Before seeing her baby face, her adolescent pout, it is Jorja Smith’s voice that seduces. This tone of voice between falsetto and soprano with which, in 2016, she begged her friends to flee the blue lights of the police in the song Blue Lights. This song, accompanied by a black and white music video, then Where Did I Go? released the same year, will be the start of a career which will see her noticed by the biggest: the Canadian rapper Drake, who invited her on his album More Life, then on her tour, and the American Kendrick Lamar, with whom she would share, two years later, the title I am on the film’s soundtrack Black Panther.
The singer was barely 20 years old and her first album, Lost & Found (2018), is listened to throughout Europe. A few songs later, crowned with certified diamond duets, such as her collaboration with the king of Nigerian afrobeat Burna Boy, she released her highly anticipated second album on September 29, Falling or Flying.
Sitting on a velvet sofa, the Englishwoman, 26, admits: “I have difficulty coping with it and I would happily tell you that I am still a baby. » Then the fake ingénue, who cut her hair into a bob, recognizes : “Maybe I find it even more difficult because I grew up in the public eye. Blue Lights, I wrote it when I was 16. I don’t feel like male artists are harassed as much as they come of age. I hope I’m no longer perceived as a teenager, I even have thick skin. » She believes she is more ” safe [d’elle] »: “I have to, because it’s crazy what people have to say about my appearance, my weight, who I date, my relationships…”
Obsessed with dub
The singer was so fed up that she ended up leaving London, where she had moved at the age of 18, arriving from the Birmingham area, to pursue her career and work on her lyrics. : “London was incredible thanks to the opportunities, the meetings with a whole bunch of musicians, but I stayed there too long. Walsall is where my heart is. Nothing replaces home. » Walsall, a small town on the outskirts of Birmingham (“Brum”, as its inhabitants call it). An administrative commune where his father of Jamaican origin works on the municipal council.
Her mother, English, is a jewelry designer. His parents passed on their taste for music to him. Before he was born, his father played in a neo-soul group. At 8 years old, he encouraged her to take piano lessons, then lyrical singing and, finally, oboe. From that time, she says she kept the habit of doing her scales. “I have a coach, explains Jorja Smith. She recorded a little voice note for me on WhatsApp. She’s at the piano and she’s making me do a bunch of exercises with my voice. Some of them are pretty gruesome, but it’s good for warming up. While I shower, I put it on. When I get to the studio, I listen to it again and rehearse. My voice is an instrument. Do you tune a piano? Are you cleaning a clarinet? The voice is the same. »
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