You grew up in a family deeply rooted in Jamaican music, with Tommy Cowan and Carlene Davis as your parents. What is one lesson you learned from them that continues to guide you, both as an artist and as a woman?
Naomi Cowan: It’s one lesson that guides me in my career and my life is that we’re all human beings at the end of the day. If there’s one thing I would have observed in my parents throughout the years in this business is that they’ve always treated everybody with equal respect and that has been a very big part of my development as a person. I think in our industry, in the entertainment business we sometimes take the fame and all of the success and we think that it makes us better than other people. But at the end of the day we all go through the same things, we all have organs, we all breathe the same air.
What tends to happen in the entertainment business is that we sometimes end up hurting lots of people, we end up doing a lot of things that are not representative of love and especially in reggae. So I think for me what I’ve noticed with my parents is that no matter how far they’ve gone across the world to the highest of the heights of their careers they themselves have always just stayed true to treating people with respect. You would never think that that’s something that’s a big deal for me but it is because you never know how much you might make a difference in somebody else’s life just by treating them with some basic respects especially when you have some level of celebrity or recognition. So that’s that’s the one thing I would say and it goes across the board for me. No matter what room I’m in I’m not going to treat one person better than the other just because this person might be the Prime Minister versus the person who is serving the food. They are both humans to me. That’s the one lesson.
When people listen to your music, they get to know a part of you. But who is Naomi Cowan when the music stops, the stage lights go off, and nobody is watching?
Honestly, I’m a very relaxed person. I think I’m more defined as somebody who genuinely wants to enjoy the peaceful aspects of life. So when nobody’s watching I’m usually either out in nature, at the beach or on the hills, or I am doing some yoga. Another thing that I love to do is I really like to do things at home like decorating. I’m always doing something new at my house. Even right now I just got some new rugs and I’m gonna you know put them in different spots in my house and things like that. So I think who I am outside of all of this is just someone that really, as simple as it sounds, just enjoys peace and quality time with the people that I’m closest to. At the end of the day all I want or what I think I want – if I don’t have some good relationships in my life to enjoy it with, then this just doesn’t even mean anything. For me outside of this world, I just invest in myself first and I invest in the relationships that mean the most to me.
Your debut album, Welcome to Paradise, feels like a very personal project. If listeners could understand just one thing about you through this album, what would you want that to be?
Naomi: What I want people to understand or know about me is that I believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to experience all that life has to offer. For example, in my business as a woman, oftentimes it’s assumed that women in the music business or women in the entertainment business don’t want love or family or anything like that.
Just because of how music has progressed over the last twenty years, everyone is very much promoting the independent woman thing. It kind of makes it seem like you can’t have healthy love or relationships. It’s so funny because, when you look at all of the major superstars that we know, Beyonce, Rhyana or whatever, all of them eventually still wanted to have children, they still wanted to have a family life and they are still dominating their industry, their careers. They’re still at the top of all of the charts. They’re opening new businesses. They’re doing really well.
I think I want people to listen to the album like this and not feel afraid of thinking that you have to sacrifice your heart in order to achieve your dreams. I think that the dreams that we have inside of us are not just to do with a career. I think that I would want people to believe that for themselves. I think we sometimes think that we can’t have all of the things in life. We might feel like – okay, if I have a good marriage, if I have a good family life, I may not have a great career because I have given too much time to my family. Or people with great careers feel like they won’t have a family life. It’s not really that I want people to understand anything about me, I think it’s more I want to understand that for themselves.
We often think of paradise as a physical place, somewhere we dream of escaping to. But what does paradise mean to you on a personal level?
This is something I’m really passionate about. On a personal level paradise within myself what it means to me is that no matter what is happening on the outside in my life, so no matter what’s going on, I’m still at peace. In other words, when life is changing and things are changing and people are changing, it doesn’t change how I feel about me and about my life at the end of the day. Finding inner Paradise means that you can actually be unshakable and undeniable.
