Fiddlehead’s Next Show Isn’t Guaranteed. As Their New Album Stresses, Neither Is Tomorrow.

From the outside looking in, it would seem like the past seven years have been the best of Jon Bellion‘s life. Along with co-writing/producing hits by the likes of Miley Cyrus, Jungkook, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, and Selena Gomez — and earning four GRAMMY nominations for his work with Jon Batiste, Justin Bieber, and Lizzo — he became a father to three boys. But it was also the singer/songwriter/producer’s most treacherous stretch.

Since releasing his last album, Glory Sound Prep, in November 2018, Bellion has been fighting to buy himself out of his Live Nation contract and reclaim his masters. For a time, he relinquished any hope of resuming his solo career and even considered walking away from music altogether. 

Bellion founded Beautiful Minds Records and Beautiful Minds Publishing in 2019, from which he and his peers dispatched some of the hottest records of the past several years, but he didn’t finalize owning his masters until 2024. Even after winning his legal battle, he warred internally over putting out solo music again. Ultimately, he realized he had experienced a luxury most artists in his position don’t have time to experience: Normal life.

“Nobody walks away for six years and then comes back and says, ‘This is what I’ve learned in six years of being away from the machine,'” Bellion tells GRAMMY.com. “To walk away for six years, develop myself as a person, and then come back? People don’t get that opportunity. Ever! It almost provides this cheat code perspective because I’ve seen the tops of the mountaintops. I’ve seen the worried king on the throne. I’ve seen his anxiety, and I dodged that bullet.”

So, his first move after gaining control over his artistry was self-funding Father Figure, his third solo LP out now. 

Father Figure captures Bellion in his rawest form. It’s still packed with his genre-defying, fantastical production style, but this time, the beat pad is secondary to his voice. Bellion has always penned exceptionally human lyricism, and after having his world blown wide open, his vulnerability crescendos with his most biographical music yet. He lets his story guide him across 14 tracks — and piercing, tangible emotion is the album’s sweetest sound.

“WASH” has layers and loops galore, but at its core, it’s just a man singing about how overwhelmed he is by his wife’s beauty. “GET IT RIGHT” and “ITALIA BREEZE” reinforce that Bellion’s bag of bars is as deep as anyone’s, while “HOROSCOPE” (with Pharrell Williams) is primarily a piano ballad. The Luke Combs-featuring “WHY,” which was written two days before his first son’s birth, is fueled by Bellion’s soaring vocals about his fear of loving someone so much it could destroy him.

The title track comes from a deep longing to carry forward his father’s legacy in the face of the lies society spits about what it means to be a man. The album’s beautiful, organized chaos ends on the hushed tone of “MY BOY,” a stripped-back confessional about wishing to protect a young boy’s purity from a world designed to steal it. Collectively, Father Figure is equal parts personal triumph and family heirloom — a promise to raise his sons with the same devotion as those who raised him.

“I got nervous, being like, well, it’s not young, sexy, and it’s not particularly exciting to talk about your children,” Bellion says. “Then, I was like, but I have to be me. Only I can be who I am, so I might as well go down that path.

“It has been refreshing and definitely therapeutic for me to make an album that solely reflects my life and where I’m at,” he continues, “because, hopefully, other guys, other parents, or other people that are just trying to do the best that they can in their everyday life, this album could be a shot of espresso for them.”

Below, in his own words, Bellion shared the primary inspirations behind Father Figure, including fatherhood, an old photo of his parents, and a dinner with Pharrell.

I’ve done trauma work around early trauma that happened to me, and there are things that my parents just could not have prevented. So, my first son coming into the world — it’s my job to protect. It’s my job to provide. And then, this thought creeps in, like, Well, there are certain things you can’t protect him from. I was like, uh oh! I have to prepare him emotionally to handle those things, not protect him from those things. How do I even do that?

He’s your first son coming into the world. You should be a happy dad who’s not scared of anything. You shouldn’t feel these things. Then, I felt shame. So, I was like, let me address it in song and expose that fear at the highest level. When people hear “WHY,” my first song talking about my kids directly, it’s like, What if you break my heart? What if you get hurt?

Maybe a song about that could help a lot of people in relationships, not just guys who are having sons, just people who are like, what do you do with love if it makes you vulnerable?

I like that the song doesn’t give you an answer. “If the higher I fly is the further I fall/ Then why love anything at all?” I think coming from the place of I don’t have an answer will make people relate to it more, rather than trying to preach at ’em. I have my own answers, but I’d rather pose the question to start the conversation.

