Hi Joyia, thank you for sitting down with us today. Your most recent release was the Genesis EP. Can you tell us about the story and production behind it?

So to back up, I had been writing songs for a good year before my Legends EP, which was my first release as an artist. I was coming to a place where I knew the direction I wanted to take my music in, but was still figuring out how to develop it. When I released Legends (I was around 19 or 20), I was growing not only as an artist, but as an individual. I found that I was being inspired by so many different genres, but I was going back to my jazz roots. The main producer that I work with, HMLT, was bringing more of the jazz sounds and live instruments back into my sound (which had darker, more mysterious Toronto RnB vibes at the time). When I mixed that with my own RnB, it became something really cool that I felt was unique to me - that’s where a lot of the inspiration for Genesis came from. I really wanted to combine those acoustic and digital sounds in my own way.

Genesis was originally supposed to be a four song EP; the first song in there, “More Than Us” was finished and added just a week before we sent everything in for mastering - it was so last minute. A great producer named Ish D, had randomly contacted me on Instagram and sent me a bunch of beats. I heard the beat for "More Than Us" and I sent him back that track written maybe an hour later. I told him that I was planning on releasing an EP soon and that what I had written would be really dope as the intro song; I wanted to get his thoughts because I respected that it was his art just as much as it was mine. But he insisted that I take it and run with it because he genuinely liked it so much.

After that was done, everything just kind of came into line. Genesis was the first project that, from top to bottom, I felt just really encapsulated who I was as an artist and as a human being. I listen to all the songs and all of these songs are different as much as they are the same. They are so different sonically, but they each speak to a different facet of who I am as a musician.

I think that's why I kind of wanted “More Than Us” to be the intro because it had so many of those hip hop elements that were a part of my Legends EP. It showed that this new project still relates to who I was when I released Legends, but now I'm going to build on top of it using sounds that I've developed and what I've been exploring and how I've evolved as an artist.

Toronto has been going through an “R&B revival” over the last few years with the come-ups of people like Majid Jordan, Daniel Caesar, Charlotte Day Wilson, and Jessie Reyez. Have they been an influence on you?

I’d say that Toronto has really blown up within the last five years, because before that, Canada was more known for like, folk music and Shania Twain. People didn’t think much about Canada, they’d just be like you’re from the north. And now it's like Canada. Oh, you're from the North.

Then Justin Bieber happened, and I can't say that OVO didn't have a huge part to play in that, too; Drake and the entire OVO crew had an influence on the modern RnB sound that I and so many other artists were leaning towards.

I was also influenced a lot by artists like Daniel Caesar, who takes more of that live sound and those more traditional, old RnB/soul sounds and kind of modernizes them. So I was into a lot of it. There's just so much inspiration everywhere. It's crazy.

How did your journey with music start?

When I was young, I’d sit on my dad’s lap and bang away at the keys of his old Yamaha keyboards; it was one of the ones that had a bunch of buttons with the pre-programmed percussion beats. Every time my fingers hit the keys, my eyes would light up - my dad would always tell me that I was born for this. I always sang around the house, too. My parents have always been supportive with everything I wanted to do without being forceful, which I'm very grateful for.

When I was a bit older we started going to a church with a children’s choir. My parents asked me to start in the choir and see how I liked it before enrolling in lessons. I sang there for around three years, and I was like, yeah, I love singing - like I LOVE music. This is what I want to do. I want to take lessons. So then I started with piano lessons.

Everything just kind of spiraled from there. One of my teachers (my vocal and piano teacher at the time) was like “why don't you try writing a song?” I was like, what do you mean... I'm 13, I have no problems haha - what am I going to write about? And she was like, “I don't know, just start writing.” I started off doing the Alicia Keys thing with just me and a piano, but eventually started going into EDM production. EDM was a good place to start because it taught me the technical elements of production that I’m still able to use today, and it also comes in handy when I’m in the studio environment because I can communicate a bit more easily with my collaborators and tell them exactly what I may be hearing. Most importantly though, I feel like I can empathize with them as an artist; there’s a lot of work that goes into production and it’s really important to respect that.

So this is what led you to attending Ryerson? How was that experience?

I think going to Ryerson is when I kind of “found myself.” I met a lot of really good people who helped me grow out of the high school problems that I thought were so big. It was the same thing musically: when I was in high school, I was so attached to this trend of EDM because it's what everybody around me was doing. As I got older, I realized that I really only got into EDM because I thought people would think I was cool if I was a DJ.

So, yeah, university really caused me to grow up a lot. I went to Ryerson for a new program called Creative Industries. When we got there, the professors were like, we don't really know what this is either, but we're all going to try to define it together ahaha. It was a brand new program at the time so it was a bit of navigating for everyone. I was really fortunate to have some awesome professors who taught us a lot about things like concert and festival marketing, management - that kind of stuff. There some courses where I found myself thinking, “these 12 weeks could have been summed up into one sentence.” But there were other classes where we learned a lot of practical music industry knowledge, and I met a lot of really amazing people. It was really valuable in that sense.

And it was really beneficial in the sense that everybody who was going into the program was aimed at kind of working in these artistic industries. So you made like you made a lot of good connections with people that you could work with in the future.

So you got a lot of good practical knowledge out of it?

Yeah! University is of course a bit more theory based, so a lot of it consisted of assignments and everything, but it was still great - it required an internship which I scored at an awesome entertainment company in Toronto, and I still keep in touch with all of my coworkers. I’ve worked Veld Music Festival for the past four years because of it, and if you’ve ever worked behind the scenes at a music festival, you gain an insane amount of knowledge and respect for how much goes into them.

