MeLo-X On Working With Beyoncé, Putting Dancehall At The Forefront Of His Next Album
Since 2014, the multimedia artist MeLo-X has gone from uploading unofficial remixes of Beyoncé songs to becoming one of the superstar’s steady collaborators. The shift began with the release of Yonce-X, an EP on which the Jamaican-American producer born Sean Rhoden reimagined five tracks from Beyoncé’s self-titled album. Though MeLo had to contend with Beyoncé’s label removing the project over copyright claims, the work eventually found its way to the artist.
After the two met, Beyoncé tasked him with designing the intro for her 2014 On the Run tour. “I killed it,” MeLo recently told DancehallMag. Since then, he’s become a regular member of the pop icon’s brain trust. His credits include co-writing and co-producing her song Sorry and co-writing and singing backup vocals on Hold Up, both from the 2016 album Lemonade; scoring Lemonade’s accompanying film and 2020’s Black is King; and contributing music to several of her live performances, such as the 2016 Formation World Tour.
Most recently, he supplied Beyoncé with writing and background vocals for MOVE, a song that features Grace Jones and Tems and which made the cut for Beyoncé’s seventh studio album, Renaissance. The album is up for nine Grammy awards, including Album of the Year and Best Dance/Electronic Album.
It’s a substantial achievement for MeLo largely because, like most of the music he’s worked on, MOVE contains heavy nods to his Jamaican heritage. “I’m always putting those seeds of Dancehall and the Caribbean into my stuff,” he said.
The various roles he’s taken on — as a Beyoncé collaborator, as one-half of the music duo Electric Punanny, and as a solo artist — reflect the dizzying expanse of his creative interests and impulses. Raised in a Jamaican home in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, he began toying with music-making as a child before branching out into other disciplines like photography, filmmaking, and creative direction. Though his sound is constantly shifting, elements of Dancehall, electronic, hip-hop, dance, and Afrobeats are frequent touchpoints.
Now, MeLo-X is narrowing his focus to Dancehall for his forthcoming album, code-named MTA. The idea was birthed from some 2020 quarantine sessions and a desire to create an album with “bangers from top to bottom,” he said. “You know what it is? I’m using it as a tool for me to get my ass to Jamaica more.”
MeLo-X talked with DancehallMag about the origin of MOVE, his collaborative relationship with Beyoncé, and building a world out of Dancehall for his upcoming solo project.
Congrats on the Grammy nominations. How are you feeling coming off of that news?
Good, man. I’ve been working with Beyoncé for about seven years now, so it feels good to still have some joints on the board with her. I work on a lot of things for her, so any time something comes out and gets nominated, it’s a big blessing because I’ve really been an independent artist for most of my career — even now.
How’d MOVE come together?
It was cool. I’m always working on songs, commercials, and ideas for her, so when they started working on those [Renaissance] sessions, I just started getting hit up with a lot of new tracks. Like yo, can you work on this? Can you add something to this? So at that point, I knew something was going down.
I love MOVE, because it’s that Dancehall, Caribbean song on the album. They got Grace Jones on it, Tems, and GuiltyBeatz, who I work with a lot. But the version that I did was totally different [from what was released.] My version was more of a deep house track.
And to juxtapose with it being house, I was pretending like I was an old, Jamaican woman deejay. So I was in the background screaming Yow! Yeah, man! Move out di way! And I was doing that throughout the whole track. They ended up keeping all of that, and some of my sounds and my transitions, and then meshed that with what P2J and GuiltyBeatz did for the final version.
So I work on a lot of things, and then she’ll use my elements in different ways, but work with other producers to fully build it out. And who knows? My version might come out as a remix later.
And from that Dancehall influence, there’s that reference to [the Jamaican dancer] George Adams’ Bruk Up dancing style, which was big in Brooklyn in the ‘90s. Was that something you recorded for the song, too?
You know when you’re listening to music and you get a feeling in your spine? When it comes to producing music, I always go with that feeling. I just ride the wave of that feeling.
I need to feel that whenever I’m working on new music or a remix or anything for Beyoncé. By searching for that, I’ve always gravitated towards things that make sense to me. So those Bruk Up parts were already written by Tems and The-Dream when the track was sent to me. And when I heard it, it gave me that energy, that feeling.
I’m from East Flatbush, Brooklyn and a lot of my friends were into the flex dance scene over there. So when I heard the Bruk Up parts, it was just like, this is perfect. It made me wanna sound even more Jamaican. I was like ok, I’m gonna sound like one of my aunties.
When you work with Beyoncé across formats – from doing the commercials to the live performances to the feature-length film projects – does the approach to collaboration between you two change at all?
When we work on the longer-form pieces, it’s definitely way more intense. Mostly because there are so many edits. It’s a lot of things. Every day there could be two or three different versions, if not the full film, then specific scenes you’re working on.
But she’s really vibed with me from the beginning because of how I envision her sound and how I manipulate, alter, and mess with her music. So when it comes to me doing scores for her, it’s important for me to do the same thing. But it’s honing it in and reeling it in to be even more collaborative. Because for the Black is King film score, it was me, her music director and a string player doing it together.
