After some time away to reset, Jackson Wang is back with his most personal album yet, MAGICMAN 2, where the chart-topping singer opens up his journals to explore fame, vulnerability, identity, and his own growth as a person and artist. A few days before the album's arrival, Wang sat down in the studio with Bru and Brooke Morrison to talk about his journey.
LISTEN NOW: Jackson Wang with Bru
"'MAGICMAN' has always been, even a lot of my fans don't know about this, they're like, 'hey, why are you always doing the dark makeup? What's the devil concept? What is going on?' And actually 'MAGICMAN,' this thing, this name, represents my internal emotions," confesses Jackson. "For a long time debuting at such a young age, I wasn't ready for anything. For a long time I've been trying to avoid the person inside me, I wanted to escape because obviously I didn't have time to think for the past 10 years. It's just packed schedules in the ecosystem of big corporate company, in a boy band, you know, it's just things after another that I missed a lot of my youth. So I took a year off last year."
"I needed some time to breathe and to even understand who I really am," Wang continues. "It's the question of, 'am I the Jackson Wang that people know of for the people who know me or am I the Jackson Wang who I think I am?' And I couldn't even answer that." So Jackson took his time away and poured himself into journals and family, emerging on the other side with a confessional new project. "I converted them into music, and this is what the entire album is about."
"It's important even for my fans, this album I wanted to share with them that, 'hey, this is the journey that I've been through, this is the experience and I this is how I recovered.' The main message of the album is, a lot of things at the end of the day it's just, whatever that happens, accept it and move on with it. That's a process of you evolving and being mature, and by doing that you have to give yourself room, and love, and time, and effort."
To hear much more from Jackson Wang, check out the full interview above, and listen to MAGICMAN 2, now available everywhere.