My kids have listened to this album a ton. They sing the songs in the car. They’re in the backseat saying, “Put on ‘HOROSCOPE’! ‘Read you like a horoscope, read you like a horoscope!’ ‘What happened to your light, what happened to your light?’ [from ‘KID AGAIN’]”

I think these are formative memories for them. My dad was a writer. My dad was a producer, and he used to play his songs in the minivan on the way to the trampoline park. I’m happy that they’ve gotten to do this alongside me and visit me in the studio twice a day. I say to my son, “What do you think about this?” He’s 2, and he’s learning to close his eyes and listen to music. It’s a blessing that my music is the soundtrack to their musical development. I hope they look back on this album and see my heart through them.

My wife has known me since I was 15 years old. We dated for five and a half years, and then took a long break. Years ago, we got back together, and she told me one day, “You’re going to have to choose the music over me, and I won’t resent you for that.” I was like, “What do you even mean?” She has always known me on a level that I don’t know myself. And I think she always believed in the figure of a father, the figure of a husband, or the figure of a person that I don’t even believe myself to be.

She was there the day I said, “I think I want to start making beats for a living.” I was 17 years old. She was in the room. There’s a line in “GET IT RIGHT”: “I remember I was 15/ Your sister said I was good, but I’d never be Swizz Beatz,” and her sister says, “You’ll never be Swizz Beatz” [on the song]. That’s my wife. She’s been around for a long time.

Creatives have an engine, and you can go 120 miles an hour in that engine. I’ve been blessed to be able to go 120, but I recognize that going 120 all the time is dangerous. As creatives, we can tether ourselves to the galaxy of touching that lightning bolt every day and trying to go and grab creative things that you can’t schedule, and it could drive you crazy. She’s the only reason I haven’t fallen into madness.

She is my anchor to reality. Not in a codependent type of way, but she’s so reliable and constant. My greatest achievement is her loving me, honestly.

No matter how far we advance in technology — I personally think we’re all, myself included, getting dumber — kids will always be the same age that they are in reality. You’ll never have this advancement where young kids will evolve to think at 7 years old, My parents clearly love me, they’re clearly giving me good advice, and I’m clearly going to listen to that. There is always this arc of resenting them. When I had kids, I realized I should have listened to my parents all the time. They might be the only people in the world who would’ve laid down their lives for me.

You can’t experience that type of love until you look in the face of your child. When I saw my son for the first time, my whole life clicked. I saw my grandfather, my dad and my brother all in his face. It was really, really nuts. I can confirm how much they loved me because I now can confirm how much my sons just break my heart. I love those guys.

The [photo of my parents] on the album cover shows the figure of my dad in the chair, the figure of my mom and her position on his leg, and the plastic on the couch. It’s so Italian. The lamp, the design of the lamp, and the angels on the lamp are so Italian. The rug is so Italian. That is reality. That’s the closest thing we have to reality.

That, to me, felt like the exact opposite of the animated covers of Glory Sound Prep or the cover of The Human Condition, which was like, Come with me to this place! Now, at 33, it’s like, these are my fears. This is my trauma. This is my family. This is who I am, and I can’t escape. There’s no escapism in this.

If you took a picture of me now in sitting in a chair and my wife in that position, you might think that there’s something deeper behind it, but when you see what it was back then and you see the type of the picture that they took as an official picture because they didn’t take pictures all the time, you can see so much culture.

Now, we’re taking 7,000 pictures a day, and we don’t even know what we’re trying to represent. We don’t even know who we are. I feel like you look at those two people in that photo, and they were representative of something that I’m longing for as a father now.

Pharrell literally raised me musically. That’s the actual sensei. That’s one of the greatest ever living producers breathing air. I love that man. It means so much that he’s on that intro [“HOROSCOPE”]. That’s my homage to him. I wear it as a badge of honor that he’s on the album.

We went out to dinner one night, and I sat next to him at this long table. He turned to me. He was like, “Chris Martin. Linkin Park.” He just started naming stuff. He’s like, “I haven’t heard something like that that has made me feel like this is large, and I feel included until you played me your album. This is very important. Keep doubling down on it.” He’s like, “I’m telling you, this is something that’s supposed to happen in music right now.”

You don’t want to put too much gravitas on a human. We’re all human. But to hear your sensei say that he believes in what you’re doing and it’s affecting him, that’s a whole other thing.

When people hear “ITALIA BREEZE,” they’re going to be kind of disoriented. Culturally, people might be mildly confused, which I’m really excited about.

In my younger years on Long Island, Rakim and Erick Sermon were kind of the only guys who really made it, besides Billy Joel. And Billy Joel was the Long Island guy. So, in my early teens, you look at culture on the world level, and you’re like my grandparents — that’s my culture. That’s my heritage. My uncles talk that way because they talk that way. There’s nothing special about that.

