At a certain point in a long career, experience stops being a biography and becomes taste: what an artist leaves out, which advice they ignore and how quickly they recognise a false note in their own work. Jah Decko reaches Love Who Loves You Back after over two decades in roots reggae, much of that time spent switching between the microphone and the producer’s chair. Due October 5, the album carries the authority of accumulated work, though authority alone can produce remarkably dull music. The more interesting question is whether time has made his instincts sharper, freer and harder to impress.

Born in Suriname and based in the Netherlands, Jah Decko has moved through professional football, independent production, label work and his own recording career. Those facts invite a tidy story about reinvention. Real careers develop through overlapping loyalties, practical decisions and long periods when public attention sits elsewhere. Love Who Loves You Back returns the focus to the artist himself, placing a current record in front of the history attached to his name. Ahead of its release, we spoke with Jah Decko.

Hi Jah, thanks for making time. You have spent over two decades inside reggae, while love keeps changing its meaning as a person grows older. What do you understand about loving somebody today that a younger version of you would have resisted?

I would first say that, yes, reggae has been part of my life for more than twenty years, but I haven’t been working in reggae full-time for twenty years. Especially in the Netherlands, reggae is not always something you can make a living from. A lot of the time it’s more like a passion than a profession.  So throughout those years I’ve also been involved in other things – football, different projects, different parts of life. Reggae was always there, but sometimes more in the background. Then I would come back to producing, recording, working with other artists or creating my own music again.  And maybe that’s also similar to how I look at love now. 

When you’re younger, you’re still discovering what you want and, maybe even more importantly, what you don’t want. Sometimes you think you know, but you still have to experience certain things before you really understand yourself.  As you get older, you recognize things much faster. You know yourself better. You see earlier what feels right for you and what doesn’t. You don’t necessarily need to go through the whole situation anymore to understand where it’s going.  So what I understand about love today is that knowing what you don’t want can be just as important as knowing what you do want. I think my younger self would probably have resisted that. When you’re young, you want to experience everything first. When you get older, experience itself starts talking to you.

I keep returning to the title Sen Her Come. Somebody is calling, somebody is being called, and somebody still gets to decide whether she arrives. Who actually holds the power inside that song?

I don’t think there is just one person who holds the power in Sen Her Come. For me, faith holds the power.  I think a lot of people in life are searching for that person – a good woman or a good man, somebody you can really build something with. In this song, it’s a man asking for a good woman, a righteous woman, a virtuous woman, to come into his life.  And he’s asking God to help guide that woman onto his path. 

So first of all, the power is with God, because I believe everything in life is ultimately in God’s hands. But at the same time, the man also has some power because he’s expressing what he wants. He’s putting that desire out into the universe and having faith that the right person will eventually come.  And of course, the woman still has her own choice. She’s not just somebody being sent without a will of her own. So I wouldn’t say the power belongs to one person in the song. It’s God, it’s faith, it’s the person asking, and it’s also the person who chooses to come into your life. 

That’s really what Sen Her Come is about: asking, believing, and trusting that the right person will find their way to you. 

Suppose a listener plays Love Who Loves You Back from beginning to end and then removes a single track. Which absence would change the emotional truth of the entire record, even if the remaining songs still worked individually?

For me, it would be difficult to choose one particular track, because the album was put together as a complete body of work.  You have some lovers tunes on there, you have some real roots and militant tunes, and then you have songs like Take It Easy that bring a completely different mood and energy. That balance was intentional. Different songs deal with different subjects, different feelings and different moments in life. As the producer and the artist performing the album, I know why every track is where it is and what it brings to the record. 

So honestly, if you removed any one of those tracks, I would feel that something was missing. Maybe every remaining song would still work perfectly well on its own, but the album wouldn’t tell exactly the same story anymore.  For me, Love Who Loves You Back is about the combination of those different moods and subjects. You don’t feel the same way every day and life doesn’t give you only one emotion. The album reflects that. So I can’t really give you one track and say, “That’s the one you can’t remove.” I would rather say that every track has its purpose, and taking one away would make the album feel less complete.

You have enough studio experience to make a track impressive almost on command. Which song on Love Who Loves You Back became stronger when you chose simplicity over display, and what did you remove?

