Ziggy Marley is staying true to himself and looking toward the bright side.
In this episode of Billboard‘s Take Us Out, Ziggy Marley brings host Tetris Kelly to Crossroads, a cozy vegan restaurant in Los Angeles for healthy bites and discourse. Over their meal, the duo talk about Marley’s upcoming album, collecting vinyl and being vulnerable in music. Of course, being that the musician picked a vegan restaurant, Kelly starts the conversation by asking how long Marley has followed the vegan diet.
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“I’m only vegan part-time,” Marley jokes. “I’m healthy all the time, but I’m vegan part-time.”
Once his vegan status is established, the two dive into the music chat. Marley is releasing his new album, Brightside, in an unconventional way. The LP will be released exclusively as physical copies on on Record Store Day, April 18, and will not be available digitally until May 1. He attributes his decision to release his album this way to seeing how music was made when he was growing up, especially with his father, the late legend Bob Marley.
“I grew up around seeing records being manufactured, vinyl from the conception to the final product,” Marley explains. “That process and the quality and the discipline that is behind it. So I wanted to kind of push this record in that way.”
He says that this approach is different from how people do music today. Today, Marley says, music is cheaper, easier and faster to make. He wanted to make Brightside “the slow way.”
Kelly then asks Marley, an avid vinyl collector, what the most important record in his collection is.
“The most important vinyl is the first vinyl I bought,” Marley says before naming an album that was surely many collectors’ first: Thriller. “The first time I had my own money, then I was like, ‘Yeah, man, I’m going to the record store and buy a record.’”
The conversation then turns toward the themes that Marley explores in Brightside, with a focus on the album being his most personal to date. Marley shares why he wanted to be honest in this project and what inspired him to write the new songs on it. One inspiration came from being on set for his father’s 2024 biopic, Bob Marley: One Love, which he produced.
“[I was] also getting some sparks of creativity, you know, being on a movie set,” Marley says. He then shares that he crafted the deeply personal songs on the album over time, but there was one day in particular during which he really took a look inside and tried to understand why some of the music he was writing was sad.
“One day I was really feeling like s–t and I was like, ‘Why do I let the world trouble me?’” he shares. “The state of the world is oppressive. And that is the battle really. The battle is how we free our mind from that oppression.”
To hear Marley talk about the making of Brightside, his favorite vegan dishes at a Los Angeles institution and his thoughts on F1, watch the full Take Us Out above.