As you get older, you think back on these memories, the culture that you grew up on, the structure that provided you, and the jokes — Italians have so much culture. I was like, You know what? Instead of trying to assimilate to another culture to get 15-year-olds to think I’m cool, let me show you something that you can’t do. You weren’t born into it from my angle. 

I don’t need to be the representative. I’m not the Italian president. I just don’t hear a lot of forefronted cultural attempts rooted in real Italian culture. It’s always this caricature. It’s a joke about a meatball.

There’s something powerful about me being like, “They called us guineas for rockin’ pinnies I rock ’em nightly” [in “ITALIA BREEZE”]. They called me a guinea when I was a kid. I’m wearing a tee right now! Now, I rock ’em to sleep because it’s a return to my ancestors and my grandparents who raised me and got me to this level. I want to pay such a deep homage to that on a competitive rap level.

Originally, “MODERN TIMES” was directed toward the album I was working on for Jon Batiste. He went through the track listing, and it ended up just not fitting the World Music Radio world. I was like, man, that might have been my favorite one. That was actually my favorite bridge he did on the entire album: “Everything blaring on my radio, on screen/ Make me wanna go, ‘Ahhhhh!'”

As I was writing it and doing the melodies, I was putting my children to bed, and lightning struck, and it hit me, like, Oh, is that Russia? Is that China? And then, I was like, Yo, this is what it’s like in my brain to think about America.

There’s this weird anxiety that I feel about America. It’s not Republican or Democrat. It’s just like, What the f— is going on? I can’t even go to Starbucks without wondering if this person leans on a side that would make them hate me for the things that I think, and I’m just getting a f—ing macchiato.

If you want to jump into my brain when I think about America and the anxiety I feel, go listen to “MODERN TIMES.” That’s why I love the song. It feels like anxiety by the end of the song. Jon is screaming “America,” and he just keeps repeating it and repeating it and repeating it. By the end, it’s like, no, it’s not okay. What do you think about it? Say something. The song reflects that energy of trying to at least get people to wake up to feel something, without saying I’m a Democrat or I’m a Republican. It’s more just that I feel anxiety about this country, and I don’t even know where to go or who to talk to about it.

Funny enough, “GET IT RIGHT” has five features. We listed the features on it, and it looked crazy, so we thought it might be fun for the fans to discover, like, I think that’s Teddy [Swims]! We’re not focused on streams or using names to get something.

Pharrell, Luke Combs, Jon [Batiste], and Teddy being on the record speaks to what I’m trying to accomplish musically, which is swinging for the fences. The features, all people in many, many different directions, are representative of that. Those directions are representative of me and how I was raised musically. So, deep down, that’s probably why I wanted to have two opposite ends of the spectrum. Would you see Pharrell on the same album as Luke Combs? And Mo Mozzarella on the intro of “GET IT RIGHT”? No, but that’s me. And you can’t escape being yourself.

There’s a dichotomy that I’m stuck in: I live in Long Island and go to people’s barbecues and talk about fantasy football. Then, I’m executive producing Jon Batiste’s record in my basement, and it’s up for Record Of The Year. That’s me as a father.

I’m still trying to figure this out. I mean, I’m not normal, but I want to be normal. I want to provide something normal for my kids, but my kids need to be able to face things with adversity that are extreme. Do I shrink myself? Do I double down and make myself larger? That’s the album.

That’s a perspective that I don’t think a lot of people have, and it’s honestly been super lonely making this. The people you’re in the industry with — the people you’re in service of — are not writing about what you’re writing about.

What’s the utility of the song? What’s the purpose behind it? That’s all I’ve been obsessed with lately. A lot of earlier stuff I made was a lot of escapism, and there were animated photos and animated single arts, and I just felt it was a necessary moment for me to come back with a harsh reality of an album. Still grand, still large in sonic scope, and things that people expect from me, but have this kind of blunt force reality.

It’s not as manic. It’s not as fantastical. It’s not as cartoonish. It’s more settled and ready for a larger storm, not just blown over creatively. Let’s go into that storm, and let’s create within that storm.

I’m most excited about being reintroduced as, like, oh, he’s still challenging his fan base. He’s still growing in a direction. But now, it’s on a totally different maturation level. A lot of artists don’t grow because they’re constantly putting out content. So, to hear this snapshot of Glory Sound Prep and then fast forward six years to whoever that guy is, well, whoever that guy is is the most me I think I’ve ever been — for better or for worse.