Gabriel Jacoby doesn’t talk about music as a career path. He talks about it as something that’s always been there, shaping his movement without needing explanation. “I can’t remember the last time I woke up and music wasn’t on my mind,” he says. It’s not romanticized, or even dramatic. It’s simply a fact. A fact that formed early, in environments where certainty was otherwise hard to come by.

Born in South Carolina and raised in Tampa from the age of eight, Jacoby’s upbringing was marked by instability, constant adjustment, and an early exposure to chaos. Florida, he says plainly, “is just crazy.” The move was jarring and a cultural shock that forced him to grow up fast. “It was on some gladiator school type shit,” he recalls. There wasn’t much room for softness. Survival meant learning how to read people, how to stay alert, how to adapt. Tampa gave him community, but it also demanded resilience. He met Doechii as a kid. He learned how to observe. He learned how to survive. Years later, those memories became the emotional foundation for his debut project, Gutta Child, a record rooted in Southern soil and the realities of growing up without stability, without space, and with very little promised beyond the present moment.

Music was always present in his home, long before it felt like a calling. His parents played reggae and blues artists such as Bob Marley and Nina Simone, whose voices carried both warmth and resistance. “I didn’t always know the names,” he says, “but I remembered the sound.” Rap came later, once he arrived in Florida and discovered Lil Wayne amongst others. Together, those influences shaped Jacoby’s relationship to music as something expressive, but also functional. Music became a way to process life rather than escape it.

When conversations about “real jobs” began in high school, Jacoby never considered an alternative. Music didn’t feel like a gamble, it felt like the only constant he could trust. “I saw people successful in music the same way people are successful being doctors or professors,” he says. “Why wouldn’t it be obtainable?” Even if success never arrived, the choice felt inevitable. “If I was on the streets playing guitar, I’d still do music.”

That certainty is tied to how Jacoby understands his role as an artist. Songs arrive instinctively, often without emotional attachment until they’re finished. “If I make a good song, I’ll cry,” he says. “That’s when I know it matters.” He refers to his songs as his children; something he’s responsible for, something he has to protect.

At the center of his work is a single idea; love. Each song is simply a different attempt to say the same thing, knowing not everyone will hear it the same way. “There are billions of people on this planet,” he says. “I want to make as much music as I can to reach them.”

That impulse is deeply tied to Jacoby’s identity as the eldest of seven. Growing up, he internalized the role of protector early. “Coming from the gutter for real, there was no one else to save my people,” he says. That instinct still drives him. “I’m not trying to be cute and be an artist,” he says. “I really just want to make a difference.”

If protection once meant emotional distance, it doesn’t anymore. Jacoby speaks openly about vulnerability, describing it as something he was forced to confront early in life. Now, honesty comes without hesitation. “Everything I give is out of good intention,” he says. “So I have no fear in what I say.”

His debut project, Gutta Child, was made for people who are still in survival mode, trying to imagine a way out. The intention was simply to give people hope. The music he’s working on now shifts direction. Inspired by Nina Simone’s belief that artists must reflect their time, Jacoby is writing more directly about the current state of the world. “This is for the people who are blinded,” he says. “It’s a wake-up.”

Jacoby doesn’t linger on where he comes from, and that restraint feels intentional. The hardship is present, but it isn’t aestheticized or worn as proof of authenticity. Instead, it functions as structure, something that sharpened his sense of responsibility and clarified his purpose. He doesn’t frame survival as trauma to be revisited, but as something already integrated. And his music carries that strength.

At a time when difficulty is often reduced to storyline, Jacoby resists turning his past into explanation or excuse. He is still standing, not because the conditions softened, but because he learned how to move through them.