Artist interview ·
115JAI RAN THE WHOLE SESSION HIMSELF. NOW HE’S LEARNING TO PASS THE ROCK.
The Columbus artist built his records on control. The next level has been figuring out what to hand off.
For years, 115Jai built records the way a lot of independent artists say they want to, with his hands on almost everything. He writes, records, produces and engineers, and he can keep tweaking a song until the drums, the vocal levels and the mix sit exactly where he wants them.
All that control helped shape what he calls Midwest Alternative Hip Hop. It also made time one of his biggest costs. In his September 10 FVTV interview, Jai described studio days running anywhere from five to twelve hours and a hard drive stacked with unfinished decisions.
The story behind “Malibu or Venice” starts right there. A song about not being there for the people he loved sat unfinished until somebody on his team heard a reason to put it out.
Control costs time
Jai doesn’t always start with a finished beat. He described recording vocals over a loop, then building the drums around the performance, so the record bends around what he actually sang or rapped.
He traces part of that approach to working with Doobie. Jai said he spent years watching Doobie build beats and picking up production, mixing and new ways to use his voice. It mattered because it was hands-on, one musician putting another on to the tools behind the result.
His own process can still eat a whole day. Recording the song is one job, and building the production and mixing it are two more. Jai said a session can run five to twelve hours because he’s doing all three. He values being able to make exactly what he hears in his head, though some days, he added, he’d like to just record and go home.
Enter the team. Jai links the speed-up in his career over the last two or three years to people who can take on specific jobs. His manager handles the business, helps lock in shows and makes sure the music is registered properly. His DJ holds down the live show. A guitarist who also engineers can record him when he needs somebody else at the controls.
These are regular jobs with real consequences. A missed registration, an unconfirmed booking or a session that never ends steals time from the next record. Delegating lets Jai stay the artist without personally knocking out every task around the artist.
He said trying to force a team together had failed before, and the relationships that lasted grew over time. For him, finding people who care about the work has taken longer than finding people happy to stand near it.
Who gets the time back?
The hook for “Malibu or Venice” had been sitting around for roughly a year and a half to two years, Jai said. It came out of a stretch when partners, friends and family felt like he wasn’t available. Last-minute travel and long studio nights made his schedule hard for anybody else to live around.
His explanation didn’t erase their frustration, and he understood why somebody might not want that life. The question in the song was whether building a better future could justify how much of the present the work was eating up.
Then his manager heard the unfinished record while they were going through the hard drive. Jai had thought about adding a feature and hadn’t settled on a full direction. His manager pushed him to finish his own second verse, mix it and put it out.
Jai called the result his strongest-performing solo single at the time of the interview. The more telling detail is the intervention. Making more music was never the problem. Somebody else recognized the song that was already sitting there waiting to be finished.
Perfectionism is harder for him to shake than any fear of an audience. He said he can hear a song in the car after it’s out and wish he had changed a vocal level, delivered a bar cleaner or made one more adjustment. Listeners can love the exact same passage without ever noticing the thing that’s eating at him.
Shows, messages, reposts and returning listeners have made him more confident in the work. They haven’t made every production call any easier. The same skill that lets him fix almost anything can hand him another reason to wait.
The single brings that conflict close to home. The hours it takes to improve a record come out of the same life the record is trying to describe. A team can help him finish the music, and he still has to decide what finishing it is supposed to make possible.
The crowd is real
Jai remembers looking out into a crowd and seeing kids in 115Jai shirts who had come with their parents. That moment changed how casually he wanted to talk about drugs and guns in his music.
He framed it as a question of responsibility and imagination. What reaches a listener too young to understand everything being said? What kind of crowd is an artist inviting into the room? Jai wants people to feel safe, enjoy the show and make it home.
He holds the music to the same high bar. He argued that how easy it is to record and release now has made strong work harder to find under a pile of unfinished songs and weak mixes. The take lines up with the attention he gives his own records, even when that attention slows him down.
The sound he calls Midwest Alternative Hip Hop gives him room outside a narrow rap box. He described rock instrumentation and grungier vocal textures sitting with rap verses and R&B-informed hooks. Rock and rap were also part of how he learned English growing up, so the blend comes straight out of his listening history.
Independence is practical for him, too. He isn’t against a label deal on principle. He wants to know the obligations, what he would owe, what he would own and how he could walk away. A familiar logo on the contract doesn’t answer any of those questions.
His goal for the next year, as he put it in September, is to make the music consistently support his life and take his own shows into more markets. He has stopped chasing a precise follower count for every move. He’d rather make the work as strong as he can and see how far it travels.
The records stay his. Learning to share the work around them might buy him more time to live the life he’s writing about.