The number you’ve dialled has not been recognised. JayWood – the nom de plume of Jeremy Haywood-Smith – is embracing new pastures having moved his music-making from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Montreal, and his new album Leo Negro chimes with a different tone as it looks to reconnect the self and grapple with one’s identity. Marking a moment of meaningful change where controlled chaos takes the lead, it philosophises on what it truly means to be an experimentalist building a multi-faceted world where genre is infinite through sounds braver, more playful, and truthful than he’s dared deliver before.

 

“It’s me at my most honest, but to approach the album like this I needed to write from different versions of myself. I’ve intentionally split the brain through each song which has made it more cohesive than my scatterbrain music mentality of just writing everything I’m into and expecting it to make sense.”

 

Leo in name, although less by nature, the 11 ‘Jays’ within feast on truth and uncertainty. Despite its astute sampling with layers of twists and turns, Leo Negro doesn’t showboat but roars in the presence of vulnerability as it considers one’s absolutes as a way of navigating the identity crisis. 

 

Leaning into the discomfort and disconnection of his new chapter, he grounded himself with a new routine and practice by writing his music as he would a journal, documenting through first-hand experience, the bric-a-brac of emotions others feel but are too afraid to face. Slowing down and tuning in, he’s taken in the tours of other musicians, the variety in nature’s landscape, street art, and (twice!) learned French, inspired by texts about the artist’s plight from Rick Rubin’s wise words to The Artist’s Way, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic. “To be an artist is to live and breathe artistically; you experiment, you try, you fail, try again, and keep going. I realised I needed to do that in every part of my life from how I dress, to how I talk to people; I want to keep experimenting in everything to unlock more about myself which others can connect to.” 

 

Nominated for Canada’s coveted Polaris Music Prize, it’d be easy to be the cowardly lion; to rinse and repeat what’s worked up to this point. But for JayWood, leaning into his natural ‘what if?’ curiosity to make up his own rules as he goes along (“I never really knew what they were to begin with”) and venture into honesty’s unsafe space to seek comfort, confidence and make even greater connections, really is the only option. After all, he can’t help it; he’s a Leo.