You have spoken about the importance of love, connection and knowing your own worth. What has life taught you about the difference between being loved by others and truly loving yourself?
To me truly loving yourself is so different from being loved by others. Being loved by others I think it’s one of the most beautiful things you can experience in life. But I found that, if I don’t start loving myself, I don’t think I’ll be able to receive the love from somebody else in a true way. In other words, when you fully love yourself your cup is full all the time and if somebody loves me, all they’re doing is pouring more on top of a very full cup. So the difference is when somebody loves you and you love yourself it’s an overflow. But if you don’t love yourself and then someone pours a little bit into your empty cup what happens is you start to depend on the other person to fill up your cup all the time. The difference between what life has taught me is that when I am making sure that I love myself everything else that comes with it is just a bonus. And I also enjoy life way more when I fully love myself.
In a world that constantly pushes us to achieve more, be more and prove our worth, how do you remind yourself that you are enough, even when you are not achieving anything?
Naomi: I think it kind of goes back to the same thing I said but I’ll answer it in a different way. The first place to start is to not attach your worth to any achievements, any outside achievements. What I do is I look at my life as a journey of lessons that I’m learning through every chapter. Instead of thinking about it like “For this year my goal is to win a Grammy”, you might say but this year my goal is to, as silly as it sounds, stay consistent with exercise because that helps my discipline. Those are personal goals. Or let’s say my goal might be something like I want to be more open-minded about reading about the climate. Those things are internal goals for myself. They have nothing to do with the external achievements that the world might give me.
Let’s say if I used to have a habit – I mean I think a lot of women can relate to this – of always looking in the mirror and picking apart little flaws about myself. Sometimes you might spend like 10 minutes in the mirror, and we’re looking and we’re like “Oh, I wish I could buy this skincare product so I could not have the acne or if I had more money maybe I could go and get botox or whatever the thing is.” The goal that I would set for myself is to wake up, don’t do that, and say something positive. What I do is I make my achievements more between things between myself and myself. What that does too is that it actually allows me to do better achieving the other goals in terms of the successes of work. When I feel good about myself then when I do my job, whatever the job is, I’m doing it because I feel good about it not because I have to do it.
So even when you may not be “achieving anything on the outside”, you’re always achieving things inside of you and those things make you feel so much better about yourself and what it does is that it increases your trust in yourself. One of my goals that I’ve been focusing this year is self trust. What that means is I follow through on everything I say I’m going to do, which might sound silly. Let’s say if you say even something small like “Oh, I’ve been meaning to get rid of all of the clothes in my closet I don’t wear and donate to charity”. Sometimes you put this on your to-do list and you never do it. Here’s the thing: when you cross off that little thing, even though it has nothing to do with your job, it doesn’t necessarily change your day, but when you cross that off, that’s an internal goal that makes you feel better about yourself. The other bonus is that you have more space in your closet. But what it does is that it develops the muscle within yourself that says “Oh, yeah! I will get it done. I trust myself to get it done.” Then one day let’s say you need to do something big, let’s say if you have to change jobs or you have to go back to school. When those things come to you in life, you don’t feel afraid of those things because in the little things you’re always faithful to yourself about the little things. So when the big things come they don’t feel as intimidating because you can trust yourself that you’re gonna follow through. That’s how I remind myself that I’m more than enough even when I’m not achieving anything.
If someone had never heard your music before, which song would you ask them to listen to first in order to understand who you are, and why that particular song?
If they never heard my music before I would actually ask them to listen to the first track from my album “Beautiful Scar”. I say that because I actually wrote that song over 10 years ago and it was a voice note from when I was learning how to play the guitar. Then we turned it into the opening track of the album. So I think I would want people to listen to that first because it speaks about how music makes me feel, which is like music is the place that reveals everything about me and music is where I’m the most vulnerable. Even though it doesn’t sound like all of my songs, its message will tell you a lot about who I am.
