SOJA’s Jacob Hemphill reflects on enjoying beauty in the silence, amid the noise and haste

Photo courtesy of ATO Records. Photo credit: Hiroki Nishioka

Dailyreggae.com spoke with SOJA’s Jacob Hemphill about SOJA’s rise to stardom, the inspiration behind the band’s Grammy-nominated album, Beauty In The Silence, and his songwriting process. 

Thank you so much Jacob for taking the time to talk with us. We are huge fans of you and your band. First off, how did your early life living in Africa and then coming back and growing up in the Washington, D.C. area shape your perspective as a musician? 

JH: Ok, reggae and do you know the style of music Go-go? 

I’m unfamiliar. 

JH: It’s only in D.C. The beat is 1-2-3-4 and it’s on congas. It goes 1-2-3-4 (makes conga sound). Do you hear the up sound? It’s like reggae (voices reggae rhythm). Chris Blackwell, Bob Marley’s manager said you know it’s funny because every other music in the world plays on the downbeat. They play 1-2-3-4 and reggae goes 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 (emphasizes the downbeats). 

I’ve been listening to Go-go since I was in middle school and reggae since I was seven. We lived in Africa and my Dad would always play reggae. To me, they were like the same thing. I was like oh man was I born in the perfect time and place (laughs) to be a guy who sings for a band?

Blackwell said they play the opposite not only in rhythm but in instruments. In reggae, the rhythm instruments are guitars and pianos. In all other music, those are the melodic instruments. So in reggae, the melodic instrument is the bass. In all other music, the bass goes (voices bass sound). It’s opposite in rhythm but also in the instruments they picked, they made the melodic instruments rhythm instruments and rhythm instruments melodic instruments. As you can tell, I love reggae. It’s amazing. 

Yeah, absolutely. That’s so interesting how a small little genre was your foundation for getting into reggae. You said it was Bob Marley’s Uprising, where you were like wow this is the music I love. Was it right then when you knew you wanted to be a musician?

Yeah, I was 13. I heard it. It wasn’t his last studio record. His last one was Confrontation but that came out after he died. Uprising was the last one that came out when he was still alive and had a picture of him on the front and he was holding his hand up like he was uprising. His dreads turn into this mountain behind him. The whole thing made a circle kind of. The background was white and I’ve now copied that album cover basically three times (laughs). 

Laughs. You and a lot of band members met and started playing in elementary, middle, and high school. What has it been like just jamming together as kids in a basement to now play large shows across the world? What has that experience been like?

I’m going to quote my drummer, Ryan Berty on this. I think we went a year and seven months without seeing each other and within five minutes of being in the same room, it was back. And I think that’s kind of how it is for everybody when you have known someone your whole life. We’ve known each other our whole lives through making music. 

When we started we didn’t make music to be something. We made music because school sucked (laughs) and then after school, we could go to my Dad’s garage or bird’s garage or someone’s garage and set up all this stuff. Sit there and smoke uh things and play music for three hours before everyone had to go home. It was our time to kind of breathe. And then people started paying us a bit of money to play. And then they paid us enough money where we could quit our jobs (laughs). I worked for Starbucks for six years. Bob was a car porter at the Chevy dealership. Bird refinished pools. I remember the day when we all quit; it shifted. 

We weren’t doing it to breathe anymore. We were doing it to work. So the next 15 years we had to find a way to make it breathe again and not work if that makes any sense. 

Yeah, it hits home for me as a musician. With your new album and recent years, have you gotten to that point where it’s more fun than anything again? 

Yeah, we have nine records and four where we were breathing on them. The first was Born In Babylon and then Strength to Survive. Then we did Amid the Noise and Haste and now we did Beauty In The Silence. For me, those are the four that if I was going to show someone this band, I would give them those four. I’d say the other five are great and everything but listen to these because you want to hear people having fun.

Absolutely, I think the love certainly translated to all those albums. Speaking of which, congratulations on your third Grammy nomination for Reggae Album of the Year. We love the new album, Beauty In The Silence. I believe the title of Beauty In The Silence was inspired by a poem your father had memorized and would recite to you before tours. Can you tell us a little bit about what the poem means to you and how it’s reflected in the album? 

So, my Dad worked for the IMF, The International Monetary Fund. Most of his life was living in countries that were in economic turmoil. This is before cellphones, so he’d leave and I’d see him eight months later. He loved his job and he was great at it. He loved seeing the world, but he spent a lot of his life alone. There’s this poem called Desiderata by Max Ehrmann that my Dad would kind of whisper in my ear before tour. And I think because he knew the life I was choosing of missing weddings, funerals, birthdays, and kids being born. You gain an amazing life but you don’t get to see the people you care about a lot.

The poem starts with the line, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste,” which is the name of two records ago. And it says “remember what peace there may be in silence.” I think the point was your life is about to be ape shit crazy. It’s going to be airport after hotel, after greenroom, after parking lot, after ten thousand fans, and then repeat, repeat, repeat.

But a lot of that noise and haste is going to be filled with silence and I think he was trying to tell me the secret is this life that I know you’re going to love is at times very lonely. If you can figure out this one thing that there is beauty in silence then you might be all right. That’s what I thought he meant. 

This new album is very reflective and at some points almost seems autobiographical. How do you think this beauty in the silence lesson from your dad and poem kind of translated into the creation of this new album? 

