Source: Bernard Smalls / Bernard Smalls
It’s been four years since Trevor Jackson’s last tour with Justine Skye. This time as he promotes his new album Rough Draft Pt. 1, he knows it’s going to be a very different vibe, describing how drastically his music has changed. He tells CASSIUS that this feels like the first time his fans will be introduced to the person that he’s become.
“I wanted to be more involved in what my music should sound like and how my vision should be seen and heard at the same time,” he said. “The way that I thought about it is if I’m [doing music], I’m going out swinging with my bat, my clothes, my cleats, on my time.”
Jackson said that even though he was signed to a label when he was 15, he felt a particular frustration with his music because he wasn’t able to express who he truly was. He saw through the shallow hooks and wanted his work to reflect his journey coming into himself as a man and experiencing life. This is why he’s written all the songs on the project and even played the electric guitar on some of them.
“When I make albums, I never want the songs to sound the same,” he said. “But if I listen to a single and I hate it and all the songs on the album sound like it, I’m probably gonna hate the album. I try to make a project that everyone can at least like one song, I try to cover all bases.”
When asked about whether or not his character Aaron (aka social justice bae) is finally getting with Zoe on grown-ish, the actor couldn’t reveal too much about the “will-they-or-won’t-they” couple. But one thing he confessed is that he does feel like Aaron should have been honest all along.
“I feel like that type of vulnerability is what young people sometimes lack,” he said. “We all go through something like that, but you just gotta say what you feel and feel what you say. That’s the only way you get what you want or else you’re just floating around. Life’s too short for that.”
Another thing he’s looking forward to is the release of the Super Fly remake, where he took a starring role as Priest. While the film will have elements of the 1972 original, the 2018 version is set to be incredible on its own.
“We’re not trying to recreate what they already had … it was amazing, legendary, we want to leave it that way,” he said. “We just wanted to put a spin on a classic story which is the American dream, going from nothing to something. We all have that moment in our lives where we strive so hard to be and we find out this isn’t what I thought it’d be. That’s what Priest goes through in this movie.”
