Sean Paul on Adjusting His Flow and Becoming a Multi-Platinum Artist
Grammy Award-Winning Performer Sean Paul’s Conscious Path to Success
Feel the temperature rising? Grammy Award-winning artist Sean Paul is heating up just days before this chat, courtesy of another Grammy nomination coming his way. The well-deserved praise is for his latest album, Live N Livin, which Paul says is an attempt at promoting unity in an otherwise combative genre.
“I’m doing step-outs with everybody all over the world but I’m not doing it at home," he tells AskMen. "So I thought, what better way to put this album out as a unity type thing.”
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Connected by Zoom video call, Paul is humble and gracious, offering up intriguing anecdotes of his youth and his pursuit of sports, his path through the music industry, and the role music has played in both his own personal trajectory and that of his personal relationships.
AskMen: You were a serious water polo player as a kid. Was music a competing interest or the ultimate path you wanted to follow?
Sean Paul: Music has always been a part of my interests, but was never competing with sports at the time. Sports was it, you know what I mean?
When I was four or five, my mom and my pops used to teach swimming every weekend and every summer. Make a little extra money, that type of stuff. They were national swimmers so people trusted them. We were given problems to solve and they used to throw me in the pool like, “Sean can do it,” and have me swim around to get more comfortable.
At thirteen, I started training with the [Jamaican] national water polo team. My pops then went to prison, which kind of pushed me more into swimming because he was a champion in the sixties and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. By the time I was seventeen, I decided I wanted to try and write rhymes down, and [music] started from there.
From seventeen to nineteen, a lot of my swimming friends [who comprised] most of my social life were going away to college. I couldn’t afford to pay the college tuition so I stayed in Jamaica and naturally started to gravitate more into music.
Can you pinpoint an experience that turned music from a passion to something you wanted to do for the rest of your life?
There was a table tennis champion in my school [named] Jason Williams whose stage name was Don Yute. I saw him spitting on the mic and was like, “Yo, that’s dope.” So I started finding out which studio he’d go to and just hang out. Literally, I would be a fly on the wall watching artists do their thing. I was soaking it up. There was no one moment, just something that was driving at me like, “This is what I want to do.”
I had another friend who was a swimmer who got into reggae and became a Rastafarian. In 1993, I saw him get on Sumfest, which is a big reggae festival [in Jamaica]. His name is Marcus I. It was he and Don Yute who helped me get in the game, and every year, I’d go to the big stage shows and tell myself, “Next year, that’s me, next year, that’s me,” but it took six years for that to happen.
But it happened! Was it simply saying, “Next year, that’s me,” or was there something else that aided your success?
Just reaffirming quietly. Everybody who I showed my demo work to, they’d look at me [puzzled] like, “You? Why are you doing it?” And I was like, “Because I love it.” I didn’t get a lot of encouragement from close friends. We all loved music, they just never saw me going in this direction.
Flashing forward a little bit, let's hear about a moment when you finally felt like you belonged.
My father came out of prison and heard the demo tapes. He said he knew Cat Coore from Third World and was going to get the demo over to him. He got the demo over to [Coore] and we got back the call, “Yo, this dude sounds like Super Cat, bring him in.”
I remember going into the studio that night in an area of town that I didn’t grow up in. My mom was calling everybody at three in the morning being like, “Yo, yo where is this dude?” She didn’t want me going down the same path that happened with my dad, which was a series of unfortunate events — being around the wrong person at the wrong time and trying to be a hustler. For me, to be carried to the studio, that was dope.
I also had the opportunity to record these demos at a musician’s house whose sister was a backup singer and dancer for Shaggy. One of my demos got to Shaggy’s manager one day when he was coming over to see the girls do their routine. The manager actually used to manage Super Cat, who everybody said I sounded like. When he heard [the demos], he was like, “Who is this kid? I want to produce a few records for him,” and he ended up producing like five forty-fives.
I’d been listening to Mutabaruka, a very big dub poet and philosopher in Jamaica, and he’s the one who I took my record to at first. To me, he’s an elder Rastafarian with a lot of consciousness, and the song I was singing was about uptown and downtown, questioning how we can be one nation when we’re split in half, stuff like that. Later that night I was doing my homework for college and remembered [Mutabaruka] had this talk show. I turn on the radio and hear the dude say, “Yo, so this next guy, he’s got something to say. Listen, listen.” I didn’t know he was going to play [my record], but then it came on. My mom’s asleep, my brother is sleeping. There’s no Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram to be like, “Look at me being played on the radio!”
