Ready for a Revolution?

Prince Judah swears by divine inspiration as his artistic fuel.

For this roots, rock, reggae singer who has been generating major heat in music circles on The Rock and in North America, he sizes up his creative process as “coming from the heavens”. “I can’t channel it; it is not just mine to own,” he told Sunday Entertainment.

“It’s bigger than me and truly God’s blessing. I know I have a duty on this earth to speak positive righteousness and upliftment, not weak-hearted energy where people just flare out and burn.”

Blessed with melodious pipes and pause-a-moment looks, Judah jumps on a Zoom call a day after he – backed by his five-man band The Prince Judah Experience – performed at the Mangrove lounge in Miami to an enthusiastic full house last month.

“The show was electric, and the vibes were immaculate. We had the audience singing along to [almost] every song I did,” the Kingston 21-based vocalist relays of his collective’s seven-song lounge set, with Senorita and Bad Treatment from their repertoire registering as crowd favourites.

Post-show, he says, “The biggest ask of the night from everyone was when we would be putting out a dancehall project”.

The Miami show date was the kickoff of a lounge mini-tour for the band with additional stops in Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; Nassau, Bahamas; and here in Montego Bay on the schedule.

Formed shortly ahead of the pandemic five years ago, The Prince Judah Experience’s other band members are director and bass player Jassiah ‘Thundering Lion’ Boswell, lead guitarist Jovan ‘Electric Lightning’ Norman, drummer Brady ‘Earthquake Bradez’ Robinson, keyboardist Ito ‘Peaceful’ Dan, and rhythm guitarist Selah ‘Shockwave’ Solomon.

Their current tour notwithstanding, the music group is already four songs into recording their debut album and eyeing a release sometime next year.

The lead singer reveals that the band has laid down tracks at Tuff Gong and Inna De Yard recording studios in Kingston and also spent time crafting music in South Florida at Uproar Studios and House of Hits.

“The producers we have been working with are Paul Fakhourie, Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith, and Quillan Black,” Prince Judah informs Sunday Entertainment, ahead of detailing the flavour of the songs he has penned thus far.

“They are mostly reflective of my life. Some songs carry a message of love. Others are about rebellion and revolution. Then there are some fun songs about me becoming a young adult, stepping out on my own and stepping away from certain things ... I and I is about balance, so every song invokes a certain emotion. It’s an experience that I am emitting.”

While now a bona fide music star-in-the-making, the then-teenage Prince had little interest in becoming an artiste. Destiny, however, had other intentions.

Growing up between Tweedside, Clarendon, and Cassia Park in St Andrew, and later in the United States, where he migrated, he was more athletically inclined. “I was heavily competitive. I played American football and was into track and field and martial arts. I played football for my high school team and was recruited at Clemson University in South Carolina, but I turned that down,” the 20-something divulges. It is a decision several years later, he is happy to have declined.

“I didn’t care to go professional,” he notes of bypassing a shot at the famed National Football League. “I see people in my family and what it has done to them. I said that is not my life to live. I see my godbrother, Alvin Kamara, who is a running back for the New Orleans Saints and what he has to go through with pulled hamstrings.”

Tried as he might to resist its calling, music had maintained a steady presence throughout his life. Prince Judah’s father is Jeffrey Warner, a soul, funk, and blues musician, who is also a producer on his son’s upcoming album.

The younger Warner, whose legal surname is Love, remembers that during his youth in Lauderhill, whenever his fashion designer and personal stylist mom, Andrea Warner, went off to work, “man would forward to the yard and my dad would take all the furniture out of the house so his band could rehearse”.

“All the street youths would come inside and ease back, and watch them performing and stay off the streets. And after they finish playing, they would pack back all the furniture in the house before my mother came back home.”

Then there was his beloved grandmother, retired nurse Shirley Taylor, whose Duhaney Park home he frequented as a boy. Falling into an elderly female vocal impersonation, he recalls that the family matriarch would say: “Come and sing the Bob Marley and the Michael Jackson for me.”

Prince was always quick to appease her. He recalls being delighted to entertain her and his cousins in song and dance. “She loved when I sang Redemption Song, Jammin ’, Beat It, and The Girl Is Mine, but she also loved Dennis Brown and especially Bill Withers bad. Every time I hear Withers’ Ain ’t No Sunshine, I think of her.”

“I was always around and engulfed in music, but I never cared to be a singer or musician. I never cared for the attention. But you can’t run from who you are meant to be,” he surmises to Sunday Entertainment of the hands fate dealt him.

He dipped his feet into songwriting and recording in late adolescence.

“I made a song when my brother Rahdi was away at university, and he called me and said the frequency of the song was pure and made him cry. I was like ‘you too sensitive’ but he told me it was my calling.”

Heeding the advice, the neophyte crooner – who was, at the time, doing double majors in music business and Formula SAE, formerly known as the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) at Florida International University – shifted lanes to full-time music pursuits.

His breakthrough came at a music revue hosted in Miami headlined by reggae band Inner Circle, where Prince performed a meditative song titled Danki. “That moment made me recognise and overstand what a gwaan,” he remembers. “After the show, a bag of grandmas and moms and girls were coming up to me and saying ‘Your song made me cry’. The song was about a son or daughter who goes missing. The next time they’re seen is on a milkbox carton or a billboard, and after that, the missing child is seen in a hearse. It was a song about killings, brutality, and injustice.”

With his genre-melding band recently dropping two new tracks, Go Live Ya Life and Burn Dem, Prince Judah – whose expansive taste in music covers a swath of artistes from seminal hip hop star Biggie Smalls to iconic rock group AC/DC to contemporary reggae crooner Chronixx – is treading new waters on the personal front. Now a singleton with a previous relationship hitting the skids, he has given renewed commitment to what matters most. “I say I and I is married to the microphone,” he shares. “Music is my kids because right now, that is my only focus.”

entertainment@gleanerjm.com

Editor's Note: Prince Judah’s beloved grandmother is retired nurse Shirley Taylor, not Shirley Sinclair. Her surname has been updated in the story. While Prince Judah spent time in both Lauderhill and Miami Gardens growing up, the anecdote referenced above about where his father's band rehearsed took place in Lauderhill. Additionally, the brother mentioned in this piece is Rahdi. Alvin Kamara is Prince Judah’s godbrother.