It’s Friday afternoon in North Hollywood and Ziggy Marley is perched on a stool inside his newly built Rebel Lion Studio, tucked in one of the neighborhood’s creative enclaves.
The nine-time Grammy winner is surrounded by a collection of lion figurines, guitars, traditional hand drums and a piano. Along the walls hang two replicas of backdrops his legendary father, Bob Marley, used on tour in the 1970s. The murals, depicting Rastafari icons and Haile Selassie I and Marcus Garvey, were featured in the 2024 biopic “Bob Marley: One Love.”
“These are what we used as the backdrop for the concert scenes. Them spiritual to me,” Marley says in patois as the smell of palo santo dances around the rehearsal space.
Music has been both an inheritance and lifelong pursuit for Marley. From sitting in studio sessions with his father as a child to building a five-decade career of his own, he has remained a curious student of the craft, one willing to challenge convention in search of a deeper meaning. That spirit is evident on “Brightside,” his ninth solo album, which was released on vinyl on April 18 (Record Store Day) and May 1 on streaming.
Rather than recording the eight-track project in 440 Hz, the standard tuning frequency for most modern music, he opted for 432 Hz, a tuning some musicians and theorists believe creates a warmer, more meditative listening experience. He also slowed down his songwriting process, giving each lyric room to carry its message of hope through turbulent times. The album, which may be his most personal yet, also features “Many Mourn for Bob,” the first song he has written directly about his late father.
“I think it shows the next stage that I probably am in,” says Marley, adding that he felt connected to his father on a spiritual level. “We took another step in the relationship, to another place that it’s never been before.”
Ziggy Marley is bringing his “Brightside” tour to the Hollywood Bowl on June 21 alongside reggae star Burning Spear.
(Dania Maxwell / For The Times)
He adds, “When I was doing the song, it kind of came to me like this song could’ve been my father’s song. It could’ve been a song that he wrote.”
The reflective nature of “Brightside” arrives at another pivotal time in Marley’s career. This year marks the 20th anniversary of “Love Is My Religion,” the Grammy-winning album that launched his solo career and crystallized a personal philosophy he still carries today. He is also set to release his sixth children’s book, “True to Myself,” in September.
As we wrap up our conversation, Marley has only a few minutes before Rebel Lion Studio shifts back into work mode. Within minutes, bandmates, background singers and production crew members begin funneling into the space, hauling in stacks of equipment as promotion and preparations continue the “Brightside” tour, which stops at the Hollywood Bowl on June 21.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
You recorded your latest album, “Brightside,” here at Rebel Lion Studio, which you designed and built from the ground up. Can you take me back to the beginning of that process and why you wanted to do it?
I grew up around my father and my mother as growing musicians trying to succeed and there was one thing I kept hearing over and over throughout my life: independence. Their whole mission was to be independent. I saw them work and I saw my father build a studio. I saw him have a space where he can do more music and control his own time. That was a dream of mine for a long time, ever since I started doing music because usually we use other people’s studios. I couldn’t have this in my house. It’s too much. It’s a dream come true.
We’re surrounded by two beautiful murals. Is there a particular item that is personal to you?
The murals are replicas of my father’s backdrops that they used. The original artwork is by Neville Garrick, but he helped us re-create them for the Bob Marley movie. These are the murals we used as the backdrop for the concert scenes. They are spiritual to me cause that’s Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey, two very important beings for us. Inspirational.
On “Brightside,” Ziggy Marley dedicated a song to his father, Bob Marley, for the first time in his career.
(Dania Maxwell / For The Times)
“Brightside” is your ninth solo album. What mindset were you in emotionally and spiritually when you started working on it?
I never thought about making an album, I was just writing songs. You just tap into things in your subconscious that are waiting to become music, I feel like. Then when the time comes for writing songs, the time comes. It’s like a season. Like you have blueberry or orange season. So there’s a season for me when I write songs. Then you say, “All right, let’s make an album then.” But you don’t think about an album before. It’s just an expression or a feeling just to make music, not for any reason but to make it. It happened over a period of years. Ideas and experiences that eventually come out. But closer to the time I [made] the album, I remember writing some of the later songs like “Why Let the World.” It was a song that I wrote because I was feeling down and everything that was happening in the world and the country. Just so much negativity and I just felt like I needed to take a break from it. To recharge yourself. We cannot fight every day. We need to take a break and then get back to it. I needed to teach myself to take some time. It was more of a mental thing than an emotional thing. Stuff I deal with my father, personal life and stuff with my spirituality and my faith. So there’s a lot of me in this record.