In Bob Marley: One Love, you portrayed Marcia Griffiths, a legendary Jamaican singer. What was the most challenging part of bringing someone with such an important musical legacy to life on screen?
The most challenging part was to make sure that I didn’t try to portray who I thought she was. It was challenging to get a clear idea of who she was at the time in her career. In other words I think we all have an impression of people, of who we think that they are. Even, for example, let’s say Bob Marley, you might think he must be this really nice guy and he’s preaching this message. But at the end of the day Bob Marley was still a man kind of going through lots of life’s challenges even though on stage he may have been one person.
For Marcia Griffiths I had to make sure to focus on the woman that she was at that age, what she was going through in her career instead of just “Okay, I’m just gonna portray this singer.” I wouldn’t even say it was challenging. It was just more something that I had to be aware of so that I could do a great job.
Did playing Marcia Griffiths change the way you see reggae music, its history, or your own responsibility as a Jamaican artist?
Yes, I would say being in that movie altogether changed things for me. As a matter of fact being in that movie inspired my album. Being in that movie showed me the importance of carrying on the legacy of reggae music and just how important it was to make sure that my album was true to the genre. So when I started working on the album, which was at the same time that I was in the movie, I really had to say to everybody working on it that this is a reggae album, this is not a pop album, this is not an R&B album, this is not afrobeats. We are gonna make this an authentic reggae album. I would say the movie really made me more committed to reggae.
There is a new generation of talented Jamaican women making their mark on reggae, including artists such as Lila Iké, Jaz Elise and Sevana. How would you describe the relationship between women in the Jamaican music industry today? Do you feel that the industry is becoming more supportive of female artists?
Naomi: Yes, absolutely I do think that. In small ways, but I’m finding that they are more supportive when we come together. I find that when they see the unity between women there’s more support in the industry. So it’s really important for a woman to come together in a real way. If we are supporting one another, then industry can tell. I find that the industry is supportive but they’re even more supportive when there’s genuine support between the women. And that takes us as women supporting each other.
As a woman in the music industry, have you ever felt that you had to work harder to be taken seriously, and what has that experience taught you about standing your ground?
Naomi: Yes, I do feel like I had to work harder to be taken seriously not just as a woman, but also because I have a unique situation because of my parents. So I had to work harder all the time because of who my parents are because there’s a general viewpoint that maybe when someone who has family in the business we don’t we don’t work as hard. So people are less likely to support you because they think you had it easy. So I had to work twice as hard because of many things. But then as a woman a hundred percent yes, you have to in order to be taken seriously. Especially because sometimes there are women that just get into the business for popularity, because they want to model or they want to be famous. It’s worse if you look at the global music industry between pop music and all these other genres where women are kind of turned into products, it does make it harder for a real musician to shine through. So we do have to just be more persistent in our efforts so that people see us for who we are.
If someone listening to this interview is going through a difficult season in their life and has almost forgotten their own worth, what would you want them to hear from you today?
Naomi: I think a lot of times we see all these positive things online like believe in yourself or don’t give up or you’re the prize. If you’re going through a breakup over something you might say to yourself or people say “Don’t forget you’re the prize!” and all these things. Or if you lost your job or something and you feel like “Am I going to be worth getting hired again?” or whatever the case might be.
I think more than anything I would want them to not hear from me but I would also advise them to take some time almost every day, a week, two weeks, however long it’s going to take and start to write down the positive aspects of who they are as a person. Where we lose our sense of self and our sense of worth in this world is when we attach our value to what other people have to say and what is happening on the outside of us. But if I start to write down good things about myself, that has nothing to do with what somebody else does. There might be things about you that people may not even know. I would say remember that your worth first really has to come from you.
