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Rising regional Mexican star Ivan Cornejo talks about how he started singing, kickstarting his career on TikTok, how Natanael Cano inspired him to make regional Mexican music, which artists and producers he wants to work with, the future of regional Mexican music and more!

Ivan Cornejo:
It’s a good feeling you know being an influence. And I remember what I used to feel like wanting to be a musician it’s a good feeling when I hear kids telling me that they picked up the guitar because of it.

Ivan Cornejo:
I started playing guitar around seven years old, it was kind of like my way of making like 20 bucks for the weekend or something my dad would tell me to like learn like Joan Sebastian songs and just like oldies songs, he’d be like, and I’ll give you five bucks for each song. And at seven years old five bucks is a lot of money. So I was just collecting my my little royalties back then. Around the time that T3R Elemento was dropping music. “Rafa Caro,” I remember like I heard that.

Ivan Cornejo:
And it like, stood out to me so much I think that I was just like hmm I actually like this. At the time, I wouldn’t really listen to regional music. It was more of like my dad’s Mariachi music and like the old school stuff. A couple of years later, Natanael Cano drops, you know, corridos tumbados. He’s definitely like a pioneer for this new genre that you call salsa reino and like corridos tumbados, so many people got inspiration from that, that he really took a big step and just changed the whole corridor feel like a lot of people just adapted to that quickly. I started with TikTok and Instagram, you know, just posting my videos. After I started getting recognition with the covers, seeing a lot of comments supporting me, as you know, motivates you to just write your own music and I started writing my own songs, I dropped my first song, I got signed to a label, and I dropped two albums with that label. Now I’m just working on my third album, it was a big change. For me, I love those tech talks. And then, you know, there’s like labels reaching out. It was like a mini dream country. You know, it was what I’ve always wanted.

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Laufey shares how she created her unique sound and how she was inspired to start making Jazz music. She opens up about being discovered on TikTok, the advice she’s received from artists such as Norah Jones and Sara Bareilles, being inspired by Taylor Swift’s songwriting, her Grammy nomination for best traditional pop vocal album, the future of jazz and more!

Laufey:
Being a really big Swiftie, I really want to see Taylor Swift, probably like everyone else there, but that’s one person I really want to meet before I die.

Laufey:
My earliest memories of music or all classical music — given that my mom was a violin player and my grandparents were both violin and piano professors — there was just so much music in the house growing up and it was always classical. And then my father really loved listening to jazz music. So I always heard that it was kind of like a sonic blend of those two.

Laufey:
Ella Fitzgerald was my first, like, vocal inspiration. I always had a lower timbre, and as a little girl with a lower voice, I always felt kind of odd. And when I tried to sing, like, the pop music of that time, it just didn’t fit. Whereas when I’d sing, like, the songs that Ella was singing, it kind of made sense.

I started writing quite late, actually, I think I saw myself as such a performer of music or a player of music and not necessarily a creator, or like a writer of music. I was singing primarily jazz, and then I was playing classical music. But then I loved listening to pop music as well and songwriters. But I just, I couldn’t find a way to mix all of those together. That made sense for me around 19 or 20. That’s when I started writing. I think when I started experiencing life a little bit more and grew more confident, just in myself as a person. The first song I wrote that really felt like I had mixed all of my worlds together was the song “Street by Street,” which ended up being the first song I released.

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Jamaican dancehall artist Teejay talks about the success he’s found on TikTok with his song “Drift,” working with Davido and French Montana on the “Drift” remix, the influence of Afrobeats, the difference between reggae and dancehall music, the future of dancehall and more!

Teejay
When people talk about dancehall artists, you don’t have to just say, um, I know Sean Paul or know Shaggy or you can say alright, I know Teejay.

Teejay
Yeah, grew up in Montego Bay, I grew up with my mother, my uncle and my five, my four brothers and one sister. So I was basically the breadwinner in the family growing up I was the one who basically left school at seventh grade just to continue music so I can help the family out. All my brothers is artists. So they have the studio so they would have like FruityLoops, Sonar, Acid Pro I’d watch them learning how to use of all of the user Pro Tools. I start recording myself at the age of nine that’s how determined I was at the time. When I’m not in Jamaica, I stay in Miami more, most of the time just to free the mind, you know as to all the vibes and free the mind, that’s some advice from my song from the past two years, so try to market myself for the younger generation for even my son, my daughter. Yeah, I’m young but most of time age have nothing to do with it because you know.

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