The Records That Made Me: Jayda G

With The Records That Made Me, VF uncovers the vinyl releases that have influenced and shaped our favourite musicians, DJs and artists.

Jayda G is a crate-digger by nature. Growing up around her father’s record collection before living through the explosion of “Napster and Limewire”, she re-embraced the physical format for comfort. “There’s so much to the physicality of records. It’s something tangible,” she explains. “You have to sit down, place the needle and listen through the whole album. I find it very comforting that a record forces you to do that”. 

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From undergraduate years to DJing and releasing on vinyl, Jayda has always taken joy in hunting out records, armed with her set of crate-digging rules. “I have all these stupid rules for myself with records—I don’t know, life is a game,” she laughs. “One rule is that I have to buy an album while out in-person digging. I can’t just buy it online. I have a lifelong set of weird rules, specific places that I dig and things that only make sense only to me”.

With her second album “Guy” having recently dropped via Ninja Tune, Jayda showcases the influence that vinyl has had on her own writing and curation. “There are little nuances that come along with loving vinyl,” she says. “I want the listener to be on a specific journey that I’m setting out for them at the very beginning as soon as they put the needle down. I’m very particular because it’s the journey of how I see people listening to it on vinyl”. 

Read on to find out the records that define Jayda G’s vinyl-loving career.

Prince & The Revolution

Parade

(Paisley Park/Warner Bros)

My favourite musician is Prince. I’m a huge, huge Prince fan. “Kiss” was a track that I just loved as a kid and I remember being five years old and just listening to it repeatedly and singing along. “Kiss” is definitely a big family favourite with lots of wonderful family memories, but also as a whole album, Parade is just awesome.

My other favourite track on that album is “Mountains”. In the music video, as it ends, he’s just in the sky with maracas and a hat, and everyone’s floating. Who doesn’t want to make a music video where you’re floating on clouds and shaking maracas? Prince has just been such an enormous influence on me. Throughout my whole life, whenever I’m upset or sad, I put his music to lift me out of my sadness.

I have Parade on vinyl and I also own a single for “Mountains” with an extended mix on it. When Prince died, they released all the songs from the vault, but the extended “Mountains” mix isn’t on Spotify. He’s known for extended band jamming and it’s one of those great moments. I’m just really in awe of the whole artistry of Prince because there’s no one like him. He’s odd and not perfectly packaged. There’s an eccentricity to all of it that I think is lost in a lot of pop music nowadays.

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Gil Scott-Heron

Pieces Of A Man

(Flying Dutchman)

Pieces Of A Man is such a good album that I bought on CD at first. I was in Brighton in 2016 and had a show there in my really early touring days. I went to a record shop and when I go digging, I always get used records–new records defeat the entire purpose for me. The shop was all new records and you couldn’t listen to them. However, you could listen to CDs and I picked up Pieces Of A Man.

That wasn’t the first time I’ve listened to the album at all, but it was something that I needed in my collection because it’s just such a beautiful album. It’s something I still listen to while travelling a lot. There’s something that I find very calming and inspiring even though it’s such a heavy album.

“I saw my grandma sweeping/ With her old straw broom/She didn’t know what she was doing/She could hardly understand/That she was really sweeping up/Pieces of a man”. That lyric gets me every time because, even though it was written in the ‘70s, it’s poignant about masculinity in our society today. It shows how your entire worth is based on how strong you are and not being seen as weak. In this song, he loses his job and lots of things happen that would dwindle your pride as a man.

“I Think I’ll Call It Morning” is also a very nostalgic song for me. It was actually my alarm clock for at least five years in university, during my undergraduate degree and just reminds me so much of the late 2000s. I get this really warm, nostalgic feeling when I think of my late teens. I was studying biology and would procrastinate by looking for music. I was really in awe of music and was constantly finding new stuff–classics that I didn’t know about and new songs. “I Think I’ll Call It Morning” really defines that feeling for me.

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Donald Byrd

Places & Spaces

(Blue Note)

Places & Spaces is a classic. Oh my god, where to even start? I feel like every album I’ve selected is from a certain point of time in my life. Prince is in childhood. Pieces of A Man is late 2000s. Donald Byrd is very much from 2012 to 2015 for me.

When I moved to Vancouver, I was super into house music and had been living in places where I couldn’t find fellow house music lovers. In Vancouver, though, I really felt like I had found my people in that city– people who didn’t just like house music, but all the same sub-genres and vibe. I’d never had a crew like that.

There are so many memories from that time with different parts of Donald Byrd’s Places & Spaces. Byrd had just passed away and people were picking up the album again. Our crew would make random mixtapes and distribute them in our community, and tracks from Places & Spaces were on one. In Vancouver, you have to drive to get anywhere and I remember driving to parties and listening to tracks like “Wind Parade”.

I was also digging in New York when I found the single “(Feelin’ Like) Dominoes”. “…Dominoes” was a track I really rinsed like back in 2015 and 2016. I played Dimensions just before I even had an agent. I was playing a closing set on the beach when nothing was happening and it was just for people waiting for their flight. When I played “…Dominoes”, it went down really well for the like 20 people dancing with us at the beach. I have a lot of amazing early DJ memories of it.

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Donna Summer

Four Seasons Of Love

(Casablanca)

Funnily enough, I’m in Chicago at the moment, staying with my friend and her partner. Her partner had never seen Paris Is Burning, so we watched it last night and heard Donna Summer’s “Spring Affair” and all the quintessential LGBTQ club hits.

Four Seasons Of Love album is a big one for my early DJ career days. There’s something about ‘70s album covers and I found this record because I love the cover. She’s just sitting on a crescent moon. Also, I’m a huge Sailor Moon fan, so anything with crescent moons makes me really happy–I’m an uber nerd. In the artwork, Donna’s on a crescent moon in a white dress with her hair up. If I could create an album cover as exceptional as that, I could die happy.

With “Spring Affair”, I remember playing that out and it wasn’t something that was played that often. It was in Vancouver, when I ran underground shows with DJ Fett Burger and I played it out and it went off. I had just bought the record and I remember it quite viscerally, actually. I’m obsessed with breakdowns and I love a song that has a beginning and an ending that is completely different to the beginning. 11 minutes doesn’t make a song sellable for radio, but I love it. On those songs, you just hope that you can bring the audience along to get to the breakdown point.

As a DJ you’re so nervous, being like, “just hold on, I promise you, it’s gonna get really good”. “Spring Affair” is one of those tracks, but it popped off in the club. I think there was an article for Resident Advisor written by some guy who had been to the party and he referenced it. It was nice that it was memorable to other people, too.

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Al Jarreau

Tenderness

(Reprise)

This is a live album that brings all my picks full circle. My new album, Guy, is out and is about my father. Tenderness was a big album in our family and a big road trip album.

I remember my dad really loving this album when I was like 4. There’s this one track where Al Jarreau is talking to the audience about wooing his lady. There’s this one line where he says “we’re gonna get into a hot tub”. My family loves that lyric, especially my dad. He would just say “we’re gonna get into a hot tub” in a low and guttural way. As a child, I thought it was so funny. It was one of those quirky moments that stay in your childhood memories and doesn’t have any rhyme or reason. It just really brings me back into that feeling and that memory of a specific time in my life.

Also, Al Jarreau’s version of “Your Song” always makes me cry. It’s so beautiful. Obviously, Elton John’s version is great as well, but the Al Jarreau version is my family’s–it’s the Guy family version. I always cry to that song. The whole album just reminds me of my dad.

Jayda G’s second studio album, Guy, is out now on Ninja Tune. Order it now. Read more of The Records That Made Me series here.