Who Is JMSN?

There's no clear cut path to obtaining a career in the music industry, especially in today's record business climate. But if you do truly belong, you'll find a way to make it work. 26-year-old Christian Berishaj is a living example of that.

Better known as JMSN, the singer/songwriter/producer has been making music professionally since he was 17. Initially signing to Atlantic Records under the stage name Snowhite as part of the lukewarm rock band Love Arcade, Berishaj then took on the moniker Christian TV to signify his new label stint with Universal Motown. After heeding less than impressive results (and another major label exit), Berishaj finally cut through the industry nonsense and emerged with a new name and a refined musical style (which he’s coined as “Hippie R&B”) in Priscilla.

The album is an emotional yet compelling journey highlighted by JMSN’s strikingly pensive production. From beginning to end, it’s a captivating performance that has garnered praise from the likes of Usher and Chris Brown. It has also opened up many opportunities for the Detroit-native, with credits including recent work with Kendrick Lamar, Game, and Freddie Gibbs.

With Unit 6, the collaborative project alongside TDE lyricist Ab-Soul due out next month (which made our Top 50 Most Anticipated Albums of 2013 list), as well his follow-up album to Priscilla on the horizon, we felt there was no better time to ask: Who Is JMSN?

As told to Edwin Ortiz (@iTunesEra)

JMSN: "Looking back on it I didn't realize how ghetto Detroit was, but I felt like I was in my own world with music. People would be skipping school to smoke weed and do drugs. I would be skipping school to go record with my Pro Tools at home. I was always inspired to do music and get out of there and go to something bigger.

"You kind of do that when you make music. You go places in your mind. So it was kind of like an escape, and it still is an escape now when I sit here in the studio. When I make a song, it's escaping from this reality that's very stagnant.

"I lived with my mom for a while and she was very supportive. She did Christian music, so she played the piano. I took piano lessons at an early age, but I quit that because I thought guitar was cooler. I kind of wish I stayed in piano so I could play it a little better, but I can make my way around it.

"My mom, she got married a couple times. My stepdads were like, 'Why is he making so much noise in the basement?'"

JMSN: "Growing up I listened to Whitney Houston and Prince. In my teenage years I got into Fiona Apple, Radiohead and that kind of stuff. That drew me to the darker stuff. And then Whitney Houston, R. Kelly and stuff like that kept me in the realm of songs and songwriting. I feel like my music kind of blends those two together.

"Being from Detroit, Eminem was like god over there. And I was a big Dipset fan.

"Any genre, any kind of music, that didn't matter. I wanted to understand everything that I heard. It was this need to be like, what makes this good? I can feel certain aspects of it, but what are these other things that are foreign to me? I wanted to understand because music is my passion, it's my life. If I don't understand something that's going on I'm not just going to be like, "Well, I don't want to listen to it.'"

JMSN: "Love Arcade was cool, I was in high school doing that. We would find these abandoned businesses and we would do secret shows there, and there would be 400 people coming to these shows. It was this cool little thing in Detroit which got attention, and that's kind of how all the record label stuff started.

"At the time I didn't know the first thing about record labels and what they did. It was just like, oh shit, a record label is coming to watch us play at a candle shop. This was stuff I was recording at 17 in my basement. It's crazy to think that was so long ago.

"When I first started doing music I had no doubt in my mind that this is what I was going to pursue for the rest of my life. Even though I didn't understand what that actually meant, it was just affirming it in my ignorant thoughts.

"All the experiences that I've had up to this point have been good. You constantly learn and learn, until you figure out you really don't know shit and you're never going to know shit. And even learning that has been the biggest thing for me."

JMSN: "Immediately after that was Christian TV in 2006. I had got dropped from Atlantic, so Warner [Bros.] had picked up the first Christian TV album. I showed them the new songs, I showed them the new videos and they were like, 'Okay, cool.' Then later they were like, 'We don't want to do this so we're going to drop you from Warner.'

"I continued with these songs that I had with Warner before I got dropped, the main one being 'When She Turns 18' which I made a video for. I put it out myself and then [Universal] Motown, who was interested, signed me. Now I'm trying to make hits for them and shit like that; It was all about radio. It got real crazy and overwhelming. Finally toward the end I was like, 'What the fuck am I doing?'

"I wanted to make music that fulfilled my soul, not music like, 'Oh shit, it's a smash hit!' I came with 'Girl I Used To Know' to Motown with a video, and I was like, 'I want to go more into R&B, this is me. I want to go darker.' They didn't get it so they let me go.

"I was glad because I was ready to move away from that. I don't think I'll ever want to go back to that machine. I want to make music for myself, for others. I wanted to do it the right way."

JMSN: "The process was fairly short because it had been building up inside of me. It came in like three months. I don't want to say it was easy, but it flowed. It was all this built up shit that I just wanted to get out and talk about. I finally released an album, and even if it didn't do anything, it was good to get it off my chest. It's something that I'm proud of and believed in.

"Doing everything is definitely hard because you're your own worst enemy when it comes to the album. Sometimes you have to put the hat on of vocalist, then sometimes you have to put the hat on of producer, and all these things kind of fuck with each other.

