Wyclef Jean reveals his creative super power—and how you can tap into it too

As a child growing up with his grandmother in Haiti, the artist Wyclef Jean developed an early appreciation for the idea that any worthy pursuit requires a blend of agency and preparation. On the day I spoke to him, Jean recalled a time when a missionary visited his village. “At five years old, a car pulls up and a man gets out and this was like my first time seeing a white person ever. I looked at my grandma and I said, ‘Do you know who this is?’ And my grandma was like, ‘This is Jesus Christ.’”

Later, Jean came to understand this man was a missionary, bringing rice and beans to his village. “When he’s leaving, I look at my grandma, and I’m like, ‘Yo, how come Jesus didn’t leave us the seed?’” 

Even at that young age, Jean knew the visit may have meant a meal for one day, but without the seeds to build a farming practice, little could change for him and his community. Ever since, Jean has been looking for opportunities to leave the seeds, not just the rice and beans, as a way to cultivate creativity.

While he’s best known as a founding member of the iconic hip hop group the Fugees, Jean has an extensive resume: He’s produced music for Shakira, Whitney Houston, and Santana; composed music for movies like Hotel Rwanda; won multiple Grammys; ran and lost a remittance business; launched a music publishing company in Africa; and even made a run for president of Haiti. Jean is boundlessly curious, and his career is a mashup of hustle and hunches. He isn’t afraid to name what he doesn’t know, or fumble in the process of sorting it out.

Here, he shares how he frames his relationship to music, when he feels most inspired, and the value of nerding out. 

When I’m creating, I create in two spaces. Sometimes I like it super loud. I like people coming in and out while I’m vibing. Creation is like the pulse of the human. Humans don’t hear music. They just feel music. So that’s one part. The other part of me: When I’ve gotta nerd out, I want complete silence. My inner me, my engineer, is asking, “How can we take Shakira up? You know, what are we missing?” To do that, it has to be, like complete silence. It’s two parts of the madness, you know?

I wake up and I’m a coffee head. I gotta have my Bustelo. If it’s really hot, I would go for a walk; if it’s kind of cold, I go downstairs. I like the treadmill. I just put the headphones on my ears for like an hour and a half, and literally just walk. I do very light weights, just to keep my gymnastics ability going. Then I take, like, 10 or 15 minutes to surf the net on world news. Two hundred days out of the year, I’m traveling, and I’m going to all parts of the world. and I always want to know the pulse. What’s the energy? What’s the culture? After that I hit my recording studio in the back. I’m recording, writing, looking at films, you know, building my ecosystem.

I do it all at once. I could be making music, but then I have an idea for a place that I’m thinking about opening up in three years. And I’m like, what do I want that place to be like? So I could be doing the music, and then I stop. And then I start writing a little bit, put it on Chat GPT, and then get back to the music and keep on boom, boom, boom. So that’s sort of like what my days are usually like. I live in a space of creativity, day and night. 

My best input for output is when I travel. I’m a local head. My greatest input is the human; and not the human through any form of technology—the human touch. Last week I was in Brazil. The first thing we do, you know, we go to the local spot, and they’re doing capoeira. Then we go to another spot, you know, there’s like four or five different local liquors they’re having, and I’ve gotta taste it. We went shopping. I went to the place where Michael Jackson did “They don’t really care about us.” Now, I could have looked at that online, but physically being there is going to do something to my brain. I call it like cultural currency, but it’s the idea of the human. My whole connection, my juju and my magic is the human connection. 

I couldn’t imagine someone not listening to music. Anyone who tells me they don’t listen to music, I have to touch them to see if they have a heart.

I always tell people, “Man, tell me whatever you want about America, it’s the greatest place in the world.” This is the only place I know where Wyclef could come from a hut. Snoop Dogg can come from where he comes from; 50 Cent could get shot nine times in Queens. Shakira could come from Colombia, and the next thing you know, we can appear in the forefront. And in the forefront, we get these tools, and once we get the tools, we become invincible. So whether it’s music tools, economical freedom tools, or culture currency, these tools work together and what they help us do is it helps us literally inspire and deliver an entire new generation. 

You get stuck because you need that pause time. You could be writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, and then all of a sudden, now you’re going into a state of forcing. So, whenever, like, I run out of it, I literally just chill. I don’t stress, I don’t be like, “Yo, when’s the next bar gonna come? When’s the next idea?” I feel as if it’s the universe that’s like, “Just calm the fuck down. Like, chill a little bit. You have to reboot.” It’s hard for people to understand that, and I’m telling you, we all have writer’s, block. It used to freak me out. So now if I have the block, I just chill, smoke a joint, relax, you know, play my piano, take time.

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