Growing Up With Musical Parents

It was a very magical childhood to have. Because my parents are both creatives and creators of music and musical experiences, I had a lot of room for expression, which is a big part of what childhood is about - owning your voice, finding your voice, expressing yourself in multiple ways. Because that's what they did professionally, I always felt very free to be myself. I felt very free to sing, dance, run around, shout, whatever. I never had a lot of fears around being me. I think that was very, very important in forming the person I am now. It also forms a lot of my artistry now, like there have been times in my life where I think I've tried to make myself smaller, but that inner child voice that I have is so strong that I can't deny it for too long. What was cool growing up in the industry was my weekends were spent backstage at concerts, on the road, in rehearsal studios. I was around what most people see on the outside, and I got to see an inside look at it.

I always gravitated towards the spotlight because I've always just loved to perform and entertain. But I used to shy away from the singing spotlight, maybe more from the standpoint of wanting to be considered an individual and not compared. never, ever wanted to do what was expected of me. Some of my choices were more of me just trying other things that everybody didn't like.

Did She Always Aspire To Be A Musician?

I initially wanted to be a broadcast journalist. I actually thought of myself like a Jamaican Oprah - not necessarily only in Jamaica, but ideally I wanted an international broadcast/presenter career. My dad, one of his claims to fame was being an emcee. He was a really popular host of concerts and stuff like that, so I grew up seeing him do that. I also have the gift of gab if you want to call it that. And I actually studied media production in college. That was kind of what I thought my path would be, and I think I had this dream where I was like, "You know what, I want to be the first Jamaican to have a nationally syndicated television show." So I did have big hopes for myself in that area, 100%.

"Holiday"

I reached out to a London-based producer named Jamie Rodigan, and it's funny because he's also kind of like a child of the music business - his dad is a legendary DJ from the '70s and '80s. I had reached out to him on a whim saying, "Hey man, I think it would be dope if we worked together, however that looks." So it started with him sending me beats and this one just connected.

If I'm not writing a song from scratch, and I'm writing it based off of an instrumental, I tend to just listen and see what the immediate vibration that I get from the song is. So I kind of go into my head, and I look for how it makes me feel. I listened to this riddim (we call it 'riddims') and I felt like I was on holiday, that's the only way I can think of it. And from there is where I started to craft the song. What it felt like was like when you go on a date and the time flies by so fast that you're like, "Oh my God, we've been talking for four hours." Or you've been hanging out for so long and you didn't realize it's been six hours - that's kind of the emotion I got from the instrumental.

The "Holiday" Music Video

What was memorable is that it felt good throughout the whole time. In other words, shoot days can be pretty stressful, you know? And I've never done that many outfit changes in one day, which was impressive for me, meaning the fact that we got through four scenes in a short time. I really have to give credit to the director because he was just very good on moving fast. He was like, "We got the shot, let's move on." That was really nice, but he wasn't too much of a perfectionist and that just comes with experience I guess.

But my favorite part about it was that everyone that was on that set, they were in it for the good of the overall project. There weren't a lot of egos involved. Everyone just brought their A-game, and it felt so genuine, and that made it a lot of fun.

One of the things I use to gauge whether or not I was happy with anything is I look at how I felt at the end of the day - and we actually went out that night. That's how I know the energies were high because even though we started at 7:00 a.m., we still kept going, and I think that was indicative of the positive energy that was around us.

Collaborating With Shaggy

It was the most random thing for me. I mean, I know him and he knows me, but he reached out to me through someone else that works with me and said, "Hey, I have a song that I wrote that I'd love Naomi to be on." And I'm not gonna lie, I actually didn't even hear it until the day I got to the studio. I did not know what to expect. I had no clue what he had in mind. I didn't know. I just ran with it 'cause I'm like, well, if Shaggy said he wants me on a track, I'm going to find my way to Miami and get that done, right? And honestly, the song was perfect. It was right up my alley, it was perfect for me. Obviously, he's had an incredibly successful career, so I'm not surprised, but at the same time, the song selection shows a lot about what he's observed in me as an artist.

