JHart
Chances are you've heard the work of British-born, US-based singer, songwriter and producer JHart before. Since 2008, following a 12-month internship with super-producer Polow da Don, the artist born James Abrahart in Brentwood Essex, has co-written songs for some of music's biggest names. The list, basically a who's who, is exhaustive, so please pay attention: Justin Bieber, Jason Derulo, Rita Ora, Little Mix, Charlie Puth, Keith Urban, Camila Cabello, Usher, TLC, OneRepublic, Troye Sivan, 5 Seconds of Summer, Jennifer Lopez and actual Cher. Plus many, many more. But after years of helping other artists achieve unparalleled success, and following a period of personal growth in which Abrahart started living proudly as a gay man, JHart is ready to step into the limelight on his own terms.
This new era begins with the honeyed, impassioned R&B of his gospel-tinged debut single, If There is a God, the first taster for this forthcoming EP, The Wishing, The Wanting, The Longing. A showcase for his sky-scraping vocals, the cover of SAYGRACE's yearning 2021's single, feels like the perfect introduction to JHart. “This song lives in a sonic world that I love, this classic R&B, and vocally it's one of my strongest songs,” he says. “Lyrically it touches on religion and things I've dealt with, and this idea of longing and pain from heartbreak. It felt like an important establishing record.” It will be followed by Father's Son, a gently percolating ode to “the complicated nature of queer relationships between sons and fathers.” It's a showcase for JHart's songwriting chops, telling a story rooted in reality. “My dad and I have a beautiful relationship now but there were times when we didn't understand each other at all,” he explains. “I wanted to do a song that held both of those truths in a nuanced way. I love how those two things exist in the same song. There's this awareness around the beauty of a relationship and also the darkness of where it came from.”
Abrahart's relationship with music has always been defined by the push and pull of beauty and its opposite. In fact, for a long time, music was a medicine to deal with the pain. Born in Upminster, just outside London, Abrahart's house didn't ring to the sound of song, but rather the chants of a football crazy family. Music came from his Nan, who would often play him her collection of Motown and Tina Turner albums, or from his grandad who would let him hammer away at a piano in the school where he worked as a caretaker. “I just always had this obsession with music and it happened very naturally,” Abrahart says. “I think it was always there. Then when we ended up moving to America it became a healing thing for me because I did not want to move. I was dealing with a lot of homesickness. That's when music became very important to me as an escape.”
When Abrahart was just 11 his family moved to Atlanta. While his parents needed a reset, the move was also a way of protecting Abrahart who was struggling at school due to constant bullying. The huge culture shock was quickly overwhelming. “I printed out a piece of paper saying 'England is my home and I miss it' and stuck it on my door as a form of protest,” the 35-year-old remembers. Later, this sense of loneliness clashed with a sudden realisation, too. “When I started realising I was different and being aware of gayness, that only added to that feeling of being an outsider.” He says he would listen to a lot of UK pop music from that early 00s period, both as a continuation of his protest and as a connection to home. While he threw himself into music in his new school – joining a choir and (briefly) learning the violin – his beloved drum kit never made it to America. “My parents told me the kit had 'fallen out of the plane' on the way over to Atlanta,” he laughs.
His parents did, however, buy him a karaoke machine (by this point he was into the big-voiced divas like Mariah and Whitney) and it was on this tiny entertainment system that Abrahart's songwriting career started. “The first song I ever wrote was over a Whitney karaoke track,” he smiles. “Songwriting got more serious and then I learned how to produce and make my own beats. That was something I did for a while, and I thought producing was going to be my thing. I got super into beat making and fell in love with R&B and hip-hop. Then eventually my love of writing steered me away.” Throughout high school he was making his own music, often handing out copies of his songs to his fellow students. “In fact they played one of my original songs at prom and it bombed and the entire dance floor cleared,” he laughs. “That was a beautiful lesson that maybe my music wasn't that good yet.” He got good pretty quickly though, with one of his early collaborators, while still at high school, being Atlanta icon and R&B legend T-Boz from TLC. “T-Boz was one of my first mentors,” he smiles. “We were introduced by my manager in Atlanta, and at the time she was working on solo material, so she would come over to my house right after high school. I think my parents had a hard time with me doing music at first – they were nervous – so when T-Boz started coming over they were like 'OK, this is cool'.” Years later, in 2017, Abrahart would co-write TLC's single Way Back, bringing it all full circle given TLC was his first concert after arriving in Atlanta.