Let’s say by the end of this year something happens on the internet where they say the worst case that could happen to me like somebody starts to spread a rumour that the she has been sleeping with all these producers and she doesn’t really have a good voice, she uses altitude not everything, she doesn’t deserve anything that she’s had. Let’s say all of these nasty things came out about me online. The truth is if that online thing came out I would actually probably feel like well bad publicity is good. Because I know for a fact that I am a great singer, that I’ve never done anything to compromise my integrity to get ahead in this business, that I’ve worked really hard. I know these things about myself that are facts and you can’t change that. Even if let’s say people that I look up to or respect or whatever they came and said “Oh, you know, you aren’t really that good.” Let’s say somebody that I wanted to meet my idol or whatever and I met them and then they said “Yeah, I listened to your album, it wasn’t that good.” But I would say “Well, that’s your opinion because I love my album. I believe in what I’ve done. I’m proud of what I’ve done.” So anything else that comes my way doesn’t change how I might feel about it. It might upset me for a little bit but it’s not gonna change how I see things.
So my thing is when you are going through difficult times, and as I said there’s so many different things that could be happening in our life, the first thing is to not place your value in the thing that is happening, that is difficult. You first have to remember who you are. That’s really between you and yourself because I can’t tell you who you are. You have to decide what that is. I’ll give you a personal example.
A couple years ago my dad had life threatening surgery. That was really difficult because out of the blue he could have died. It was scary for me because I’m thinking to myself “We haven’t done this yet…” I’m thinking to myself all the different things that you want to experience in life with this person if they’re gonna leave. Of course I started to panic because I’m thinking that tomorrow he may not be here. I gave myself one day to cry as much as I could. I just told myself “Okay, today’s the day we’re gonna think of all the worst case possible scenarios. You’re gonna ball like crazy. But starting tomorrow, because of who you are which you’re somebody that shows up and you’re supportive and you know how to solve problems, you are going to lock in and you’re going to show up for your family. That’s part of who I am. I’m somebody that’s supportive of my family. After that first day where it was like the worst day possible when I cried until my face was so sore, the next day I called every doctor I know, I just put a plan in place. I just said I’m gonna be there for him. He can’t move, he’s in a bed, this was hard for my mom so I just had to make this decision that who I am, the type of person I believe myself to be, is someone that is going to hold it strong until the end. I didn’t know what was going to happen but what I did know is I wasn’t going to let this situation cause me to crumble. I had to say to myself: “Naomi, this is the person you are, you’re very dedicated, you’re disciplined.”
So every morning I woke up and I just had this whole thing of checking with the nurses, I called the hospital, I made sure I updated the family on WhatsApp. I had all of these things that I did because I knew that I was capable of being that person. But if I didn’t know who I was, I would have just been a mess and I wouldn’t have been able to be there for them. Whether or not that saved his life I don’t know. What it did do it allowed my mom to be able to be there for her husband. It brought a lot more peace to everything because somebody was taking care of what was going on. If I didn’t show up to help, maybe all of this responsibility would have fallen on my mum. And she could have gotten sick from that type of stress too. I think that’s a very long answer.
And if you could speak to the younger version of yourself, the girl who dreamed of becoming an artist, what would you tell her today?
Naomi: What I would tell her today is that the music always comes first, and that her talent always comes first, and that the art and the message of what she is doing will always be the first thing to focus on. The reason why I say that is because I have gone through time periods where I think that, not that I never focused on my music, but I would sometimes get caught up in you know promoting on social media and all this kind of stuff and trying to do everything that I can relate to push my music forward and then what would happen is the time that I’m investing doing other things it affected the quality of my music and my writing.
The message I would tell her is invest as much and all of your energy first into creating the best quality music, writing, everything production and then focus on the rest. And the reason why that has happened to me in the past is just because I’m multifaceted. I went to University for Media Production, I have a Master’s Degree so I’m not like an average artist. I have the capacity to actually do a lot of things. But I found that, when I tried to do all of the different jobs in this business, it affected the quality of my music. So I would just tell her to lock in on making the most beautiful version of your voice, to lock in on making the best production music that you have the capacity to make, and then focus on other things.
Sursa Foto: easystar.com
