Jorja Smith has got it together just in time for EP headline
A headline slot at Electric Picnic is just another marker in the inexorable rise of Jorja Smith, writes
Jorja Smith was mildly surprised when hip-hop superstar Drake reached out and invited her to cameo on his 2017 album More Life. But she wasn’t fazed. The Mercury-nominated British r’n’b singer doesn’t do nerves. Success, disappointment — all of it she takes in her stride, with a shrug and a chin tilted forward.
“I’ve always been like that,” says Smith (21) speaking ahead of her appearance at Electric Picnic on Saturday. “I don’t know where it comes from. It’s just how I am.”
Drake would subsequently join Smith on stage in Toronto, describing her as “one of the most incredible people, incredible voices, incredible talents” he had ever met.
The sentiments were by every appearance shared by her fellow Electric Picnic headliner Kendrick Lamar, who asked her to guest on the soundtrack to the movie Black Panther, which he curated earlier this year.
“It felt surreal,” she says, remembering that first approach from Drake and his team. “But at the same time it was just really cool. I thought, ‘well I’m going to go with it and see what happens.”
Drake had discovered Smith through her early single ‘Blue Lights’. Written when she was just 16, ‘Blue Lights’ was the perfect pop song for the Black Lives Matter era — a work of striking maturity and insight.
What made it even more impressive was that she wasn’t drawing from first hand experience. Her home town of Walsall in the English Midlands is unlikely to be mistaken for Lamar’s hard-knock Compton or even the preppy Toronto neighbourhood where Drake grew up.
But Smith, who wrote ‘Blue Lights’ as part of a project school about the police crackdown on grime music, nonetheless caught lightning in a jar.
“Don’t you run when you hear the sirens coming, when you hear the sirens coming,” she sings “You better not run ‘cause the sirens not coming for you.”
“When I write, I write for myself,” Smith explains.
“I sing about what I see and then I put it on the record. I wasn’t thinking about everything that was going to happen to me in the future. It was about the song.”
‘Blue Lights’ is one of several stand-outs on her debut album, Lost and Found, a soulful top three hit in the UK (it reached 14 in Ireland and topped the independent charts) and a pick for the Mercury Music Prize for best British LP of the year.
Up against veterans such as Florence and the Machine, Arctic Monkeys and Noel Gallagher she is regarded as having a decent shot at claiming the gong.
“I didn’t think it would be nominated,” she says.
“It’s nice to be recognised. I don’t know what I was thinking but for whatever reason I didn’t expect it to be nominated.”
She had to grow up in a hurry after ‘Blue Lights’ became a viral hit on SoundCloud. Shortly after her 18th birthday, she left home and moved to London, where she worked as a barista in a Starbucks along the Embankment.
In her spare time she would record demos and try to cajole radio stations into playing her music.
Her parents were supportive throughout. Her father, originally from Jamaica, had played in bands around the West Midlands and understood that it was pointless standing between his child and her ambitions. Best be there for here rather than try to talk her out of something she had her heart set on.
“They told me to follow my dreams,” she says.
“There are parents whose kids want to do something artistic and they don’t feel they can get behind them because it’s such an uncertain industry and because they don’t think it’s a real job. Mine were never like that.”
She knows her mind, which may be why she opted not to sign for a major label. Smith, who seems to have a natural sense of how the music industry works, wasn’t prepared to jump through hoops in order to please a record company.
The first person she needed to please was herself.
That said, there were moments starting out when she did feel slightly overwhelmed. Going into a big recording studio with season producers was obviously intimidating.
She quickly understood that the only way was to follow her own vision and to say no when she felt she needed to.
“I didn’t really know what I wanted at the start,” she says. “If I didn’t like something I might not have said no. Now I’ve learned to say no, If something isn’t working, I’ll say it and we’ll start again.”
She was chuffed to be asked to do Black Panther. As luck would have it she was in Los Angeles meeting producers when Lamar reached out. It was lunchtime when she received a call from a mutual acquaintance.
Kendrick was in the studio and wondered if she wanted to come around and work on a track. She dropped what she was doing and, within a few hours, she and Lamar were recording ‘I Am’, a highlight of the soundtrack.
Can’t wait for October now, sold out and my soul sister @thisisminarose is coming on tour with me 💕💖 excited for you guys to hear her if you haven’t- she’s got her first UK headline tour coming up straight after too✨cute photo of me, Bardha and Mina channeling cheetah girls pic.twitter.com/2AAGRHuMS7
— Jorja Smith (@JorjaSmith) August 30, 2018
“I heard of Black Panthers, the movement,” she says. “I don’t know anything about Black Panther the superhero. I saw the film when the soundtrack came out. It was fantastic to be involved.”
The Stradbally show won’t be her first in Ireland.
“I’ve played Longitude before, and the audience was fantastic. Festivals can be great when the crowd gets behind you.”
Presumably, that will happen tomorrow in Co Laois.
