There were definitely a lot of chills, a lot of tears. When I was re-doing these two albums, I was feeling very nurturing toward my younger self and having compassion for her, because I feel like a different person now. I felt like a big sister to myself. I guess my 15-year-old self was having a premonition about the things that I would need for the next few years. I’m an only child, and I always wanted a big sister or somebody who could teach me things or tell me about how life was going to be. It’s about resilience - when people go low, you go high. It was the same with “The High Road.” I was like, “Did I manifest this happening? What the fuck?” It’s crazy to think about the content of that song. That message of “You gotta keep your head up high, and whatever you’re going through is going to be okay,” that was woke! I don’t know where that came from, but I was always a little weirdo. It was almost like a little gift that my 12-year-old self gave to myself now. The idea of “Keep On Keepin On” is a message that I still need - and one that I don’t think I’m ever going to stop needing. When I did “Keep On Keepin On” and thought about my 12-year-old self writing those lyrics, I cried. I’ve lived, so to put that into these songs was really dope. It was really interesting going back, because now I’m a woman who’s made tons of decisions, loved and lost and fucked up. Fifteen years ago I was 12, and I was singing about these grown-ass things that I knew nothing about. It really wasn’t my intention to try to make these songs “cool,” or make them something that they’re not. My intention was to give the fans the nostalgia that they couldn’t get. Listening back to both of those albums, it brought me joy, because I was so young and naive and had no experience in the industry - it was just about my love of singing and music. I laughed about it, but I was also like, “This ain’t right!” I did these re-recorded albums with Javad Day and Jordan XL, and I sent them and my musical director the links to the songs on YouTube. To find the tracks, I just did what my fans have been doing: I went to YouTube. There was a period of time, like 10 days in July, when I was going in every single day and recording two songs a day. When I was on the road on the Leaks, Covers & Mixtapes Tour in 2018, my collaborators and I were getting these tracks, listening to them, and figuring out what we were going to do with them. I had to recreate new masters of these songs. It seemed like I was going to have absolutely no chance of seeing eye-to-eye with my former label and getting to an agreement, so my only option was going to be to get into the studio. My lawyer said we’d reached the end of the statute of limitations on my re-record clause, so I was within my rights to “cover” my old songs. But I sold millions of albums, and they were a huge foundation for me - I’m proud of them. Something that bothered me was that I thought there was a misconception that these albums weren’t available because I was somehow embarrassed by them or didn’t want people to see them. I wanted to give them what they were wanting. I see people on my timeline like, “Why can’t I find your first two albums? Can you fix this?” and I wanted to stop seeing these comments! It makes me feel so out of control to not be able to come up with a solution. If it weren’t for my fans being very vocal on social media, I would not have done this. I was like, “Should I file a petition to get these masters? Is it worth undertaking this and spending the money? Does anybody want this?” I wanted to see if there was something that could be done to get these first two albums in the hands of my fans. It all started with a phone call to my lawyer. But JoJo learned that she was allowed to re-record them, so she got to work on remaking both records, along with old one-off singles “Demonstrate” and “Disaster.”īelow, in her own words, JoJo opens up about what it was like to revisit her first two albums, healing from the trauma of her legal battle and what’s next for her now that this chapter has closed. The original recordings, she determined, were out of her grasp. So at the start of 2018, the now-28-year-old began searching seriously for a way to get those albums back. , her first studio album in a decade - fans continued to ask about JoJo and The High Road. JoJo Re-Releases Debut Album With Updated Tracks: ListenĪs JoJo moved on with her career - in 2016, she released Mad Love.
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