That’s one of the moments for me where I was like, “Yo, I made it!” That was 1994 and I broke in late 1996.
You mention learning from some of the decisions your father made. Has your approach to creating music helped or influenced parts of your personal life?
Honestly, I think it’s the other way around. It’s life experiences and stories I’ve heard about other people that I’m putting into the songs. [Music] became therapy for me in that way.
At first I was only doing conscious music. Everybody who heard me do it was like, “It’s dope, you sound like Super Cat, but bro — that’s not you. Why are you singing this conscious stuff?” And I was like, “Because I am a conscious person, that’s what I want to put out.”
But a lot of the producers didn’t see me that way. They were like, “You’re the dude who takes dudes’ girls away and you end up in a fight with them at parties.” That’s when I was an adolescent. [The producers] were like, “Sing about the ladies, sing about girls. Ladies love you, sing that.” The first song where I did sing like that blew me up in ‘96. From there I just decided I was going to talk about the ladies and relationships and everything that comes with it, from wilin’ out to sex to meaningful conversation.
I started zoning in on the fact that these producers weren’t really going to record me trying to sound [more “conscious”]. I switched up my flow, and from there, it just took off. I decided to make a lot more songs about ladies and relationships and partying with friends. And honestly, it helped me. Every time I’ve had a problem in my life, music has been the thing I could lean up on. Maybe my girl left me. Maybe I bumped my toe or broke my knee. There’s always been a song that’s been like, “This is your song today, bro. Play this song and you’ll feel better.”
Music for me has been something I can lean up on every time.
Here we are in 2021. Live N Livin is nominated for a Grammy, which must feel incredible. What was the inspiration behind the new album?
I went through years of blowing up and turning into an international artist. In the past few years I’ve been feeling like, “Yo, I need to return back to the essence of it, hardcore dancehall music.” So that’s what I started to do and I was itching to make an entire project.
In 2019, I started recording a few singles I thought I’d release in the dancehall circles every three or four months for a period of a year or so. When the pandemic hit, I realized I had a lot of material and that maybe I should do an album. That’s how [Live N Livin] came together. I put the songs together, I started mixing them, and it just popped off as a hot album.
Everybody I worked with on the album —the artists, engineers, producers, even the album artwork guy — I revere all of their work. [The album] was a way to unify dancehall music, which is a lot of times about clashing. I wanted to prove that the collab is better than the clash, especially for a genre that’s been so influential to hip-hop, to reggaeton, to afrobeat. When I look at the factors, we don’t really do a lot of songs together. We don’t please our fans in that respect. Live N Livin came out to remind people that dancehall is still around and that there are some younger cats [on the album] who I think are on the same level as me lyrically, stylistically, rhythm-wise and flow-wise.
We just all got together and did it.
"Cheap Thrills" was your first time collaborating with Sia, and now we're here with "Dynamite." What made you want to work with her again?
My mom said to me one day, “Do you know Sia?” I said, “You mean Psy.” She’s like, “No, it’s Sia.” I thought she was talking about “Gangnam Style.” She’s like, “You need to do a song with her.” I’m like, “It’s a dude and his name is Psy.” She’s like, “Nah, it’s Sia.” I’m like, “I don’t know that artist.”
[My mom] played “Chandelier” for me and I was like, “Yo, I know that song. I thought it was Rihanna.” A few months later, my manager calls me and asks if I’d consider doing a song with Sia. My niece loves her, my mom loves her, let’s do it. And we did “Cheap Thrills,” which was a remix, and it went to number one, which was her first.
We wanted to do another song, hitting them real big and making sure it was a real good-feeling vibe. It took some time for me to find the right vibe. When I hear the rhythm, the track, or the demo, I always picture who [the song] should sound like. I wrote the song with Dua Lipa, “No Lie,” with a girl named Emily Warren. Emily did a demo of it and there’s a certain thing about her vocals that just stands out. Nobody could hit it. I didn’t know what Dua sounded like, but when I heard her demo, I knew it was it.
Same thing with “Dynamite.” I was trying to find the right thing that I knew sounded like Sia.
The vibe of the rhythm sounded like her, and when she did the demo, she blew me away. So I knew it was “Dynamite,” for sure. It all started with “Cheap Thrills,” and for all the fans who supported that one, thank you. [“Dynamite”] is the next installment. I hope people enjoy this one just as much.
Follow @duttypaul and check out https://www.allseanpaul.com for tickets and tour dates.
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