Party time: Still got my eyes on you

British-Indian singer Jay Sean returns to music after three years

NEW YORK: Jay Sean is back in the music scene and ready to make his fans party again. The British-Indian singing sensation returns after a hiatus of three years, following a lengthy legal dispute with his former record company Cash Money Records.

“I do understand that, in this day and age, if you disappear for too long, people think you have actually died,” said Jay, in an interview on Monday. “People will think ‘Oh, I haven’t heard his song on the radio for a few years. He must be dead.’”

Unfortunately, after a five-year relationship with Cash Money Records – where his label mates included renowned artists like Lil Wayne and Drake – Jay parted from the company in 2014. The split left the 37-year-old crooner silent in more ways than one. “I could not talk about the issue because there are a lot of things we can’t talk about, legally,” he explained. “I couldn’t say to my fans, in interviews, what’s going on. All I could keep saying was, ‘it’s coming, it’s coming,’ and hope that they will understand.”

Now signed to Sony Records, Jay has called the split “civil” and said there is no bad blood between him and Cash Money co-founder Bryan ‘Birdman’ Williams. “I don’t like to hold grudges. I don’t like to talk ill of people,” Jay said.

The summer release of Jay’s single Make My Love Go brought him back to what he loves and grew up with, i.e. pop, R&B and dancehall music. It also brought him back to creating music with 43-year-old rapper Sean Paul. “What I think I wanted to achieve with this song was to make people feel good, which is, I think, what I’m really known for with my music,” said Sean. “People always tell me, when I want to get in the mood for a party or when I’m at a party and they put a Jay Sean song on, I feel happy. And so I thought, let’s hit them up with something like that.”

Sean’s new single has reached the top 10 on German music charts, as well as platinum status in the Netherlands. It has also received more than 38 million plays worldwide on Spotify.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 5^th, 2016.

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