World Of Juzawni: From Feeling Unheard to Making Music Where Others Can Feel Seen

 

Juzawni was 19 when a coworker heard him singing at one of his nine-to-five jobs and told him something that would get him thinking seriously about music for the first time: She thought he had a beautiful voice and that more people needed to hear it. 

He’d been singing for as long as he could remember, writing rhymes over beats, and experimenting with BandLab, but making music professionally hadn’t really been part of the plan. Yet her comment left him wondering how he could make it happen.

It’s an apt place for his story to begin, especially considering what he would later tell World Of about his experience of feeling overlooked. 

For a long time, Juzawni had felt as though the things he said carried little importance to the people around him. Now, someone was suggesting his voice deserved a larger audience.

Of course, having a beautiful singing voice and having something you need people to hear are two different things. 

For Juzawni, the relationship between them has become a significant part of the artist he’s building.

Growing up in Jamaica, music had already been an important part of his life long before that interaction at work. His Christian household meant gospel music was constantly present, alongside the reggae and dancehall he grew up hearing. During some of the more difficult periods of his childhood, music became somewhere he could turn when things felt particularly overwhelming. He found himself fascinated by the poetry of songs and the way different genres and sounds could make someone feel something specific.

One of his earliest musical memories, which he shared with Apple Music, involves sitting on tiny chairs with his cousin, turning buckets upside down to use as drums, and singing songs they made up together. They didn’t have real drums, but they were determined to make music anyway. 

The instinct to make something out of whatever was around him seems to have been there from the beginning, and long before he thought of music as a career, he was already finding ways to make it part of his everyday life.

Singing came naturally to him. In his own words, “I’ve always been singing; it’s something I’m really passionate about. I feel like I’ve been singing ever since I came out the womb. It was almost like second nature to me!”

But for all the comfort and enjoyment music brought him, it would eventually become important for another reason: he needed somewhere to put things he didn’t know how to express.

“I had always felt like I was never really paid attention to,” he told World Of during our first written interview in July. “Everything I ever did felt like it was overlooked, and everything I said felt like it had little to no meaning to anyone around me, so that just naturally made me coop myself up in a little box. It wasn’t until one day when I decided – ‘I can’t let this keep happening!’ because the more I kept in, the more it fed into my depression – that I knew I had to find a way to make people listen to what I have to say.”

 

The Jamaica native revealed that music was always there for him, including through heartbreak and the periods when he found himself keeping everything inside. “I was so scared to show my emotions after cooping myself up for so long, and in today’s society, males aren’t really allowed to show emotions, but I felt I needed to do something about that…There’s not much room to admit to being hurt, feeling insecure, or just being affected by something.” Yet keeping those feelings to himself wasn’t helping. So, eventually, he began looking for another way to communicate them.

Music had been there for him throughout his childhood. It made sense that he’d return to it when he needed somewhere to express what he was carrying as he got older, too. But writing about personal experiences and allowing other people to hear them brought its own discomfort.

“At first it was definitely uncomfortable,” he explained when we returned to the subject in September. “I was basically taking thoughts that I would normally hide and putting them somewhere where anyone could hear them.”

For someone who’d spent years holding things in, the possibility that a listener might hear a song and immediately understand exactly what he’d been feeling was certainly frightening. But there was freedom in it, too.

“I realized that I didn’t have to carry every emotion silently just because I was afraid of how it might look. Music gave me somewhere to put those feelings without having to apologize for having them.”

That change eventually extended beyond the songs themselves as he began to see emotional honesty differently, particularly in relation to his understanding of masculinity. 

“Making music helped me become more comfortable speaking about love, insecurity, jealousy, longing, and hurt in his everyday life,” he revealed. “It made me realize that expressing emotion doesn’t make me less of a man. If anything, being honest about what you feel takes a certain level of strength.”

 

 

Still, becoming more comfortable expressing himself doesn’t mean he’s interested in turning every experience into something for public consumption. It’s not until Juzawni notices himself repeatedly returning to a feeling that he starts considering whether there’s a song somewhere in it. But sometimes, he finds, some things are better left private.