“Many Mourn for Bob” is the first song you’ve explicitly written about your father. Your brother, Stephen, is also on the vocals. What surprised you emotionally once that song was finished?
I’m not sure I thought about it like that. The experience of expressing that emotion, it’s a spiritual experience. I think it shows the next stage that I probably am in and even my relationship with my father on that spiritual level. It’s a different place. We took another step in the relationship, to another place that it’s never been before. When I was doing the song, it kind of came to me like this song could’ve been my father’s song. It could’ve been a song that he wrote. That’s how I felt about it. This is partly his song. It’s me and him making this song. This song is his song too.
How has your relationship with grief changed over the years?
It’s more of a comrade, understanding, empathy and having the maturity and the experience to understand what he went through as a man, as a human being. I think that’s what it is, really. A better understanding of what he went through, not the glory. The pain, the mental and emotional state. You’re more than just an idol. You’re more than just a legend. You’re more than just a father. To go deeper than that, so that’s the next level.
Yeah, the skit you used of him saying “I’m just a man from the ghetto” on the song really summarizes that.
That’s the real him. That’s him right there. Even in the tone of his voice, you can hear the real Robert coming out.
Another standout song from the album is “Racism Is a Killa.” One thing that you do well is having a heavy topic, but finding a way to still make it feel hopeful and joyful. Why was it important for you to approach the track this way rather than from a place of anger, heaviness or sounding preachy?
I think it started out preachy and angry, but over time, it kind of evolved and I kind of evolved too ‘cause my own evolution is represented in the music. And you know something, doing that song helped me evolve because I had to think about it differently without the anger. The song made me do that. Like how else can I approach this? It’s inspiration that causes these things. It’s not an intellectual thing. I didn’t do that intellectually. Like over time, something just started coming out of me. I never really thought about it before, but I can see it now.
In the video, which features your daughter, Zuri, you referred to the condition as “Racismosis” in the video and sang about how it can be cured.
It’s kind of like a sickness, a disease. It’s a virus. We can minimize the virus and stop the disease. It’s true. Racism is a killa. This virus can kill ya. Literally kill ya. Spirtually kill ya. Emotionally kill ya. Mentally kill ya. It kill ya in different ways. It kills the victim and it kills the person perpetrating it. It’s killing everyone, but we can cure it though. It starts with the children. I have a friend of mine who said, “Yo, my little son loves this song. He doesn’t want to stop. He says ‘Put on “Racism is a Killa.”’ So that’s where the antidote is starting. The minds of the children. The music with a conscious message gives them the right consciousness that they grow up with. That is how we take our time and lower the spread of the virus.
You recently released an alternate version for “Racism Is a Killa” with Big Boi. How did that collaboration come together and what excited you about working with him?
I’ve loved Big Boi and Outkast from a long time ago. He’s a legend and a strong voice. There’s different layers to it and I feel like Big Boi took it to that other layer. So yeah, we just love Big Boi and I’m going to jump on something he does. [Laughs]
I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask your approach for your album and how you swapped the typical 440 Hz for 432 Hz. Do you remember the first time you heard the music played back that way?
It’s a long journey because for most of my life in music, I’ve tried to be a student. I’ve tried to keep an open mind and learn more and more. With this album, there’s an inspirational side of music and that’s where I lean into most of the time, but as I grew up, I started to understand there’s also a science too. It’s also mathematics. The universe, it’s all mathematics and science, and I shouldn’t shun the science of music just because I think the inspiration is all it should be. I think a part of that was learning that for myself and opening up and saying, “Yo, let me put some science into this.” Frequency. What does frequency do to people? Frequency affects people. Frequency is a weapon. It’s a tool. I’m sure the army has some kind of frequency thing. So frequency is powerful. I wanted to try something different anyway. I want to be different. I want my frequency to be different from the majority of frequencies that’s being played out there, because it’s fun for me to be different.
