Jupiter Rising

"I made the transition from doing beats to producing and writing songs because I'd started to feel I couldn't rely on anyone else; I was very protective of my music, and I guess I just hadn't found the right person to help me take it to the next level," reveals Jupiter Rising founder Spencer Nezey. "Then I started working with Jessie. She is a genuine artist, with killer instincts. I can count on her to bring her A game to whatever we're doing and to be straight with me about what she thinks. Bottom line: I know I can trust Jessie. Without her, there would be no Electropop."

Spencer pays Jessie Payo, the L.A. outfit's other half, perhaps the ultimate collaborator's compliment when he says, "Working with Jessie is easy." And "Electropop," the title cut and first single from Jupiter Rising's debut album (forthcoming on Chime Entertainment) is a prime example of the pair's carefree rapport. Spencer and Jessie trade lines over high-octane old-school beats and stabbing synths, with Jessie delivering the playful come-on "I may be your sweet spot/ Take me to your candy shop." Hitting that sweet spot is ultimately what Jupiter Rising is all about.

Their fierce, urban-flavored pop is seasoned with hip-hop, soul, funk, rock, Latin music, electronica, jazz and even an echo of the blues, courtesy of Jessie's many years of immersion in that idiom. In song after song, seductive verses give way to hooks that stick like the gum likely found under the seats of "The Bus," another of Electropop's standout tracks (and a showcase for guest rapper Christopher "Kid" Reid, of Kid 'n' Play). The chorus may as well be Jupiter Rising's manifesto: "You can't mess with us/ Cool kids from the back of the bus/ Don't look, don't speak, don't threaten us/ We're comin' up/ Remember/ You can't mess with us/ Cool kids from the back of the bus/ Got looks and style, experience/ We're comin' up/ Remember."

"It's the groove that keeps us comin'," Jessie sings, and it's the groove that unifies Electropop's diverse delicacies; rhythm rules songs like the dance-floor grenade "Go!," the unapologetic declaration "Wicked," and the reflective, castanet-laced "Liv the Day."

Even the ballad "Hero," which serves as the emotional heart of Electropop, is propelled by a confident, mid-tempo beat that keeps the song grounded amid its sumptuous strings and keyboards. "Hero" also reinforces the album's theme of self-determination and empowerment. "We need a hero to save us from ourselves/ Lookin' for a hero/ Like nobody else," Jessie ventures. "We need a hero/ But if we can't find one/ I will do it myself/ I will/ I will."

Spencer, it turns out, has been absorbing rhythmic pop all of his life, beginning with the Michael Jackson records his mom favored during his growing-up years in Sacramento. An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, he took his first step toward a career in music when his father presented him with a saxophone. "My pops never had the opportunity to play music, though he always wanted to," Spencer explains. "So when I was nine, he pretty much forced me to play sax." It took a while for it to grow on him - baseball and football were more his style - but by the time he got to high school, Spencer was happily playing in the marching band, concert band and jazz combo.

He remembers vividly the impact of what he still calls his favorite record, A Tribe Called Quest's landmark 1993 release, Midnight Marauders. His voracious musical appetite thereafter led him to electronic music, particularly trip-hop and drum & bass, then to jazz (fellow horn players John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon, to name a few), and back to hip-hop, especially forward-looking artists like The Roots.

It was inevitable that Spencer would start making his own beats and programming what he calls "weird electronic music and progressive trance" on his computer. But when he went off to college at San Diego State to study international business, he put music on the back burner. "Music was my life," he concedes, "but it didn't seem like a realistic career option."

Then a friend played him the first N*E*R*D record, 2002's In Search Of .... "I said, 'Shit, that is dope," he relates. "He told me it was The Neptunes," the production team (of Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo) that had enjoyed stratospheric success with Britney Spears' "I'm a Slave 4 U" and Nelly's "Hot in Herre," among other smashes. "That's when I started teaching myself how to produce records."

This roughly coincided with another friend encouraging him to attend a local open-mic night. "I remember one show in particular where everyone was going bananas," he says. "I was playing sax and keys and beatboxing, and it was groovin' and groovin' and groovin. People started telling me, 'You should do something with this.'" Before long, Spencer was producing and writing for a local outfit that would, over time, metamorphose into Jupiter Rising. "At first I was just a cool addition to the live show, but I ended up becoming the main creative force behind the band," he notes. It was also during this period that he began hanging out in the Black Eyes Peas camp. Spencer says he started writing "Go!" after being inspired by the Peas' "Hey Mama."

Upon relocating to Los Angeles, Spencer met Jessie through mutual musician friends. By then, he'd found himself increasingly influenced by producers Timbaland and Dan the Automator, as well as songwriters like Damien Rice and Coldplay's Chris Martin "for the stories they tell." A prolific composer, he'd frequently play new material for Jessie. "It was endlessly inspiring," she says. "The coolest thing about writing with Spencer is that I love all his tracks; I hear something in every single one of them, and I run with it."

Jessie, too, was surrounded by music from childhood as her father was always in (and writing songs for) one band or another. Growing up around the Los Angeles area, she was impressing people with her vocal skills by the time she was four. "I had this really dramatic vibrato," she says, laughing at the memory, "because my mom was always playing musicals and I was copying the singers." Mimicry began to pave the way to mastery, however, when she got onstage at one of her folks' backyard "Woodstock" parties and floored guests by wailing the Janis Joplin classic "Piece of My Heart". She was 11.

Her talent was so undeniable that when she was 13, Jessie's father formed a band for her to front, which played the blues circuit throughout her teen years. Asked if audiences were stunned by her youth, she informs: "People were amazed not so much that I was a kid who could sing but by what I was singing - Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, Big Mama Thornton, Koko Taylor. They couldn't understand how I could sing these songs and seem to understand what I was singing."

Jessie says she was also into rock and pop, specifying, "I was and still am a huge, gigantic Beatles freak - I have every one of their albums." But nothing has had as profound an impact on her as Erykah Badu's 1997 recording Baduizm, which her father picked up for her. "I hadn't really listened to contemporary urban music," she recalls. "But I couldn't stop playing that record. I connected with Erykah Badu vocally in a way I hadn't with any other artist."

Jessie went on to study vocal performance at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she began writing. She cites Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits as writers she greatly admires. "The ability to paint a picture with words and melody - to take a set of chords that have been used a million times and create imagery and a tone and a voice that is uniquely mine - has always been a driving force behind my wanting to write," Jessie says.

After meeting Spencer, Jessie realized quickly that his compositional depth and encyclopedic grasp of beats, coupled with his prodigious skill as an instrumentalist, would allow her to explore the entire range of her songwriting and vocal impulses. At the same time, Spencer was discovering how consistently effortless it was to write with Jessie. Nor was it lost on him that her vocal style - distinguished by raw vulnerability and rare intimacy - corresponded precisely to his vision of Jupiter Rising.

Of course, both are quick to acknowledge the contributions of co-producers Jason Villaroman, Marc Tanner (president of Chime Entertainment and the man who signed Jupiter Rising to the label), as well as Grammy-nominated mixer Ethan Willoughby and everyone who played on the record, including keyboardist Quincy McCrary, guitarist Enor Evol and drummer-percussionist Mike Shapiro.

Looking back on the album's genesis, Spencer remarks: "We never said, 'Hey, let's get together and make a record.' At first it was just party tracks, material I'd started working on as my production skills developed. But it naturally evolved into something much more musical and much more lyrically substantial. It's hard to categorize this album because it really does represent whatever random creative flow was coming out when these songs were written. But I will say one thing: Electropop is hot!"