"Mixing, that's a whole different monster right there. I save that for last because I'll go a couple weeks on one song just fucking with the right bass drum or a snare snap. It's really complicated to juggle all those, but in the end I guess you could say it's worth it. You know what you want and you can get it by doing it yourself."

JMSN: "I directed the first three videos and then the other ones I had a lot to do with the ideas. It's good to have the directing part out of my hands because there's so much stress doing that. I'd rather just make the ideas good and be a part of the editing rather than having to wear all the hats.

"I'm very proud of the videos, like 'Something' with the octopus and the scenes in the hotel room. They're all good, I got the point across for sure. With 'Jameson,' it's crazy that we pulled that off with so little money. It looks like a movie."

JMSN: "Dave Free who manages them reached out to me, and also Sounwave, who's their in-house producer. They were both just fans of the music and their girlfriends introduced them to it. Sounwave was like, 'We got to do some work. Kendrick is working on his album.' I was like, 'Cool, let me know.'

"I met up with Dave Free who wanted me to do a track with Ab-Soul. He didn't even know at the time that I had been talking to Sounwave. I was like, 'Where is [Sounwave] at?' He's like, 'Oh, you know him?' I said yeah, so it was kind of this circle of connections.

"I got with them and Sounwave brought over 'Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe.' I did some vocals on that, and at the time Kendrick was on tour. He got back and I went over to Dr. Dre's studio and just laid a bunch of vocals. I did some strings for them on a couple songs too.

"I was happy to help get Kendrick's ideas out there and accent what he was doing. I'm a big Kendrick Lamar fan, so it was just great to be a part of that. At the time this was one of the only rap crews that I would fuck with."

JMSN: "Somebody from his team had heard my stuff and Game had sent them an open hook like, 'Who can we get on this?' They were like, 'We got the perfect guy.' They sent it to me and I sent it back, and Game loved it. Then he listened to Priscilla and loved that.

"I think I was in Ohio when they first hit me up. It's crazy that I'm on that record now because it was done with a little SM57 on an Apogee One in the back of a tour bus. It was hard to do it like that because on tour it's crazy trying to find Internet just to send shit; that's a task in itself. And it was right before the album was coming out too, so I got in there right at the last second."

JMSN: "Like I said, all those guys are just dope. Ab-Soul is just a good experience because he's chill. I like it when people come in without egos and want it for the love of the music. We got on so good that we were doing two songs a session.

"I had all these beats that I had been working on. 'Nibiru' started out as just a JMSN song and I had been putting vocals on it. And then I was like, I'm not really feeling what I was doing. I showed it to Ab and he was like, 'Oh shit. Well, let me do this.' And he knocked that shit out in like fucking 20 minutes. It came out so great I was like, 'Shit, let's do another.' [Laughs.]

"The album is 12 tracks. There's this one...I don't even know if I should say the title because it might give away too much. I feel like I'm under a microscope because when MixedByAli was mixing the first single I posted a photo of it on Instagram like, 'Unit 6 coming.' And then Ab hit me up like, 'Dude, why did you say Unit 6? I didn't want to give away the album title.' I was like, 'Oh shit, I didn't even know we didn't give it away yet.'

"I got to chill. I'm wanting to talk about it like everybody knows but it's a secret. [Laughs.] You post a picture on Instagram and all of a sudden it's a blog post across the wall. I was just posting it because I wanted to tell you all what was going on because I was excited about it.

"We definitely are experimenting with other elements musically, but It's still my style of production. It's dark and moody, and there's a lot of horns and reverbed out shit. You'll see when you hear it. It's got that JMSN production on it.

"There are no features. We made it a point not to get features and have it stand on its own. With TDE, they wanted to put Kendrick and ScHoolboy Q on it which is cool, but they weren't part of the process so it doesn't make sense to just throw them in there."

JMSN: "Good stuff is coming. The last couple days I've been in the studio with Tyga. I got a couple things on his album Hotel California so I'm excited for people to hear that.

"I actually met him when he was with Chris Brown in a random occurrence. I was showing them some music and they liked it. Like 'Love & Pain' is Tyga's record. He was all like, 'When are you shooting the video?' [Laughs.]

"I was also in the studio with Freddie Gibbs. It's not even about commercial appeal to me. I want to work with these artists because I love their whole aesthetic. I want to be a part of that world."

JMSN: "[White Room Records] is my vehicle. It's going to be a point where I want to get other artists on there, but I feel like most importantly the one artist that's on the label has to break. Then we can go on to that stuff.

"My next album is the 'Blue Album.' Because Priscilla is considered the 'Red Album,' it'll be a blue box this next time. The actual album has a different name, but I don't want to release the name yet. It's coming along great though. It's making more of a mold of exactly where I want to go with JMSN.

"I would say I've done like 24 tracks. As the new tracks come though, I like those better than the other ones. It's going to be a process. I don't want to say that it's 60% done or something like that because I don't know yet. I'm trying to figure out exactly what I want to say with this too, lyrically and musically. So until I know exactly what I want to say and know that the record encompasses all of that, I won't be done with it."