Well, first of all, experience in the studio definitely helps you to get things sounding a certain way. But with this album, the simplicity was actually there from the beginning.  We didn’t record this album in some big, expensive studio with unlimited equipment. We worked with quite minimal resources, and to be honest, at certain moments we were asking ourselves, “Are we really going to get the sound we want out of this?” The recordings came from different situations and different equipment. We used different snares, different toms, different percussion, even two different bass guitars. So we didn’t start with this perfectly polished, expensive studio sound. 

That was actually the challenge.  It became a question of: can we take these raw recordings and turn them into something polished? Can we make an album recorded with relatively simple means sound like something that came out of a much more expensive studio?  That’s where the studio experience really became important. Not to show how many effects or techniques we could use, but to know what each recording needed – and sometimes what it didn’t need. 

So for me, the simplicity wasn’t about one particular song where we removed something. The simplicity was in the way the album was originally recorded. The real art was taking that raw material and bringing everything together until it sounded like one complete, professional record.  And I think that’s one of the things I’m most proud of with this album: you don’t need the most expensive studio in the world if you understand the sound you’re trying to create. 

In sessions with other artists, the first ten seconds after playback can reveal plenty. How do you hear the difference between self-doubt and genuine self-awareness in that silence?

I think you can hear the difference quite quickly.  An experienced artist who knows what he wants will usually hear immediately when something isn’t right. You play it back and they might say, “No, I need to do that again,” or, “I want something extra there,” or, “Let me put an ad-lib there.” They already have an idea in their head of how they want it to sound. 

That’s self-awareness to me. It’s not insecurity. They know their own voice, they know what they’re capable of, and they know when they haven’t reached what they were trying to do.  Self-doubt is different. You can often see it when an artist listens back and then looks at you as the producer and asks, “Is it good?” They’re waiting for your confirmation because they don’t completely trust their own judgement yet. 

That’s when the producer has to give more direction. Maybe you tell them, “Try another take,” or, “Put an ad-lib there,” or, “Don’t do too much here.” You help them find what the song needs.  Of course, even experienced artists sometimes need another opinion. But generally, a confident and experienced artist doesn’t need you to tell them whether something feels right. Most of the time, they already know.  That’s the difference for me: self-doubt looks for confirmation. Self-awareness already knows what it’s listening for. 

A long career can quietly turn old hunger into habit. At this stage, what are you still trying to prove, and whose approval would make the answer uncomfortable?

I think I would first have to challenge the idea of this being a long career.  Like I said earlier, my journey hasn’t been like that of some Jamaican artists who have been working continuously in reggae from a young age and have made music their full-time career. My path has been very different. I’ve made reggae in the Surinamese language, I’ve worked as a producer, and roots reggae has always been somewhere inside Jah Decko. But at the same time, I’ve had other projects and other things going on in my life.  So in a strange way, I actually feel like my career is only starting now. 

Love Who Loves You Back is my first English-language album. That’s a completely new step for me. I’m moving from making music mainly for a Surinamese-speaking audience into making roots reggae that can potentially reach people anywhere in the world.  So when you ask me what I’m still trying to prove, I don’t really see it as “still” trying to prove something after twenty years. What I want to prove now is that Jah Decko can also bring something meaningful to English-language roots reggae – coming from Amsterdam, with Surinamese roots, and bringing my own sound and perspective into it.  The roots element has always been there, whether I was producing or making Surinamese-language reggae. The difference is that now the feeling and the timing were right to make an English album and try to reach a much wider audience. 

So to me, this doesn’t feel old at all. It feels new.  And yes, I’m starting this chapter at an older age, but I don’t believe creativity has an age limit. If anything, everything I’ve experienced before this has prepared me for what I’m doing now.  Honestly, it feels less like I’m looking back on a long career and more like my career is just beginning. 

Roots reggae gives an artist a public language of conviction, and conviction can sound beautifully complete inside a song. Have you ever written a lyric that was wiser than the life you were living at the time? Did you keep it, grow into it, or cut it?

Yes, I’ve experienced something like that, although maybe in a slightly different way.  Sometimes I’ve written lyrics without realizing at that moment how much they might later connect to my own life.  For example, years ago I had a Surinamese-language tune called Welcome to Damsko. In that song I talked about going back to Suriname and living there. At the time, it was a lyric. I wasn’t sitting there with a serious plan saying, “This is what I’m definitely going to do.” 

But maybe six years later, it actually became reality. I’ve had that happen with certain things I’ve written. You put something into a lyric because that’s what you’re feeling or thinking at that particular moment, but you don’t necessarily understand where that thought is going to take you. 

