After connecting in college around five years ago, Elijah Woods x Jamie Fine went from being a producer/songwriter and vocalist duo to a multi-platinum breakout act that are currently climbing the charts with their genre-blurring sound that offers a fresh take on pop music.
“[Jamie] is actually an insane chef, so I walked into this place she was working at and I heard her voice on an iPhone memo and I kind of freaked out and lost my mind. I was like, ‘this girl can sing,” Elijah Woods recalls to Celeb Secrets. “We got in the studio that week and we just kind of clicked. We complimented each other in a way that neither of us had been musically complimented before. So the friendship developed and then the music developed.”
Their music led them to try out for the inaugural season of the Canadian singing competition series The Launch, which to no surprise, they won.
“We said no to it 3 or 4 times [at first],” Jamie says about their involvement with the series. “Obviously there’s such a stigma around music television, let alone Canadian music television, so we were like, ‘I don’t think this is for us.’ However, when we got the final pitch, Scott Borchetta’s label Big Machine was attached it and after talking about it, we felt like it was a good fit.”
Jamie adds, “Scott was really supportive of who we were and he totally got what we were talking about previously. He understood the, ‘wow you don’t get you guys until you see you,’ and we love that, we needed that. At some points Elijah and I lose sight of a lot of things being in the thick of it, being the artists, and it’s important for us to have a team around us that understands us so they can kind of lead us back to that path so to speak. And Scott was one of those people.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9Zdh0jnOY2/
Following the competition, the duo earned major success up North, snagging multiple JUNO and iHeartRadio MuchMusic Awards nominations as well as 60 million collective streams and one million Shazam’s of their songs worldwide.
“I think just taking everything in stride is the best thing I took away from [The Launch],” Elijah says. “There’s a lot of positive things and a lot of negative things that come along with that much exposure that quickly. You’re put into a bubble you necessarily wouldn’t go in yourself. It’s really easy to get cast into a bubble and get bitter and get sour about how things have gone in past rather than moving forward. But we’re trying to take that and move forward with that energy instead of being like, ‘oh I was on a music TV show and that’s who I am.'”
“We have more to offer and that was just a platform we took advantage of to get to this place. It’s been really great and that’s one thing to reassure with Big Machine as well. It’s hilarious because we’ve both grown up not listening to country music at all, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the way country music is written. Seeing how Big Machine has sort of adapted to accommodate our needs and us has been absolutely amazing and I think that’s been a big takeaway for us. We want to be a partner with all these people who are involved with us.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-nPS4Gn19e/
ExJ produce, write, and play on all of their songs – melding the three skills into genre-blurring, emotionally impactful experiences unlike any other, striving to create moods and worlds through highly eclectic, surreal musical moments. One thing that they really live on is the initial judgement they receive from listeners, as they are the pure definition of not judging a book by its cover.
“We live for that initial judgement and then for people to expect something a little more negative or and their reaction to be a little more negative, and the reactions that we’ve gotten since performing live has been the opposite,” Jamie says.
“When we walk into a room, people look at us and say to themselves, ‘ok I really don’t understand,'” Elijah adds. “And then we see people’s faces after we perform and they kind of want to be our friends and they’re like, ‘okay cool. Now let’s actually try to get to know you,” kind of thing.
“But I think there’s been a few situations where we’ve been type casted a certain way like, ‘alright these guys don’t really know what they’re doing.’ And then you hear Jamie sing. Not that we need approval but we want to show people what we’re about and we want people to have the opportunity to see us live and hear our music.”
Just last month, ExJ released their new single “Want You Back,” which they say is “confetti” in a song. Showcasing their brighter, more fun side, “Want You Back” is a song that will get people dancing.
“In one word the song is confetti,” Jamie says. “We were on tour with this company called WE Day and we had no idea that they were going to be blowing confetti in the crowd and CO2. So we’re singing on stage and the last chorus hits and we freak out because this CO2 blows up in the air and confetti goes into the crowd. Elijah was on the plane home and was like, ‘I just want to write a song that feels like confetti.’ And he wrote the instrumentals to this song and we went to his place and pieced together the toppling and it was one of those songs that we want people to feel good.”
“It’s not necessarily a happy, bubbly story. It kind of has a sad undertone to it but the song makes you feel euphoric. It’s just a feel good, everything’s going to be alright song. And it’s been awhile since we’ve released something like that.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-dGsokH5BJ/
As for the rest of 2020, the duo will continue to release new music single by single, with the release of a new project by the end of the year.
“I think at the moment we’re trying to take it single by single. We released an EP last year and it’s interesting because we’re getting a lot of recognition for it now in Canada and we didn’t really even put it out for that reason. We just put it out as a body of work,” Elijah says.
“And now we’re trying to think a little more critically about how to move forward. I would say by the end of the year we’ll probably look at doing a project. I don’t know how large it will be but we’ll be releasing singles for sure. We’re just trying to grow and develop. We’re trying to diversify our audience globally.”
Keep up with Elijah and Jamie by following them on Instagram at @exjmusic.
