Jon Batiste is an album artist through and through, as he said to Billboard News. In the most recent episode of Billboard, the Grammy winner sat down with the magazine to discuss his current project, World Music Radio, as well as his approach to success as a highly acclaimed musician.
Speaking about World Music Radio, which was published on Friday, August 18, Batiste explained that he collaborated on the project with producer Jon Bellion, which enabled for various unintended themes to find their way into the album.
“Water is a motif throughout the record. There are many different themes that repeat, and we didn’t even realise some of the themes were subconscious while we were crafting it,” the five-time Grammy winner told Carl Lamarre, Billboard’s deputy director of R&B/hip-hop. “I was working with the great Jon Bellion…he had this thing for his son for living life and the world’s crazy and just the idea of self care, being in the world living your life, sometimes you just have to take a pause.” And tying it to my life, what we’ve gone through, and everything we’re attempting to accomplish in this record is a mantra.”
Following the success of his 2021 effort WE ARE (which garnered him four of his five overall Grammys), creating a new body of work may seem to be a difficult undertaking, but Batiste said that the accolades do not weigh into his approach to writing music.
“I create whole bodies of work.” The singles are incredible, and that’s significant, but I’m mostly an album artist. “I create bodies of work and worlds that you can immerse yourself in, so that requires people who not only know how to connect to what’s in the culture and reinvent it and make it our own, but also know how to speak to it through my voice and understand that there’s a world being built that’s bigger than just me,” he explained.
Instead of “trying to outdo any public perception or even in awards,” Batiste says the pressure comes from wanting to “build something that’s even more bespoke, even truer to my artistry that takes everything that I’ve done so far, synthesises it, and adds to it.”
World Music Radio, which was preceded by songs “Calling Your Name” and “Drink Water,” is now accessible to stream.
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