“I think the difference is whether turning it into a song helps me understand the feeling rather than just exposing it.” And when he does decide to write about something, he doesn’t necessarily want it to sound like anything he’s made before.

Juzawni is categorized as an alternative artist, although his individual releases move between styles. His six-song 2025 EP Tethered is listed as R&B/Soul, while the single “Think Of Me” is categorized as pop, and other singles span afro-beats, dance, and alt genres. It’s a fairly broad musical range for an artist still in the early stages of developing his catalog, but that flexibility suits the way he approaches songwriting.

When I asked him to describe the feeling of his music back in July, he didn’t offer a neat collection of genre labels. Instead, he described different experiences: driving on a rainy night, walking through a foggy forest, crashing out in a rage room, or running through a bright grassy field during the day.

They’re very different scenes, and that’s exactly how he wants it.

“I make a lot of different types of music because I feel a lot of different things,” he explains. “I want the sound to match the emotion instead of the other way around.”

Sadness, for example, doesn’t always mean a quiet song. Sometimes it calls for something intimate that somebody might listen to alone at night. Other times, that same sadness can become anger, energy, or even freedom.

Juzawni is interested in allowing those differences to exist rather than trying to establish one specific sound and making every experience fit within it.

His recent writing reflects that approach, too. “The Climb,” released on July 17th, came from something outside his own immediate experiences: a story he encountered about a couple climbing the Empire State Building and getting engaged. Their story inspired him to write about the power of love.

But other songs come from somewhere much closer to home.

“Stillwater,” in particular, offers an interesting look at Juzawni’s relationship with himself.

He wrote the song about resilience and the importance of having your own back when other people aren’t there for you. It’s a reminder that even when somebody feels alone or is dealing with people trying to bring them down, they can still choose to stand by themselves.

The message is particularly personal to Juzawni because, as he explained in July, it’s something he has to remind himself of, too.

“I have to remind myself that if nobody’s got me, I got me, and I will stand by that till the end.”

That idea also influenced the creation of his logo. He wanted a symbol that people could eventually recognize and associate with resilience, individuality, and the message behind his music.

But one of the more interesting things about “Stillwater” is how its message relates to the kind of community he wants to build around “Juzawni.”

For an artist who places so much importance on having his own back, he also talks quite a bit about making sure other people feel supported. When asked how he balances those two ideas, his answer was straightforward: “To me, self-reliance doesn’t mean you have to be alone. It means knowing that you’ll still be there for yourself when other people aren’t.”

He’s passionate about turning the Juzawni community into a place where people can support one another without feeling that they have to rely entirely on somebody else’s approval to recognize their worth, and the message he imagines sharing between himself and his listeners is one I think captures that distinction exceptionally well: “I have your back, but I also want you to know you have your own.”

It’s a meaningful ambition for someone who knows what it feels like to lack that kind of support.

What he wants to create is music that can become the kind of place he once needed himself: somewhere a bad day, a bruised heart, or any overwhelmingly unpleasant feeling doesn’t have to be cleaned up before it’s allowed inside. Somewhere listeners can care deeply, hurt openly, and exist for a moment without feeling embarrassed by any of it.

And for him, creating that environment begins with being willing to practice what he’s encouraging other people to do.

“I don’t want to tell people it’s okay to be vulnerable while pretending that I’m never vulnerable myself.”

His willingness to be more open is also influencing the music he’s making now. When we spoke again in September, Juzawni was working on an upcoming project that he described as different from his earlier releases. He hadn’t shared a confirmed release date, but he was excited about the opportunity to introduce listeners to sides of himself they hadn’t necessarily heard before.

Earlier in his career, he was still trying to work out what Juzawni should sound and feel like. These days, he trusts his instincts more, and doesn’t feel the same pressure to make every song represent one particular version of himself – he’s content to just let the music be whatever it is. Romantic, confident, angry, messy, petty, or playful…Regardless, he’s adamant, “I’m not trying to make myself fit into one emotion anymore. I think this project feels more like me because I’m giving myself permission to explore all of those sides.”

His confidence has also changed the way he thinks about the songs themselves. He used to focus primarily on making something he liked. Now, he’s increasingly interested in the world a song belongs to, what it communicates about him, and what someone might take away from it years after hearing it for the first time.

