With hopes of unifying the world through her music, Jahna Sebastian transforms her best and worst experiences including confront neo-nazi racism and being illegally detained while pregnant, into songs that bring us closer together when society seems to pull us apart.
Let’s start at the beginning. Tell us about how you were first introduced to music and how your career began.
I have been doing music all of my life. It has always been a part of my life’s journey. I started singing as a child at pretty much the same time I started talking. I graduated from the Russian Academy of Music by the time I was twenty. Before that, I played in an orchestra from the age of seven and that’s how I learned to read music. It also gave me a producer’s view in how to analyze it and put different elements of musical sounds together.
As a teenager, I started making beats for myself and others. Eventually, I came to London and started my studio. It has been an ongoing journey of pretty much my whole life. I don’t come from a musical family. This has been me choosing my path and going forward
Not only are you an accomplished singer, songwriter, actor, and musician, you also are a business owner. You also have your own recording studio, Multivison.
There have been quite a few reasons for that. One thing is that I wanted to say what I wanted to say, musically in terms of culture, my own way. Starting my own recording studio. let me to be independent in that sense. It also allows me to work with other people and help them put out their music and ideas out there without having to wait for someone else.
How would you describe your personal artistry?
I incorporate different genres and different elements. With my music, I produce, write, engineer and record all by myself. I recently released my album, The Alchemist. This basically summarizes who I am as an artist because The Alchemist is the foundation of stories to come. Each and every album that comes out afterward is like a chapter in a book. They are all connected. My purpose is to do more than music. I strive to give hope through messages to the world. People are living in a very divided world right now and are in need of a more unifying element. This can be done through music. People from all kinds of backgrounds and different places can come together. That’s how I see it. With my music, I am trying to bring the world together. I want to inspire people and show them a way that we can all be uplifted. There’s so much going on in the world, I want my music to be the light.
I have a very distinct vision of how we can approach the situation especially right now because I feel that we are living at a crossroad. We have to ask humanity to choose the correct way where everyone can ultimately come to an understanding. I have a vision for that and I’m unfolding that step-by-step, bit-by-bit, through my music. It’s a unifying vision for everyone that is available for anyone throughout the entire world willing to listen.
That’s a beautiful goal to set for yourself. You work with so many artists from different places with different styles, what are some of the things that you look for within them?
The most important qualities that I look for is them being unique in some significant way and having something of value to say. Stop trying to jump on bandwagons and doing music just because it sounds nice, fancy, or glamorous. In fact, it is really the other way around. They have to be prepared to work hard. I’m very tough in the studio. I may tell them to repeat the same stuff twenty times (Laughing) until they get it right. I am a perfectionist in that sense, but I’m even harder on myself.
I am looking for genuine talent and passion, but I also love when people have long-term goals so they are not just trying to record one song and then give up, expecting fame to come very quickly to them. I’m looking for people who want to pursue music seriously and want to say something interesting, but at the same time be unique. I take who they really are and try to bring out the best in them. The more different they are to everything around us, that’s even better because we can grow something that starts trends as opposed to following them.
You have overcome a great deal of adversity including being wrongly imprisoned while you were pregnant, how have those experiences shaped your music?
Life has shaped my music tremendously and the other way around. As they say, life imitates art and art imitates life. In my life, everything is connected. My music, of course, speaks a lot about the things that I have experienced in my life, the struggles as well as the victories. That is exactly how it is connected because through hearing the misfortunes that I have overcome along with my triumphs through my lyrics, it can inspire people going through similar hardships that they too can look forward to better days. Everything comes straight from my heart.
I have written about regaining my freedom and its importance in several songs to share what I’ve been through with people who may be going through it now. I also write about how even in desperate times, you can have one pivotal moment that can change everything.
- BE’N ORIGINAL
