NXTSTYLE’s 2020 New Music Guide: Jake Vicious

Me and one of my amazing cohorts and Emma Remelle do a lot of writing in the studio and often. I like to hear the demos that people are working on and so to my memory that one came in as a demo Emma had where she had played some sexy-ass guitar. I think it was like we’re doing some referencing from like some Niykee Heaton and some really cool singer-songwriters and she had played some crazy guitar sped it Up by double or triple or something wild and had this arrangement. It moved and it’s just this really cool demo and then we started playing with it and tried to make it something real.

We did a lot of singles. There’s a couple of big projects I’m focusing on bigger bodies of work that let artists dig a little deeper. We’re supposed to be releasing 50 singles, I think it’s gonna be a couple of really impactful projects, which I’m pretty excited about.

Burna Boy. All the Burner shit is lit. He just came out with a crazy record with Stormzy and Ed Sheeran and African Giant, I think it’s one of the best albums this year. Me and Emma take a lot of inspiration from BANKS who dropped an album this year, was fucking ridiculous…Yeah guilty pleasure music…Rihanna probably because like, “bitch better have my money”. Maybe Hootie and the Blowfish, kinda wack, but that’s a little guilty pleasure music.

Obviously dream but Bibi Bourelly is unbelievable. I would love to get like two weeks in a studio, with her and just a couple musicians and just let her go in. You know she’s a crazy writer and she wrote some amazing music and she already did a collab with my man Jacob Banks. So A Jacob Banks collab would be lit. Timbo is the man, that’s where I get a lot of my sexy shit. So any of those would be dreams, but plans- there’s some really cool collabs coming out, so just stay tuned.

Music is kind of everything to me. And I know that’s kind of a funny maybe generic answer but like everyone in this room knows me through music. Everyone in most rooms knows me through music and it’s just something I found early that was an amazing way to not just express myself, but I find a lot of joy in helping other people express themselves and just like being in that moment where you make something special that you couldn’t have done without the two people, you know what I mean? So music means to me connection. And it means everything. Means life. It’s what I do. So that’s what music means to me.

This is a really hard question. There’s a really good one in a country lyric that just came out. I think it’s like Toby Keith or something, but it’s not Toby Keith (NXTSTYLE fact check!…Keith Urban). It’s like…“I love who I am. But I miss who I was when we were” and I always thought that was a cool lyric, a really cool introspective way to look at relationships. I think because it’s like I think you missed that more about the relationship than you think. It’s more about how you felt as the person in the relationship than it is about the person, because you were so happy with them. So it’s like I love who I am. But I do miss who I was when we were and that’s a really cool.