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Music

Drake’s Secret Weapon, Majid Jordan Take You Inside Toronto's Musical Golden Age

Ahead of a North American tour, the duo discuss listening to music while driving, working with Drizzy and their on point hair game.

Image: Norman Wong

Majid Jordan (Majid Al Maskati and Jordan Ullman) have been on a musical golden run since posting tracks on Soundcloud in 2013. Within days Drake’s sound architect, Noah ‘40’ Shebib, invited them to become part of the production camp for Drake’s Nothing Was the Same album. Working and sleeping in tents on the studio floor, the duo helped create Drizzy’s pop smash “Hold On, We're Coming Home.” It didn’t take long for their own releases to be greeted with almost the same fanfare as a Drake album and their recently released self-titled record was followed by an upcoming North American tour.

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On a break from tour rehearsals we had a chat with Jordan and Majid about why music sounds better when driving, team OVO and their super tight ‘hair game’.

Noisey: Your hometown show has sold out. Does that mean the guest list in Toronto is at 500 people?
Majid Al Maskati: Yes exactly! We woke up and there was all these messages coming in from our family saying "OMG congratulations" and texts from friends being like, “Yo what do we do, when there’s no more tickets left?" That was both cool and surreal news to get before breakfast.

How was the album created? You relocated to California early last year to work on it right?
Jordan Ullman: This time last year we relocated to LA to work on the album and before we’d touched down Majid and I really knew what our intention was. We were thinking about mood and once we arrived we immediately started to create tracks and got the chance to work with our good friends Paul “Nineteen85” Jefferies [producer of “Hotline Bling”] and Illangelo [producer for the Weeknd]. LA was so important in terms of the growth for our sound and once we felt we’d finished we flew back to Toronto to arrange a cohesive album.

You’ve said that your process of making music involves you driving to it. Why is it that music is so heightened when driving?
Jordan: When you’re driving there’s a connection based the on fact that there’s movement and your passing all of these things so quickly and forgetting what you saw two minutes ago but recalling small details later. I feel like our music takes place in a dream like state with no real sense of time. We often drive around the block without a destination. It’s unexplainable, it’s just a feeling.

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Majid you essentially discovered music in Toronto right?
Majid: When I arrived from Bahrain I was studying business and it was in my dormitory that I really got into experimenting with music and my voice. We were messing around making funny songs about classmates. Someone said, "hey you can actually sing and write songs”. I started to do a few open mics and then at my birthday party I met Jordan and we started talking about doing music together. Within a day he hit me up with a beat and I realised he was the real deal. Bbecause I was due to return to Bahrain we had one summer to finish a project. That ended up being the first tracks we put up on Soundcloud.

What was it like making Nothing Was the Same?
Majid: It was one of the most fun experiences ever. Everyone involved just wanted to be there for as long as possible. We were all on the same wave, basically all these incredible people were working simultaneously in different studios for one purpose. We lived there, we were literally sleeping in tents in the studio and we’d work on songs and experiment with Noah then if it was working Drake would come in and track the song.

You’ve said that many life changing moments happened within that 24-hours. What were some of those pivotal moments?
Jordan: That moment when we really put together “Hold on…” with Drake happened so quick and we didn’t realise until afterwards that it came to life within a 24-hour period. Those moments give you that energy to create so you can get a hit of that feeling again.

You both have very strong hair game. Shout out to your barber and please keep it up.
Majid: Ha! Thanks. We really like switching it up, it’s fun and we’re doing all these videos and appearances now so the hair has got to be on point!

‘Majid Jordan’ is available now through OVO Sound/Warner .

Follow Courtney at @thisiscourtney