Jigitz Tried Keeping His Music a Secret, But It Was Too Good to Stay Hidden

John Jigitz used to spend his work days helping musicians promote their art. His own music, however, he kept to himself.

“I took it really seriously, but I never thought it would be an actual thing,” the producer tells Billboard over lunch at a bustling Sunset Strip cafe on a sunny afternoon in Los Angeles.

Always interested in music, the Albuquerque, New Mexico native was simultaneously coming at it from a business angle, graduating from Portland State University and later landing a job at UMG — where he started as an assistant and worked his way up to the team at Interscope Records — and then at °1824, the label’s culture marketing and content strategy team.

“The whole time I was making music in the office but not telling anyone,” says Jigitz, who eventually quit the job and moved to New York to close the gap on a long distance relationship and work at social media focused creative agency.

He was still simultaneously plugging away at his music, posting his sleek indie dance productions to SoundCloud but never to Instagram as he was, in an irony for both a musician and a person whose job was helping musicians find success, afraid of being discovered.

Still, sleuthy coworkers at more than one of his jobs approached him at the office and asked if he was behind the tracks they were finding on the internet. “I said no,” Jigitz says. “I was so nervous that I was going to f–k up my job.”

But fate pushed him towards the spotlight when another major component of his life got f–ked up, as Jigitz and the girlfriend he’d moved to New York for broke up. Heartbroken, and “so depressed” in an unfamiliar city, he spent countless hours on music production, if only because tunnel visioning on the productions “gave me something to focus on. I got through it with music.”

By this point, the music he was making was too good to keep secret, a fact he realized for himself while on a mushroom trip with friends, an experience during which he decided that music was the only thing he really wanted to do with his life, and that it was time to take it seriously.

The decision has proven prescient. Jigitz’s music has since racked up millions of plays, launched a label bidding war and fostered a 21-date North American tour that started last week in Boston, follows a three show run through Austria and Germany in August and comes ahead of five Australian concerts in January. The comments section of the @jigitz Instagram post announcing the tour is packed with people looking for tickets for the sold out shows. Meanwhile, the post commemorating his debut Lollapalooza set on Aug. 3 contains many a fire and goat emoji.

Wild then that up until a few months ago, Jigitz was still working a nine to five, which he quit this past April so he could focus full time on music. (“They were definitely sad, but I felt really supported,” Jigitz says of giving notice to his now former employer.) Taking the money he got from a publishing deal with APG and high-tailing it to scenic Bozeman, Montana, Jigitz rented a house in a landscape he says “looked like a screensaver” and worked 15 hours a day, for eight days straight.

A self-described “kind of nervous guy,” Jigitz simply didn’t want to waste the opportunity he’d been given, with this head down approach also being a function of witnessing many artists’ careers up close through his label and agency jobs. He’d seen some acts get lazy after receiving a big advance and some get so in their heads about their art that they couldn’t finish anything. He also saw how his own patterns that needed to shift.

“I used to finish work and watch TV or be on TikTok or whatever,” Jigitz says. “Now I think about opportunity cost. I can’t bring myself to watch TV when it’s like, ‘I should be making music right now.’”(He clarifies that he does make an exception for Love Island.)

Staying in the Montana house with his friend Faizan Malik, who’s also his manager and a marketing director at Columbia Records, Jigitz made four new songs, matching them with another four he’d previously produced. Altogether, they formed his July EP all my exes live in brooklyn. (Jigitz’s real ex is in Manhattan, but he thought the title, an homage to George Strait’s 1987 “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” sounded better with the other borough, where he himself also still lives.) The project’s biggest track, “tell you straight” has nearly 40 million streams on Spotify, and 2.8 million on YouTube.

The EP pulses with heartache, longing and the other medley of emotions one feels during a particularly brutal breakup. But it’s also sharp, uplifting, danceable and extremely of-the-moment, falling into a wheelhouse Fred again.. fans will recognize and gravitate towards. The project came out on R&R, and although several other labels were trying to sign Jigitz over the summer (“Everyone I talk to is my favorite person. I leave every meeting, like, ‘I love these people,’” he says of trying to choose between offers), he ultimately stayed with R&R, which is also home to artists like Mk.gee and Dijon.

R&R also released Jigitz’s Sep. 19 single “s.o.s.” featuring rising Los Angeles-based singer Tabi, which in its first 11 days has clocked nearly 800,000 streams across Spotify and YouTube. This success is no doubt bolstered by a familiarity with social media marketing that Jigitz cultivated at his previous jobs (a skillset that also surely made him attractive to all the labels who were trying to sign him.) His Instagram and TikTok channels are full of artfully shot clips along with more quotidian, behind the scenes fare.

“It took me awhile to be authentic online and find my voice, he says. “The stuff I’m posting now finally feels like me.” Finding this voice, he says, was a function of deciding whether he’s posting just because he wants the serotonin rush gratification of all the likes and comments, or because he genuinely has something to say. “I really think about that every time before I post.”

The social marketing for “s.o.s.” vibrates with energy, with Jigitz and his team posting loads of live performance videos that find him dancing alongside the tutu and point shoe wearing ballerinas he often brings to shows. This was another concept that came from the breakup: “I wasn’t talking to anyone about it yet,” he says, “so one of the ways I got it out, which was so extra, was choreographing an eight-minute ballet” to some of his music. He subsequently hired a ballerina to perform this dance at one of the DIY live shows he threw in the wake of the breakup.

The audience loved it, he loved it, and the ballerina loved it too, “so I just started doing that with every show,” he says. “I was losing so much money, because I was making like, $200 and spending $600, but it was so fulfilling.”

The ballerina motif is now woven throughout his work, with the imagery appearing on the cover of all my exes live in brooklyn, along with its social videos and the video for “s.o.s.”. (The most recurring of these dancers is Paige Litle, a USC alum and current member of The Rockettes.)

But the ballerinas are not on tour with Jigitz this fall, given that all his shows are being played on the floor in the round, where the energy can get hectic. “But I’m a big dude,” Jigitz says, “so I can get pushed around.”

Altogether, none of this looks much like the days he used to spend in the office writing emails and hiding his art from the world. He and his workweek, while now more unconventional, are both better for it.

“I don’t get Sunday scaries anymore,” he says. “That’s not a thing I experience.”