I’ve been a musician since high school and I’ve been moving pretty much constantly for 22 years. When the pandemic started for someone who is conditioned that way to look out the same window every day and be with your girl every day and to kind of make the same food every day, I was not prepared at all for this (laughs). I’m prepared to go out and rock shows.

One day I kind of looked out the window and it was weird. The birds were fine. The squirrels were fine. The egrets were fine. The oak trees were fine. The rain was fine. Everything was fine. And it was like they knew this thing that I had forgotten, which is beauty in silence. And I don’t want to quote my favorite show ever made The Office (laughs). 

Laughs.

In the last episode Pam says, and I’m paraphrasing, I thought it was weird that this documentary crew did nine years about an ordinary paper company, but there is a lot of beauty in the ordinary. 

I don’t know it sort of seemed like the lesson we’re kind of supposed to be learning right now is stillness. 

Yes, that’s beautiful. It certainly rings through on the album, no doubt. You have many incredible collaborations on the album. Did you initially plan on this being such a communal album, or did that happen more organically? 

Well, it kind of worked this like this. I had a bike wreck that had me in the hospital for a while, and I woke up and thought who would understand about this situation? And then I had a relationship that went horribly wrong and I said, who would understand? I kept going down the list because when there is more than one take on the same subject. It’s like when you watch a news show. You don’t just want Michael Strahan, you want all those other guys too. But they’re talking about the same thing and they know what they’re talking about. So that was kind of the idea. I’m pretty close friends with most of the musicians, especially singers in the American reggae genre, because we’ve worked together for so long. Each song I would think, who knows what I’m talking about? 

So when you had an idea for a song or particular subject you kind of reached out to a fellow artist, who you thought you could work with to hone in on creating something about it? 

Yeah, it was either me or our manager, our fearless leader, Elliott Harrington. I’ll send him a song when it’s very pre-production - acoustic guitar on a voice memo. Sometimes he’ll come back and say, man, I can hear so and so on this. 

We made a song called Reason To Live. I was in California with the singer of the Dirty Heads, Jared Watson. We were doing a day in the studio. I was there for an extra day after a festival, we were writing and doing the song. DENM helped us produce it and I thought it was all done. I sent it to Elliot and he was like, have you ever heard of this guy Nanpa Básico? And I was like why does that name ring a bell? And he was like because his last video has been out for a week and has 32 million views (laughs). Elliott said he’s been a fan of SOJA his whole career and we added him to the track. 

It happens all sorts of different ways but is honestly never manufactured for hits, streams, or views. It’s organic. That’s kind of the story of SOJA. Being organic and that’s where the hits, streams, and views come from. 

Do you have a normal songwriting process? As in do you usually start with chords, then a melody line, and match lyrics to it? Or do you normally have lyrics first and then put them in a song? Or is it all over the board on a case-by-case basis? 

It’s always the same and I love this saying this because I’ve never heard a songwriter describe it like this and makes me feel like I might be sort of unique.

I get a feeling and the feeling feels like a memory. Like one time I got a feeling and it was a memory of a house on a hill. There was one window and one tree. It was raining. And then I wrote a song called Thunderstorms. 

It starts with a feeling and then I pull the basic idea of the words. I don’t rhyme them. I write this story of the feeling if that makes sense and then before I rhyme anything I put chords to it that feel like the feeling. And then I start rhyming, cutting out lines, and adding lines. It’s not really a feeling, it’s a memory. I get a memory, I don’t know where it’s from and then a song starts going. If it takes over two weeks to write it then it goes in the trash. If it’s done in 20 minutes it’s the single. 

That’s awesome! On this new album, personally, the lyrics for Press Rewind and It’s Funny touched me. They almost feel like love letters to music from the perspective of a fan and musician. Can you tell us a little about the inspiration behind those songs? 

Press Rewind was me and Collie Buddz on his bus one night. We were doing a show and it was like one thirty in the morning. He was playing me beats. He’s a great producer, so he plays this beat and I’m like hold on. He was like, what do you mean, pause it? Yeah, pause it. I wrote, “I see it in the past like I feel it in my mind. I hear it in the roots and the song, press rewind. Take me to the truth, like the very first time. I fell in love with music.” And he looked at me and he was like dude, are you serious?

Laughs. 

Laughs. I was like oh wait, I got to do the Collie Buddz voice. He looked at me and was like are you serious? I said isn’t that what we’re all chasing? When we fell in love with music before it was a job. Before we had to pay our bills. When we really truly only had one emotion, which was love. 

It’s Funny was kind of about the flip side of that. The lyrics to funny are, “It's funny- you start this life with no money. You start this life with no girlfriend. You start this life with your tears. And your Mom and Dad. But then you start to grow older. And you decide it's important. To focus on your own self. And what you could have. And then you change what you came for. And your sunrise leaves like an airport. The moon is gone from your eyes. And you wonder why. The feelings that you are feeling. They suddenly have no meaning. You got lost in this life. And you start to cry. It's funny.” 

You start this life crying. Then you go through and have this really cool life that leaves you empty and you cry again. The main point of that song is God or whatever you call it, the universe or nature gives you the exact same reaction for intense joy and intense pain. And it’s tears. It’s kind of like secretly telling you if it was just joy, you wouldn’t know joy. And if it was just pain, you wouldn’t know pain. But if you know them both then you’re probably going to cry at them both (laughs) and I thought that was a pretty good idea for a song. 

It was! It really rings through.

Yeah, we are all kind of everything. It’s the human experience. It’s up and it’s down and everything in between.