Encore: Tell us about the significance of your 10th album "Miracle Worker".
JJ: We are really excited about this release, it’s the first project where we recorded some of it internationally. Half of it was recorded in Africa and the other half, here in the U.S. So, because some of it was recorded in Africa it has some African influences. We recorded two songs with two African artists, one was Tim Godfrey who sang on, "Onaga" which was number one in Nigeria for a quite a few weeks. There’s another song called, "Excess Love" with Mercy Chino, we’re excited about that. We have some great collaborations with Todd Dulaney, Travis Greene, Darrell Walls, Benita Jones and a whole bunch of great artists. It’s really a full worship experience.
Encore: As you mentioned, half of the project was recorded in Africa, why did you choose to go there?
JJ: The reason I wanted to record in Africa was because their worship experience is so intense and so different. Here in the U.S. sometimes we take worship experiences for granted. They treat every worship experience like it’s their last time. From the time we started a song they would be singing it after the first go around. It was really just awesome and exciting the whole time, we recorded for like an hour and half and no one ever sat down. From the first to the last song, they were singing.
Encore: You and your wife Trina have a relationship book, tell us about that?
JJ: The name of the book is called, "A Miracle Marriage". We are really excited about this book, it took us about 4 years to create, but it took us 25 years to live through it. This year we’ve been married 25 years and of course when you're married that long, there's going to be some trouble along the way. We ran into trouble when we first got married. Me and Trina were kids and didn’t know anything about what marriage took. So, we wound up in divorce court, I mean literally we were about to be divorced. Look at us now, we went from being in divorce court to marriage counselors, so that in itself is a miracle. But, with every miracle you have to do some work, so our book talks about the work you need to put in if you want to restore your marriage or relationship. We're hoping that everybody that is in a place where you're not sure where your marriage is going or even those that are in a safe place and just want to learn how to communicate and do different things that’s necessary for marriage to go pick up the book, it’s on Amazon now.
Encore: Tell us about Jamestown music.
JJ: A few years ago right before the "You Deserve It" record, we had fulfilled our obligation with our label eOne. Believe it or not, every record we released in the industry has been through eOne or Light Records. We were with a company called Gospelflava.com when they were called Evidence Gospel and distribution was with eOne. Once we fulfilled our obligation it came to a point where there was an option to resign a deal that probably wouldn’t have been as good as what we had or to start our own label and be distributed through eOne. We chose to re-distribute through eOne which is ironic because our first project was signed to another label and distributed through eOne. So, here we are being our own label and able to make our own decisions. We’re excited because the first project we released through Jamestown music was "You Deserve It", which is our most successful project to date. "Miracle Worker", is also released through Jamestown music and we are releasing music artists that are from the Youthful Praise team, because we have some great worship leaders and artists that are right in the group. Our first single that we released outside of Youthful Praise was Phil Thompson's "My Worship", we’ve been successful so far and we are going to keep going forward.