Kenya wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card. Good Morning, the new collaboration between dancehall artiste 450 and Damian ‘Jr Gong’ Marley, landed at number three on YouTube in Nairobi, and for producer Jahvanie ‘Weekday’ Morrison, that was a first in his career.
The track only dropped on October 16, but it’s already moving like a song with a passport. It climbed to number one on Audiomack in the United States and reached number four and number six on the iTunes charts in the United Kingdom and Japan.
The Caribbean showed up too. Good Morning topped iTunes in Grenada and The Bahamas and hit number 10 on YouTube’s trending chart in Jamaica. By Weekday’s count, the song has charted in more than 35 countries.
“It has been great. We’ve gotten radio plays from all over the world,” he said.
The visuals are pulling their weight as well. The music video, shot between Miami and Jamaica and directed by AKA Ruppi and AM Visuals, passed three million YouTube views in under a week.
For 450, this is new territory. It’s his first time working with a member of the Marley family, a name that carries real weight in reggae thanks to Damian’s father, Bob Marley, and Damian’s own long run as one of the genre’s most respected voices.
Weekday has some history with the family, having previously worked with Julian Marley. Still, landing Damian was something else entirely.
He described it as one of his dream collaborations since he first started working in the music industry, and said getting to live that dream has been a special feeling.
The fan reaction is where things get interesting. According to Weekday, listeners have been flooding him with messages, and a lot of them sound pleasantly caught off guard.
“I’ve gotten countless amounts of messages and comments from fans saying they weren’t expecting this, and they’re grateful for the message and change in the musical production,” he said.
That surprise factor seems to be the point. Weekday framed the record as proof that he’s not stuck in one lane, and he wasn’t shy about taking a swipe at the copy and paste approach that can creep into any scene.
“It just shows that I’m doing what a real music producer is supposed to do. Produce different types of music and not just repeat the same patterns and melodies over and over again,” he said.
So the conversation around Good Morning is really two stories at once. There’s the chart run, which is easy to measure, and there’s the shift in sound, which fans are clearly noticing and rewarding.
Weekday isn’t treating this as a finish line. “My goal is for it to become a global hit,” he said, adding that “it has already made a strong start.”
With radio spins coming in from overseas and new territories still popping up on the charts, the next few weeks will show just how far this one can travel.
