Zach Jones says music healed him after illness threatened his voice

Jamaican artiste Zach Jones — known professionally as Stony — says music once meant the difference between carrying on and giving up after a doctor told him illness might end his singing for good. In a Sunday Gleaner Lifestyle interview, he described music as both autobiography and medicine: for himself and for listeners who struggle to name what they feel.

Jones said there was a period when he was sick, could not make music, and could not speak. A doctor advised him to quit, warning he would never return to the craft. Alone in his room, he weighed a ordinary work life against music and treated the choice as life or death. Songwriting, he said, still helps him process that history. Citing lines from his work — including the idea that a hard man does not cry but still feels pain inside — he argued that musicians give language to emotions others cannot voice.

His path was not a straight line into entertainment. As with many Jamaican households, his parents pushed medicine or law over music. Strong school results brought a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he began in medicine while aiming at the Los Angeles music scene as a rap-focused artist. He skipped classes, his grades slipped, and he tried to switch into the music programme but was refused for lacking a classical background. He entered psychology and the social sciences instead. That training, he said, sharpens how he reads behaviour and eases tension in everyday relationships — a point he tied to Bible teachings on wisdom and understanding.

Almost all of his catalogue, he estimated at least 90 to 95 per cent and possibly all of it, draws on his own life or that of close friends and family. He also spoke candidly about crying more when he was younger, and about still learning that men can feel openly rather than hide behind a tough pose.

His debut album, Treasure Beach, is due this year after years of promise and work. The title nods to the St. Elizabeth fishing community where his family comes from — a calm place he says has little crime and where people live peaceably. The project grew from his song of the same name. After his grandmother died, returning there gave him a peace and sense of home he had not felt before, even though he grew up chasing opportunity in Kingston. He frames the album as a playlist for that feeling, and as a metaphor for anyone’s personal refuge.

About 90 per cent of the set, he said, comes from main producer I.O., a partnership that dates to Miss Jamaica with Agent Sasco and continued through Lonely and a weed song with Jesse Royal. On the recent Treasure Beach single, I.O. started the track and Natural High and Zia finished it. Jesse Royal appears among featured friends; Agent Sasco is expected as well. He also named collaborators Projects and Sheen Works among others still under wraps.

Modelling runs alongside the music. Encouraged by his mother from childhood, he has worked with brand Graphanu after meeting Jamaican photographer Yazid through Los Angeles shoots, and he became the regional face of Hennessy Pure White for the Caribbean and Central America. His Stony label treats packaging like fashion; album covers double as polished photo work. At the Lifestyle shoot he credited Spokes Apparel for the suits and said trying on looks puts him in a flow state similar to recording.

What he wants next is to carry Treasure Beach’s sense of peace to a wider audience. Offstage he is deep into bossa nova — especially Antônio Carlos Jobim’s album with Frank Sinatra — a taste that grew after childhood visits to an uncle, Horrison, also called Doratio, who played jazz at home in Whitehouse, Westmoreland, and who died recently. Bossa nova experiments, he said, belong more to his freer Stony Sundays releases than to the album proper: a mixtape-style outlet against a business-first industry, rooted in the SoundCloud-era urge to try any rhythm for the joy of it.