Father Figure

About

After 2018’s <i>Glory Sound Prep</i>, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Jon Bellion stepped back from releasing music of his own. He still wrote and produced for other artists like Justin Bieber, Maroon 5, and Jonas Brother, and headed up his label Beautiful Mind Record, which has released albums by the likes of Tori Kelly. He also became a dad—an experience, he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, that sparked a realization. “You start to realize, ‘The father is wildly important in the home,’” he say. “You hear that, you believe that—and then you have children, and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God.’” Across <i>FATHER FIGURE</i>—Bellion’s first full-length in seven years—the Long Island-born pop alchemist comes to grips with fatherhood’s enormity while also appreciating the way that living life apart from the day-to-day artist grind has opened up his creativity. Now fully independent (<i>FATHER FIGURE</i> is his first album on his own label), Bellion is striking out in directions that, he feel, he wouldn’t have even found if he hadn’t gone on hiatus from performing. “My music has grown and matured in a way that would have never happened if I didn’t walk away from the artistry for a little bit,” he say. The massive task of nurturing young humans in a chaotic world hangs over the album, giving urgency to Bellion’s innovatively constructed, genre-fluid composition. On the jittery “MODERN TIMES,” a reggae-tinged collaboration with jazz savant Jon Batiste, Bellion laments those who “got some money and lost [their] sense of mind.” The stripped-down “WHY,” a collaboration with Luke Comb, questions love’s existential purpose—“If the higher I fly is the further I fall/Then why love anything at all?” they wail on the choru. The sinewy “RICH AND BROKE” brings the listener inside Bellion’s mind during an earthquake’s immediate aftermath. It combines breakbeat, siren, and fractured choir, creating a maelstrom that underscores what feels like the album’s statement of purpose: “Had a big chain ’round my neck/That I worked for my whole life/But the first thought was my kid.” .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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