After a brief sojourn to Savannah, Georgia, to study film, Abrahart returned to Atlanta after he realised music wasn't just a hobby. Keen to ask anybody he knew in the music business for help, his brother's friends' mum connected him to a man who owned a local studio where Polow da Don had a room. This was in 2008, when the super producer was working with the likes of Nas, Nelly, Keri Hilson, Jennifer Hudson and the Pussycat Dolls. As well as being the studio's intern, or “full bitch” as Abrahart puts it, he also got to watch how a studio worked. “A lot of how I learned about songwriting and engineering and even producing was just by being there,” he says. Eventually, after some of Abrahart's songs he'd put up on MySpace came to Polow's attention, he tried to sign him as an artist. “I knew that I was very closeted, and that I had a lot of stuff internally I had to work out; I wasn't comfortable with my weight and my body, and so I knew it wasn't the right time. I also wanted to produce and write at that time. I didn't want to do artistry.”
Via production duo Rock City (Ciara, Miley Cyrus), Abrahart then got his first publishing deal and headed to LA where he crashed on his second cousin's couch. From there his songwriting career took off, enabling him to play the role of various different characters. “It was so freeing. I loved it. I loved wearing all the different hats but I think I still wasn't comfortable with my sexuality and had not come into myself,” he explains. “There was an element of trying on different personas. I enjoyed the freedom of writing from different perspectives, but didn't understand that there was some element of myself longing to be free and self-embodied.” It's taken a long time to reach that point. In fact, an early iteration of JHart, the artist, was started way back in 2014 with Grammy and Oscar-winning producer D'Mile, shortly after Abrahart had come out to his family. “I feel like I've only just really come into the person I am in the last five years though,” he says. “A lot of my songwriting career I felt like I was walking into sessions and letting my talent shine, and that's what helped me have success, but internally I wasn't coming from a place of self-knowing. Ever since coming out I've just been hungry to rediscover the version of me that existed before everything was piled onto it. There have been a couple of false starts with my artist career that can be attributed to that because I knew I wasn't ready. I didn't know myself enough to have a perspective.”
It was in 2020, during the pandemic, that Abrahart reconnected with D'Mile: “He reached out and said 'are we ever going to finish these songs?', and for me that was such an important and special way of saying 'I still believe in you'. We started working slowly on The Wishing, The Wanting, The Longing in 2020, and then in 2021 and 2022 we dug in some more.” It's an EP that showcases every aspect of both James Abrahart the songwriter and JHart: The Artist. It's there on the Prince-esque R&B heater, Ripe, which fantasises about a perfect relationship (“It's written to my imaginary life partner – it's the idea of finding someone you can be a kid with forever”) and on the OnlyFans-mentioning, Justin Timberlake-esque bop, Crash My Car, which highlights his “penchant for drama” with its lyric about, well, crashing into someone's house to get their attention. “It's about a relationship I had during Covid and trying to get someone to notice you after they've moved on,” he explains. “The irony of that relationship was that I was emotionally unavailable for the majority of it and then when I came around he was over it and moved on. It's that feeling of 'are you fucking kidding me?? Now?'.” The Having, which features the EP title in its lyrics, meanwhile, describes Abrahart's “period of growth” and “going from a place of longing and pining and pain, to a place of self-embodiment and magnetism and attracting things to myself. Knowing my self worth.”
That journey is also encompassed in the video for If There Really Is a God, which finds Abrahart showcasing both his queer sensuality (there's a lot of flesh on show), and within that his love for both masc and fem gender fluidity. “That balance is a very important part of my identity artistically or otherwise. I do a lot of things with the intention of that balance.” Even the way he's releasing the music – which Abrahart describes as “Cinematic. Musical. Polished. Soulful. And... a little camp” – is testament to his newfound assuredness. Released via distribution platform, United Masters, it was crucial for Abrahart to eschew the major label system he'd witnessed from the inside as a songwriter for others. “It was important for me to do it on my own terms,” he states. “It's been inspiring to see this host of songwriters that have existed in the business start to take their careers into their own hands. People like Victoria Monét. These people I was writing with years ago and now they're stepping into their artist careers on their own terms.”
After years of supporting other people's musical endeavours, JHart is finally ready to stand up and be counted as an artist. With a suite of songs showcasing both his incredible vocals and his hitmaking songwriting abilities, it feels like the world is his for the taking, and his goals for the future are typically lofty. “I would like to see myself established as an artist,” he says. “Respected by my peers, which can be tricky when you've set a precedent in the career you already have. But I don't want to be put in a box. I feel like I have so much more to share.” And it starts right now.