She also loves how I explore and mash up these different genres of music, ideas, and elements because I’m more from that experimental, weird side. So with her being as huge and respected as she is, we’ll find a good meeting point in the middle where it makes sense and it’s palpable for her audience, but still has that edginess to it.
How has that collaborative relationship affected how you approach your own work?
If there was one thing to sum up what I’ve learned from her, I would say work ethic. That and time management. There’s also the musical inspiration from when we create new and original stuff together, which is always fun.
Throughout working on all that stuff – the music, the tours, the IvyPark collaborations, and the commercials – with my own work ethic, I see an even more polished and defined work ethic with her. From working on the On The Run tour with her, I saw that it really took a whole village to make that tour run. While she’s on the stage, there are people under the stage moving things. There are the lighting guys, the engineers, the sound guys, the pyrotechnics person, and so on.
So from that, I saw that time management is about being on point with the vision and employing the best people to execute certain parts of the vision, and not feeling like you need to do it all yourself. That goes into the work ethic, too. Not overworking yourself, but having the right people in the right position to do it.
Like, for me, when she needed an intro for her On The Run tour, she brought me in because she liked what I did with remixing her music. So when she brought me in and I killed it, she was like, he’s the right person to do this for other parts of the tour.
So I just became the guy to do it. So I did it for On the Run 1 and 2, the Coachella performance, and those on BET and MTV. But that’s time management. She’s like, he’s not gonna waste my time. He’s gonna execute it correctly, and the vision’s gonna be ill, so here you go.
You spend a lot of time working in different mediums besides music, too. Where does that drive to pursue so many other creative interests come from?
I’d say one of the reasons why I do it that way is because when I was a kid, I’d buy an album and start reading the liner notes to see who took the cover photo, who engineered it, who did the art direction, and so on. And I’d be like, oh, it takes mad people to get this done.
Then any time my friends were like, we don’t got anybody to do the album artwork, I’d be like, you know what? Imma do it. That got me into artwork and photography, and then my friends would say they need a DJ and I said I’d do that, too.
And I’d look at live shows that looked crazy, like [Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg’s] Up in Smoke Tour or some of those Jamaican festivals like Sunsplash, and I’d see what went into making a song that I loved on the radio seem great live. So that got me into stage design and creative direction.
Also, because I was independent coming up and doing it all myself, I had to wear those hats and I didn’t want to half-ass anything, either. So I really went on a deep dive into the technique of doing these things like shooting videos or shooting film.
I just didn’t wanna limit myself creatively, so when it was time to take a break from rapping or making beats, I could also creative direct. So I was never really taking a break. I’d just jump into another hat and learn from that. But it all comes from music. All the facets of music creation and how it’s brought to us – that’s what inspired me.
Are you working on any projects right now?
Yeah, I have an album I’m working on now and the code name is MTA. It’s a full-on Dancehall album. I’ve always put a lot of where I’m from in my music, but I also approached a lot of my earlier music by thinking about how many genres I can put into one thing. How can I bend and manipulate these genres to sound the same or make sense with each other?
[Electric Punnany] has toured all over the world – we’ve done Glastonbury Festival, and gone all over Europe and Asia. And we’re always pushing Dancehall, Afrobeats and a fusion of music. But with this new album I’m working on, Dancehall is at the forefront. The new album is more about taking this one aspect and building a whole world inside of it. It’s a whole Dancehall album.
So have you been travelling to Jamaica for this one?
You know what it is? I’m using it as a tool to get my ass to Jamaica more. That’s kind of what happened with our album Zulu Guru; me and my friend Jesse Boykins III worked on that and it brought us to Africa.
The last time I was in Jamaica was probably four or five years ago, but I used to go more frequently as a kid. I would go like once a year to visit family in Clarendon and St. Elizabeth — scattered all around.
What else should we expect from the album?
Jesse Boykins III and Machine Drum are two of the artists I’ve been working with. Jesse is an amazing writer and producer – he works with Steve Lacy and all types of artists. Same with Machine Drum. He and I have been putting music out for over ten years now.
During COVID, when everything got shut down, I’d been working on this album called Big Chunes. And the idea was just that I want big chunes. Bare big chunes. And I tapped into this certain sound and style with two songs where Jesse and my wife were telling me to go deeper into that world.
So I just made it a whole world and just started building and creating. And because the outside world was shut down, I actually had time to just sit with myself and kind of see like, okay, what do I want to create next? How do I wanna push myself?
And from there I realised I need to explore an album with bangers from top to bottom. I’ve done experimental, but I haven’t done one consistent project with a sound and the same elements. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but it was just a space that I haven’t worked in yet. So that’s how the album came about.
And also from having kids. I had my first son three years ago and I had my daughter last year, and the process of seeing them come into this world was life-changing. It teaches you a lot and I put a lot of that into the music.
It’s gonna be a solo MeLo project, but I am working on some collaborations right now. It’ll be out next year and right now we’re working on ways to get my fans and community involved. I wanna build an ecosystem where people who support me can reap the benefits of the music blowing up as well, with stuff like NFTs and Web3 and all that.