: Seeing the city. I really like the lights and large buildings. It doesn’t matter where I am. I just like to see that kind of stuff. And really just chilling, being on my phone, in my bed with my headphones on and scrolling through YouTube.
GROOVERELLY: Why do you make music?
JAYTHEDØN: Like I said before-when I first started, I really wanted to make rock music. That’s something that a lot of people didn’t know about me. But at first I was just making dumb, trolling songs-because it was fun. It was a release and something to get away from what I was going through. I used to get bullied a lot in school. Making music made me feel like I could control the bullying in the way that I wanted it to. Like, I would rather have somebody joke on a song I made than how I looked. After a while, it just became a coping mechanism because I realized that I could make music about anything. I didn’t have to talk about what everyone else was talking about. I could just say, ‘Hey, this hurts my feelings’ in a song. I would then feel better because I felt like I’m talking to somebody. And if the track was bad, I just deleted it.
I don’t really know why I kept going. Maybe it was just that, I didn’t realize that I felt like it was my calling. For some reason, I knew I needed to keep doing this. People saying it was bad didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t blocking out the haters or anything, but it literally didn’t matter to me whether they said something or not. It was just a hobby at that time. I still don’t know why I started taking music seriously. But I know when it finally did, I felt like I could really do it. I wouldn’t always wonder why I couldn’t back then. My stuff was trash but I thought I was hot sh*t when I made it. It went from me trying to heal myself, to me thinking I was good.
Eventually I found the “Kremlin” sound, and I feel like this just clicks. It feels like what I’ve been working towards my whole life. I plan on remaking this album too, like a movie reboot.
GROOVERELLY: Who do you make music for?
JAYTHEDØN: If you would’ve asked me this years ago, I would’ve just said anybody who feels like they’re going through what I’m going through. Now, I don’t give a f**k. I’m back making music for just myself.
