Major Seven pauses to consider how long he has been making music, he sounds almost startled by his own timeline.
“Man, it’s that long already?” he says, laughing. “I’ve pretty much sacrificed everything to do music. No matter what life threw at me, I always gave 100 per cent to the craft.”
Born in Atlanta to Jamaican parents, and partly raised in Jamaica, the 34-year-old producer moves easily between accents, cultures and genres — a fluidity that has quietly shaped a résumé spanning hip-hop, R&B, reggae and Afrobeats. His catalogue includes work with Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Rihanna, Future, Burna Boy and a deep roster of Jamaican artists. Yet he still talks like someone at the start of the climb.
“I’m always a head-down, keep-working person,” he says. “I don’t even really think about it,” he says.
Music was not his first creative language. “I used to draw a lot when I was younger, play the piano, just be into creativity,” he recalls. The shift came in Jamaica, where he attended school for what he calls “first and second form”.
“Someone introduced me to freestyling, and I started rapping, writing music,” he says. “Ever since then, it just evolved.”
The decisive turn toward production happened almost by accident. “My girl wanted to write an R&B song,” he says. “I didn’t know anybody who produced R&B music. So I was like, ‘You know what, let me try.’ I had FL Studio. That’s the first time I made a beat. Ever since then, I just stuck to producing.”
College, he admits, was a strategic cover. “I kind of used college as a disguise to really work on what I was passionate about at the same time.”
His first notable placement arrived in 2013, on a T-Pain mixtape track featuring Shea Mooney of Dan + Shay. “That was the first major artist that had something come out,” he says. “That’s when things really started moving.”
The money changed
Major Seven came of age after the era when super-producers like Timbaland commanded half-million-dollar fees per track.
“That era pretty much ended a while back,” he says. “There’s still decent budgets for certain artists, but it’s not that kind of money. That’s like a 10x figure compared to what most major producers get now.”
Fees vary widely, he adds. “A new producer could be getting 5,000 or even less. Other projects might pay 25, 30, 50 [thousand], depending on your track record, the situation, your leverage. If it’s sync, it could be more.”
The Jay-Z moment
Asked about his most significant record, he does not hesitate. “I always go back to ‘Devil Is a Lie’ with Rick Ross and Jay-Z,” he says. “Even though it’s not the highest certified record I’ve done, to me that’s my first album placement and my first single. It set the tone for my career.”
The path to that record was not smooth. “There was a producer in the game that tried to take credit for the beat,” he says. “It was a big story at the time. It was a story of resilience. I had people on my side, like R&B legend Keith Sweat, helping me navigate that situation.”
In retrospect, he calls it “a blessing in disguise”. The song has since appeared in films including Black Mass and Monkey Man, and across sports broadcasts. “I think it’s a classic,” he says.
Other milestones include platinum certifications on projects such as Future and Rihanna’s “Selfish” and work on Lil Durk’s Almost Healed. “If I had to guess, maybe like seven million certified units,” he says of his cumulative total. “But I’m always just working.”
What a producer really does
For Major Seven, beat-making is only the beginning. “To me, that’s just a fraction of the job,” he says. “A true producer adds value in the room — vocal production, arrangement, quality control.”
Sometimes he is present in sessions; other times he sends beat packs or helps shape songs with writers before they reach the artist. “A lot of artists don’t even know the value of a true producer until they experience it,” he says.
He is sceptical of traditional writing camps. “I feel like they’re not done in a way that maximises everybody’s strengths,” he says. “I work based off strengths, energy and vision, not just ‘you did this record, you did that record, let’s put y’all in a room.’”
Bridging Jamaica and the world
Dancehall and reggae remain central to his identity. He recently worked on the track What Do I Know (Just A Girl) connecting Jamaican star Shenseea with Canadian singer Nora Fatehi.“I was more of a creative bridge,” he says, coordinating writing and working with management to pull the collaboration together.
His ambition is explicitly global but Vybz Kartel, with whom he has yet to work, he says: “I have a lot of respect for Vybz. I even have a record right now I was planning on getting to him. Beyond making beats, I’d love to record him, vocal-produce him, and do collaborations in other countries. Let’s do something with Vybz and a major artist in Brazil. I’m big on bridging those gaps between cultures.”
That philosophy underpins a forthcoming project he is executive-producing with Voss Productions, blending hip-hop and reggae. The guest list is formidable: “Rapsody, Wyclef, Mavado, Jah Cure, Sizzla, Capleton, Luciano, Massacre, Dre Island, Nicole Buss, Kabaka Pyramid — a bunch of people,” he says. “But even more than the line-up, it’s the music. I think it’s something very unique for the culture.”
On the Grammys — and the grind
Major Seven has contributed to four Grammy-nominated projects this year including Kenznamdi’s Blood and Fyah which is up for Best Reggae Album. That does not make him a nominee this year and it was during the interview just a few days before the 2026 ceremony that he became clear-eyed about the technicalities according to grammy rules. “I’m a producer on Grammy-nominated projects,” he says pending his own nomination which he hopes to achieve with his upcoming compilation where he will be the primary artist and producer.
He cautiously predicts the winners in several categories this year in rap, “that’s a tough category — Kendrick, Clipse, JID, Glorilla. It could go a lot of different ways.” In global music, he mentions Burna Boy and Bad Bunny. In reggae, he says, “Just unbiased, I feel like Keznamdi’s album is deserving. He really treats the music like art.”
Of the artists he enjoys working with most, he names Rapsody first. “She’s super easy to work with, a master of her craft. She takes the art seriously.” Nicole Buss, he says, “always shows up,” while others stand out for their work ethic and openness.
As for his personal pantheon, he rattles off names with the instinctive speed of a fan: “Tupac, Biggie, Bob Marley, Whitney Houston,” he says, before adding, “Maybe Eminem. Maybe Lauryn Hill. I need a top 10.”
Watch full interview below:
