Jon Batiste On Living, Creating, And The Meaning Of His New Album, ‘BIG MONEY’
Jon Batiste has never been easy to pin down. A prodigy from New Orleans who first found his footing on piano, he’s since moved fluidly through jazz clubs, symphony halls, […] The post Jon Batiste On Living, Creating, And The Meaning Of His New Album, ‘BIG MONEY’ appeared first on Essence.
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Photo Credit: Beth Sacca 
By Okla Jones ·Updated August 21, 2025 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… The results are raw and alive, often captured in single takes. Batiste leaned heavily on guitar this time — an instrument he carried with him while touring, jotting down ideas between cities. “Playing the guitar opened up another form of songwriting,” he explained. “You could carry it with you like a companion on the journey. Just start strumming and an idea will come.” The shift gave Big Money a looser, more lived-in energy than some of his previous work, closer to a journal set to rhythm than a meticulously polished statement.
That doesn’t mean the project is without scope. The album closes with Angels, a reggae-inflected track where No I.D. himself jumped in on a dub box siren. The moment felt serendipitous. “He was like, let me play that while you sing. And that was the take,” Batiste recalled. It was the last song recorded, and it became the album’s parting note, leaving listeners with a sense of uplift even as the record grapples with weighty questions about power, purpose, and survival.
As always with Batiste, the music is tied to a philosophy of service. On the title track, he repeats the refrain, you might as well live for something — a mantra he’s been carrying with him through years of triumphs and trials. “At the end of the day I want to come back home and really be comfortable in my own skin and be able to love the people who are my family, my chosen family, and my blood family,” he said. For him, art is not just expression but responsibility. “Our whole goal in life should be to serve,” he added. “My faith is the bedrock of that belief that we are here to serve. We have a purpose, and God put us here with our gifts to do something with ‘em. That’s how I move. And there’s no price to that. You can’t buy me out of that.”
Photo Credit: Beth Sacca There’s also a playful side threaded through the record, embodied in the reappearance of his alter ego, Billy Bob Bo Bob — a kind of fantastical trickster figure he’s inhabited before. “That’s like when you step into that space for me, it becomes something that anything is possible traveling through space and time,” Batiste explained. “It’s almost like Black Willy Wonka or a mythical character from the future. I love that character coming back at the end of this album because it signals, oh man, what’s next?”
The “next” is always the question with Batiste. His career has already traversed so many worlds that it can be hard to imagine where he hasn’t gone. But BIG MONEY suggests that he’s most interested in stripping things down, leaning into vulnerability, and trusting his instincts. In doing so, he’s created a body of work that’s as much about questioning the forces that shape our lives as it is about offering joy, groove, and catharsis.
For all its urgency, BIG MONEY isn’t a lecture, it’s an invitation to dance, to wrestle with contradictions, to see value beyond the dollar. And it is proof that Batiste, even at the height of recognition, still refuses to settle into one lane. As he put it, “Big money is not just in dollars. It’s in cultural inheritance. It’s in who we are and what we create.”
The post Jon Batiste On Living, Creating, And The Meaning Of His New Album, ‘BIG MONEY’ appeared first on Essence.