Would you recommend the Ryerson program to others? Why or why not?

So if you're looking for something a bit more technical in terms of production, I actually wouldn't recommend it - my only reason being is that it focuses more on the working parts and business aspects of this industry.

If you wanted something a bit more technical for production, I'd suggest a college. Ryerson does have a program through their RTA school, which is Radio-Television Arts, but I believe the production is still kind of more in terms of sound for broadcasting and not actual music production. I’d also suggest something like Humber College, which now has a joint university degree program that's actually more jazz based. And of course, there’s Fanshawe out in London. There’s also a place called Metalworks. They’re basically just a music production school and they do certificate programs. I know a bunch of people that have gone through there.

I actually auditioned for the Humber vocal program when I was 18. Knowing that it was more jazz-based, I didn’t think I’d get in, but I just wanted to do it and say that I auditioned, because none of the other university programs that I applied for had an audition process. A month before my audition, my vocal teacher was like, “hey, let's learn some jazz for your audition.” Being classically trained, it wasn’t anything I had done before, but growing up I listened to a lot of bossa nova / Brazilian jazz when it was playing in my house. I never really knew it, but I guess jazz was always subconsciously playing in my head.

I ended up getting in, which put a huge fork in the road for me. The Humber program had elements of music business, but you also had jazz classes and classes on music production. But, I think I ended up choosing Ryerson because I felt like I’d be boxing myself in a program with people that were all doing the same thing at Humber. I wanted to go into a program where I would meet people from different areas of life that could bring multiple perspectives into my learning. And the other thing that I didn't really like about going to a music production program is the idea that I was going to be graded on my music, because to me (and I think a lot of artists can say the same thing), art is something that is judged and consumed so subjectively. I didn't like the idea that my work was going to be graded by somebody who just may not necessarily have the taste for it. You know what I mean? I think that music and art is something that should be enjoyed by people for individual reasons. One person could love it, and one could hate it - I didn’t want or need a grade to reflect what someone else thought of it.

At this point, I know the message and the art that I'm creating is authentic to me - if it speaks to me, then that's what matters. And if it speaks to one group of people and I ‘m able to affect them in a certain way, that's amazing. And if it doesn't speak to one group or other groups of people, that's totally fine, too, because, again, music is something so subjective. I think it’s amazing that there’s something out there for everyone.


We know you got started with mixing after a Swedish House Mafia show. How did you end up transitioning more towards the tech house rather than pop EDM?

So that's a funny story, and HMLT can probably speak to that. I met him when I was young and at the height of my house music obsession, and at that point I was listening to a lot of Swedish House Mafia and big room house. He looked at me and he was like, “you're going to turn like twenty or twenty two and you're going to be like, ‘this shit sucks, I only like techno.’”

I looked him dead in the face and I was like, "What are you talking about?"  That's never going to happen. Lo and behold, I turn like 20 years old and start liking techno.

But yeah, I think when I was producing a lot of bigger house music, it got to the point where it was starting to get very redundant - like it was the same thing over and over: make an intro, try to write a little hook, a build up an interesting drop... I took a step back and realized that I was producing all this house music and writing all of these little hooks, but I hadn’t written a full song in forever. And with songwriting… if you don't use it, you lose it.

Fast forward a few years - I met this amazing songwriter (who ended up becoming my mentor), and she told me that if my song can’t be stripped back and played on a piano, it’s not a good song. She taught me to make sure my songs have substance when there's nothing added to it first, before going crazy with it. In retrospect, I think I was drawn to people like Swedish House Mafia, because if you completely strip down a song like “Don’t You Worry Child,” it’s an absolutely beautiful song.

Kind of like the Above and Beyond Acoustic series?

Oh my god yeah. I was like, this is absolutely crazy. I think that that's what I respect the most - you get two completely different styles of music - dance music and classical - all using the same material? You need a ton of creativity for that. For Above and Beyond, they had to completely orchestrate every single song, which goes way past making it acoustic. They composed everything for every instrument and arranged everything completely differently. I have so much respect for that.

Anyway, back to the question - I started transitioning to techno after I began listening to people like Disclosure. When I started listening to them, I became exposed to more UK garage sounds. That's what opened my eyes to this whole other side of UK Garage which is basically tech house with a bit of soul, you know what I mean?

What I dig most about tech house is that you can make a lot of impact with something really simple and subdued - not everything needs to be extra or obnoxious. There's more of an emphasis on the bass line and the actual kind of rhythms of the music, which really interested me because it’s something that's really rhythmically based, similar to the bossa nova that I grew up with. It makes you move - you don't know why, but it does.

What about DJing or making RnB mixes since you also have a lot of knowledge within that genre? What keeps you away from making something like that?

I think it provides my brain a little bit of a nice break. I feel like having those two separate worlds of RnB and electronic music increases my creativity for both. When I’m spending time on RnB, that’s when I’m in my creative element, whereas when I DJ, I use that as a break to discover new music and have some fun. I think it's important to give your brain breaks and just remind yourself of how much you enjoy doing what you do, so that we don't just constantly get caught up in the pressures of creating.

It’s great because when I’m in music-discovery mode, it reminds me of all these other cool genres that exist. So that way, when I go back to kind of songwriting and creating, I'm inspired because I see all these cool things that other people are doing. It inspires me to keep creating in my genre as well, and to not be afraid of taking risks and taking these influences from things that I enjoy.