When I was working on the demos, I was like “Let me try this 432 Hz thing” and I like how it feels for me personally, how I sing on the frequencies. It resonates differently and makes me feel different. We did it and it felt good, and we did it live, and from my point of view, I felt a different energy with the audience too. So all of those experiments led me to the final conclusion to say, “Yeah, let me do the record in 432.” It’s really nice vibes, which the world needs a different frequency. We can use it.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of “Love Is My Religion,” your first solo Grammy-winning album. When you think back to that era of your life, who was Ziggy back then?
A lot was changing because I moved to L.A. during that time.
You got married around that time too, right?
Yeah. I don’t really fight change. I just try to navigate them and figure them out cause sometimes change is hard. There was a lot of change living here, moving around, trying to find a place, music, but then it’s like we are continuously updating ourselves. I’m continually updating. You know how you update your OS. I’m updating my OS. My operating system is being updated throughout my experience in life. There’s always something else out there for me to evolve to. So during that period of my life, “Love Is My Religion” came to me when someone asked me, “What religion are you?” And I just said “Love is my religion.” I never thought about it before, never contemplated it, never even thought of those words together before in my life, and they just came out to me that day. So the album represents a time in my life when I realized there’s a spiritual awakening that I had. “Love Is My Religion” is a spiritual awakening. That’s my thing. That’s who I am. That’s why it’s a milestone.
“If you think you’re going to change this world with music and you’re trying to send a message out there, you have to speak to children,” Ziggy Marley says.
(Dania Maxwell / For The Times)
You’re kicking off the “Brightside” tour this month, which includes a stop at the Hollywood Bowl. What are you most excited about when it comes to bringing this album to people for the first time live?
I’m excited about playing the music. I think it’s about the music. These new songs, they vibrate very highly for me and I’m excited about experiencing and expressing that. And also kind of not doing it for the audience. I don’t want to do it for the audience. I want the audience to experience what I’m experiencing, what I’m expressing. I want them to feel me. I don’t want them to be like “Hey look at me.” [Laughs] There’s still connectivity going on, but I want them to feel the songs the real way. That’s what I’m excited about for people to feel it the way that I feel it.
You even posted the lyrics and told fans to get to practicing, so they can really understand the message.
Yeah. Just reading them for me, I really like the writing I did on this. I also took some time with this too. I was saying to someone that I developed a deeper relationship with the lyrics and the words than I did before. My relationship with the words here are very mature. I feel good about it. That’s why I want people to know the words because words are very important. Words are very important. If you know the words you get a deeper understanding of what I’m talking about and what I’m feeling.
After nearly 50 years of making music, Ziggy Marley built his own studio in North Hollywood called Rebel Lion Studio. He plans to turn it into a multipurpose creative space.
(Dania Maxwell / For The Times)
Look on the bright side is a phrase that people say often, but what do those words mean to you right now?
Sometimes we can get in a place [where] we can’t see the other side of things because we’re so caught up in that one place. Like the cliché, there’s two sides to a story, ya know? The universe is always yin and yang, but there’s always another side of things. But I feel like the way we are being programmed in a way through media and everything, it’s like there’s only one side. Everything is like this, there’s nothing else going on over there that we need to see, we only need to see this. This is all that’s going on in the world. There’s nothing good, there’s nothing nice, there’s no good people, there’s no love. So it’s a realization too. A realization that there’s the other side. Never get to that place where we think it’s just that side alone because we get so much of it. It’s a reminder, I think, for us like “Come on guys.” The thing about it too, sometimes you can feel like — even for me — some people say, “Hey look on the bright side,” some people find that like “Why are you happy? Why you so chirpy?” [Laughs]
That’s true.
I’m proud that I’m on the bright side. I’m living on the bright side, I don’t care. You don’t like me because I’m living on the bright side? You want me to be like you, you want me just live on the dark side with you, right? So it’s like a proudness of being positive and having that outlook in life, and not feeling like you have to [fall to] peer pressure. More positivity in life, not just the negativity. I’m confident in that too. So it’s kind of like that too, you know, like being proud, lifting up that side of me. Yeah, I’m happy to be living on the bright side.