We ended up discussing why he thought of me, and he said it was my music video for the song I have titled "Energy." Because one thing that is for sure, in Jamaica, and in my industry, especially in Caribbean music, we're not short on talent. So it's not so much about your voice, but more than anything it's probably about your vibe.

What I appreciated is the fact that this particular song of mine and this video was very special to me, and even that song represents a turning point in my life. So the fact that that creation allowed a new opportunity to come as a result, was really special to me. It was just an honor to know that he (a) thought of me and (b) saw me in a specific light. He's like, "I've always known about who you are, I know your parents, but when I saw you on that video…" He basically said, "This girl is definitely crossover material."

So I was honored that "Energy" did that.

The Story Behind "Paradise Plum"

I love telling this story. A producer named Teflon Zincfence brought the riddim to me, or brought the instrumental to me because he and I had been experimenting with quite a bit of ideas, and he and I just knew we wanted to work together. We just said, "Hey, let's just try and make as many demos as possible."

I remember it was October/November of 2017 when he came by with this instrumental - I still have the voice note from when I first heard the riddim. And as he was playing the instrumental, I immediately thought of an encounter I had with a guy I had recently met in Toronto. I was in Jamaica when I heard this, but there's this dude in Toronto that I had met, and it was so funny 'cause it wasn't someone I was really seriously dating, but it was someone that I had got the feels for. He immediately came to mind, and that's where I came up with the parts of the hook that said, "You, you never put up a fight. No, you just know me like we knew we never had to say a word, not a sound. Silence."

He was just somebody that I hung out with, but it kind of ended up feeling like a date. We met through mutual friends, so there were no pretenses involved - the time that we spent together that night, we walked around the city, we just went to different coffee shops, we walked into different bars. It was just very organic and not like, okay, I'm on this date. Or I like this guy or like this girl, and let me ask them a series of small-talk questions or anything like that. It was just so down to earth, and that's why I said, "You, you never put up a fight," because there were no games in this space - you know, sometimes the games that we play with each other in dating and stuff like that. There were no games.

And then the second part where I said, "You know me like you knew we never had to say a word, not a sound. Silence." It's because there were some moments in that night where we didn't really try to fill the empty space. I'll never forget we were sitting in a park at one point in time and we're just sitting there and we weren't saying anything and it was okay. I think there's so much beauty in being able to be in silence with people, not just in a romantic setting, but even in general, like with friends and family. You don't always have to fill the space. You can just enjoy the space with somebody else.

The hook was the first thing I found, actually. In the voice note, within like six or seven minutes, I'm like scatting and scatting and scatting, and then you just hear me go (hums the melody of the song) ..."silence." I found the melody, but the only word I found first was really "silence." That was the dominant emotion, the dominant feeling I first found when I heard it. And then I approached another friend of mine, who's a songwriter, to work together on filling in the rest of the picture.

She and I sat down and she asked me what I was feeling and what we're talking about. We basically embellished the whole story 'cause I didn't really anticipate moving forward with this dude, to be honest. But we embellished it as if the romance continued. So, that's how that song came to be and it's literally changed my life.

Reggae Is A Universal Language

I decided to pursue this genre by observing my parents and their life and their career. I'll never forget growing up and they'd come back from countries like Singapore, Japan, whatever, and I was thinking that these people don't even really know English or maybe they just speak it a little, but how is it that this music took them so far across so many cultures and communities? That was really why I chose reggae because I recognized that reggae is such a universal language.

And what's dope about reggae music is that no matter where you're from, no matter what language you speak, reggae gives everybody a very similar emotion. It's not to knock all those other genres or anything like that. But for example, not everyone can listen to punk rock, not everyone can listen to country. Even though country music is beautiful, if you took a crowd of people, and there's a wide cross-section of languages and religion, if you play reggae music, I feel like they would start swaying in the same way. It's a very spiritual genre, and it does something to the soul that I have not seen any other genre be able to do. And because my desire has always been to reach people in a positive light, I felt like, man reggae is such a great pathway.

May 17, 2022

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Further reading:

Interview with Maxi Priest
Interview with David Hinds of Steel Pulse
The Ska Episode

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