 

 

And while his sound continues to develop, he’s noticed something interesting happening in his more recent writing. Yearning keeps finding its way into the songs.

“Wanting something, wanting someone, wanting to be understood, or wanting to go back and change something…” he keeps finding himself writing about wanting. But beneath the yearning is a newfound sense of self-worth. “A lot of my music is starting to ask, ‘How much of myself am I willing to lose just to feel loved?’ I didn’t necessarily plan for that to become such a recurring theme, but it keeps finding its way into the music.”

That question doesn’t stay contained to the lyrics. The more Juzawni thinks about who he is within the music, the more intentionally he seems to be shaping the world around it, too. The young artist doesn’t want Juzawni to become another name that somebody scrolls past on Spotify. 

He wants listeners to recognize the world attached to his music, even before they encounter a song, and while the visual ideas are still developing, Juzawni already has a fairly specific feeling in mind for them. He describes wanting the imagery to feel introspective and mysterious, almost like someone discovering pages from a story they’re not supposed to have yet, or looking into another person’s memories.

“I want people to eventually recognize a Juzawni visual without even seeing my name,” he reveals, unafraid to express his ambition. As an emerging artist who’s still developing his catalog and building his audience, Juzawni seems to enjoy imagining what the music could eventually become when the songs, visuals, stories, and community have all had more time to grow.

Yet despite the abundance of ideas about that future, he’s also thinking about what he wants to preserve from this earlier stage of his career.

“I don’t ever want to get to a point where I’m making something because I think it’s what I’m supposed to make instead of because I genuinely feel something.”

He’s also protective of his relationship with the listeners who have supported him so far. “I also don’t want to lose that closeness with the people who were here early. I want people to be able to look back years from now and say, ‘I remember when it was just Juzawni and a small group of us figuring this world out.’”

He isn’t shy about how much he longs to build something undeniably recognizable and eventually reach a much larger audience, but he balances that desire to scale with a refreshing appreciation for his day one supporters and the idea of people watching that process unfold. 

On Apple Music, he lists performing in front of a crowd of 100 people at one of his own shows as something he hopes to accomplish. It’s a specific, relatively modest number compared with the much bigger visual and musical world he imagines building someday. But it makes sense for someone who places so much value on genuine connection with the people choosing to listen. And those connections are already changing the way he thinks about himself.

In September, I asked Juzawni whether having people actively choose to listen to his music had changed his understanding of what it means to be heard.

Turns out, it had.

“I think for a long time I associated being heard with people simply listening to me, but now I realize being heard is also about someone actually connecting with what you’re saying.”

Listeners have begun telling him that his songs made them feel understood or helped them through difficult experiences. Hearing that has encouraged him to reconsider the importance of his own experiences, even when he struggles to recognize that importance himself.

“I’m still learning to believe that my voice matters, but seeing people willingly make space for my music has changed the way I see myself.”

It’s an interesting development from that moment at 19, when that coworker heard him singing and thought more people deserved to hear his voice.

Back then, he wondered how he could get people to listen. Now, he’s beginning to experience what happens when somebody hears what he has to say and recognizes something of themselves in it.

There’s still plenty he wants to do. More music, more visuals, more stories, and an entire artist world that he’s hoping will continue taking shape alongside the people discovering it. But when asked what he’d want somebody to hear if they found his music while feeling ignored, misunderstood, or emotionally shut down, Juzawni’s answer returns to something that’s mattered to him since long before he considered making music a career.

“You don’t have to become numb just because being vulnerable has hurt you before. Feel it. Sit with it. Express it. And don’t let someone else’s inability to understand you convince you that you don’t deserve to be understood.”

The person who once felt like the things he said carried little weight is now making music for people who might be struggling with that same feeling. He’s still learning to believe in his own voice, still figuring out what he wants Juzawni to become, and still working toward the bigger plans he’s beginning to imagine.

And if the people who are listening now really do get to watch him grow into the artist he wants to be, they’ll be able to say they were there when he was still figuring it all out.

Juzawni’s music, including “Stillwater,” Tethered, and “The Climb,” is available now, with another project currently in development.

Find Juzawni’s interview with World Of here.