Jon Batiste doesn’t make albums so much as declarations of purpose. When We Are arrived in 2021, it wasn’t just a record — it was a mission statement written in brass, gospel, and pure conviction. “I think it’s more of myself than I’ve revealed to the public,” he told me. “It’s a full panorama of my artistry.”
That’s not modesty. Batiste sang, rapped, chanted, and played a dozen instruments. Over a hundred collaborators cycled through the sessions, yet somehow it all sounds like one clear voice — his. “The world needs authentic artistry right now,” he said. “Real, conscious, but accessible artistry.” The kind of stuff that doesn’t just entertain but, as he put it, “feeds people spiritually.”
He made the record’s blueprint in six frantic days — not in some high-end studio, but in his dressing room at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “In between tapings, food deliveries, writing scores, working on Soul for Pixar… all of it was just bleeding together,” he said. “We had one mic, a laptop, and all my instruments. People coming in and out all hours. Homemade food, pastries. We made the skeleton of We Are right there.”
From that chaos came nine months of careful refinement — lyric writing, layering parts, bringing in musicians. The timing was uncanny: though recorded before the summer of mass protests, the album felt like it had heard them coming. “We didn’t know it would be prophetic,” Batiste said. “We were just making what was on my heart.”
That heart was wide open — to love, childhood memories, community, and protest. “I wanted to sing about the full experience of what it means to be human,” he said. “And I don’t believe in genre. The real objective was to make something that creates community.”
Community, of course, is what drives Batiste’s entire public persona — the dancing joy on Colbert, the second-line spirit of New Orleans that never left him. But it’s also what connected him to Soul, the Pixar film that snagged him an Oscar alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
“I don’t think about capturing everything,” he said, describing how he wrote the Earthbound jazz sequences while Reznor and Ross handled the afterlife’s ambient pulse. “I think about the specific moment the character’s in — how does he feel? What does that sound like?” The answer: something euphoric and transcendent, drawn from what he called “God’s divine source.”
Batiste talked about composition as if it were communion — the kind that blurs life and work until both are worship. “Anything can be source material,” he said. “If it gives me the feeling I’m looking to create, put it in the room.”
It’s easy to forget, amid the Grammys and late-night fame, that Batiste’s true north isn’t celebrity — it’s connection. “This record,” he said, “was about feeding people something deep.” Mission accomplished.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