Then years later, life moves in a certain direction and suddenly you realize: “Wait a minute, I already said this in one of my songs.” So maybe I wouldn’t say that the lyric was wiser than me. But sometimes a lyric can be ahead of you.  You write something before you’re completely conscious of what it means for your own life. And then you grow into those words.  That’s something I’ve definitely experienced.

Once ideas such as love, unity and consciousness become part of an artist’s public identity, audiences can begin expecting those values from the person at every moment. How do you keep a belief alive once it also becomes part of the Jah Decko brand?

For me, when something is real, it’s not difficult to maintain.  Peace, love and unity are not things I say because they are supposed to be part of the Jah Decko brand. If you really live according to certain principles and values, then after a while they simply become part of who you are. 

For me, Rastafari also plays an important role in that. There are certain orders, certain principles and certain boundaries that I try to live by. That doesn’t mean I’m perfect. Nobody is perfect. We all make mistakes and we all have our own struggles.  For me, it’s a daily struggle between yourself, your beliefs and God. You know the values you want to represent, and every day you have to try to live according to them. 

But that’s very different from creating an image. If you’re talking about peace, love and unity because you think that’s what people want to hear from a roots reggae artist, but those things aren’t really in your heart, eventually people are going to see through it. You can’t perform a belief forever. 

When it’s real, you don’t have to wake up in the morning and think, “Today I have to be Jah Decko and represent peace, love and unity.” It’s simply part of the way you live.  It’s a way of life.  You know what you stand for, you know the values you want to carry, and you try to live by them. Not perfectly, but genuinely. For me, that’s how you keep the belief alive: don’t turn it into a brand in the first place. Live it.

Imagine one of your songs comforts a listener whose values directly oppose yours. Would that connection prove music can cross a divide, or would the song’s meaning depend on what they do with that comfort?

Can music cross ideological divides? I definitely believe music can reach people who have completely different beliefs and ways of life. Somebody can be into hard rock or heavy metal and have a completely different outlook on life from a Rastaman, but they can still make a song that touches me. It depends on the song, the message and also on what you personally hear in it. Because music is music. Sometimes it isn’t even the words. A musician can play certain chords or create a certain feeling, and that can touch somebody from a completely different background. 

For me personally, though, there is a limit. If the message of a song is full of negativity or represents things that go directly against my Rastafari beliefs, then it becomes very difficult for that song to reach me, no matter how good the music might be. The message still matters. But somebody from a completely different musical world could make a beautiful song about love, for example, and that could absolutely touch me. And it works the other way around too. Somebody who normally listens to heavy metal can hear a Bob Marley song, or another roots reggae tune, and feel something from it even though reggae isn’t their world. That’s because there are certain emotions that don’t belong to one culture, one religion or one type of music. 

Love is inside human beings.  So yes, I believe music can cross those divides. You don’t have to believe everything I believe in order to feel something from my music. And maybe that’s one of the most powerful things about music – sometimes the connection comes before the understanding.

After twenty years, has being Jah Decko ever become a role you have to keep performing, even away from music? Where does the artist end and the private man begin?

Again, I think we come back to that idea of twenty years and a role that I’ve somehow had to maintain. For me, it doesn’t really work like that. Decko has been my street name since I was young. People were calling me Decko long before there was any idea of creating an artist called Jah Decko. So Decko was never a stage name that I invented for music. It’s simply part of who I am. The “Jah” came later, as I got older and wiser and my faith became more important in my life. God comes before everything, so Jah also comes before Decko. That’s where Jah Decko comes from. 

Because of that, I’ve never felt that I have to perform Jah Decko as a character. Whether I’m making music, producing somebody else, involved in football, working on another project or simply living my private life, I’m still the same person. All those different things are part of me. 

So I can’t really tell you where the artist ends and the private man begins, because there isn’t a clear line for me.  When I walk into a studio, I don’t suddenly become Jah Decko, and when I leave the studio, I don’t stop being him. Jah Decko isn’t a role I play. It’s a name that grew out of who I already was.

This article was made possible through our editorial partnership program. All information provided is prepared in accordance with editorial standards and is intended to offer useful insights for readers. Please note that the opinions, interpretations, and evaluations expressed by the author may substantially differ from the viewpoints of our readers or the general public at large, and we respect the diversity of opinions.