JEAN MICHAEL PAUL began as a father and two sons making music in their living room, but the project has already pushed far beyond the family home. In this interview, Raphael Rocha opens up about stepping away from a 20-year global marketing career, reconnecting with his sons through music, and turning that bond into a fast-moving independent project. The conversation moves from BritPop, Ibiza nightlife, K-Pop and Brazilian EDM to the viral 2026 FIFA World Cup Anthems project, which carried their songs into more than 60 countries, FIFA spaces and even Times Square. There is also a sharp, timely discussion around AI, transparency, family creativity and why JEAN MICHAEL PAUL want to build without waiting for the industry to hand them permission.
JEAN MICHAEL PAUL started during Raphael Rocha’s sabbatical after a 20-year global marketing career. For readers discovering you now, can you explain how a break from corporate life turned into making music with your sons?
For two decades, my life was a blur of flights, business meetings, spreadsheets, presentations and events. I had the opportunity to work in many countries and experience very different cultures, and I loved that. But when I looked in the rearview mirror, I could also see my sons growing up too fast, while I was increasingly distant from their daily lives and needs.
Adolescence is never easy, and I believe the father figure can play a pivotal role in helping teenagers navigate that period. Putting your career first sometimes makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t. I took a sabbatical knowing there would be risks ahead, but I was also fairly certain about what I could help my children achieve in the medium and long term.
We started JEAN MICHAEL PAUL in our living room simply to laugh and to create something that was entirely ours. It wasn’t born from a master plan. It was born from curiosity. At home, it has always been normal for us to listen to music and sing almost every day.
The fact that it became a successful global project is amazing, but at its core this is simply a father and his boys finding a new way to talk, reinforce trust and grow together in this crazy world we are in.
Raphael, before working in global marketing for companies such as Samsung, TCL and VIVO, you had already lived part of your life around music as a radio announcer and Roxette-tribute band frontman. How did those early experiences shape the way you approached creating music again years later?
My relationship with music started early. Around 12 or 13, two gifts rewired everything: a Yamaha DD-6 electronic drum machine and a copy of Roxette’s Joyride on CD. Love at first sight, twice. Soon I was playing and singing with friends in a garage band, staying up all night creating songs or listening to the radio, and building what became a library of more than 1,000 CDs.
Then, in the second half of the 1990s, I moved to the UK and fell into BritPop during what I still think of as a high water mark of British cultural influence worldwide. Imagine experiencing Oasis, Blur, Jamiroquai and The Prodigy almost in real time, when living in Europe was not so common for a South American teenager.
Back in Brazil a few years later, I met the owner of a local radio station. Because I had just returned from England, he put me on a Saturday night show to bring “the news” from the international music scene: new bands, new sounds, records most people around us had not heard yet.
But the education did not stop there. In 2008 I was in Spain getting a second schooling in Ibiza nightlife: Thursdays at Pacha with David Guetta and Tuesdays at Space with Carl Cox. Electronic music felt less like a genre and more like a lifestyle, a way of connecting people who did not share a background or a language, but shared a passion and a true view of the world.
A few years later, in 2012, I was living in South Korea, inside another global musical explosion: PSY’s Gangnam Style and the rise of K-Pop.
In the 2020s I was back in Brazil for the next shift. Alok and Vintage Culture were taking Brazilian EDM onto the world’s main stages. More recently came the rise of Brazilian Phonk.
Looking back, that pattern is too consistent to treat as luck. BritPop. Eurodance. K-Pop. Brazilian EDM. Phonk. I was not reading about the wave. I was surfing it while it formed. I kept arriving where the sound is changing at the exact moment it changes. I do not call that a coincidence anymore. It feels like a life path.
Today I bring those rooms into JEAN MICHAEL PAUL as three perspectives at once: the performer who feels true emotion, the communicator who knows how to read an audience, and the strategist who understands how a song, like a product, has to leave the house if it is going to travel.
Your sons grew up around travel, a home club space, a DDJ and a 1,000-plus CD collection. What did that environment teach them about music before JEAN MICHAEL PAUL became a serious project?
To them, music is infrastructure like electricity. You do not worship the cable. You decide what to power with it.
Long before the project had a name, they had already learned that taste can be incredibly broad. In a single night, we could shift seamlessly from a 1990s club record to a Bass House track, then into 1980s pop and finish with a modern hook. They learned that music is a personal and social experience first. Most importantly, they realized that making music is infinitely more exciting than just consuming it.
Alongside an old DDJ controller, our house was always filled with guitars, flutes, electronic keyboards and karaoke machines. They were exposed to sounds from different countries and decades without ever being told that one style was superior or better than another.
Imagine growing up where Fatboy Slim and Iron Maiden sit alongside The Beatles and Queen as everyday furniture. Our CD collection is a library of human emotion and real life stories. I can still tell them exactly where I was, what I was doing and what I felt when I bought or listened to every single disc for the first time.
During the pandemic lockdowns, we turned our living room into a broadcasting booth on Instagram. We played DJ sets for our family and friends just to keep everyone connected. A couple of years later, we spent over a month backpacking across seven European countries. They will remember every detail of that trip and the exact soundtrack of each moment forever as music became linked to their memories and feelings.
Producing music as a father-and-sons trio is a rare setup. How does the creative process actually work between you, especially when you are bringing together different generations, tastes and ideas?
It is chaotic, beautiful, and a massive clash of worlds, which is exactly why it works.
Everybody brings the initial ideas. I put the structure, the melodic sensibility and the storytelling arc. They bring this unfiltered, raw energy, a modern aesthetic, and zero reverence for the way things used to be done.
When my experience collides with their fresh intuition, that’s where the JEAN MICHAEL PAUL magic happens. It’s the ultimate litmus test: if 2 teenagers and a guy in his 40s both start nodding their heads to the same groove in the office studio, we know we have a potential hit on our hands.
We do not romanticise consensus. Different generations in the same session stop a track from becoming only nostalgic or only fashionable. One of us finds the spark. We fight it into a shape. Then we ask the only questions that matter: does this still sound like a father and two sons having fun on purpose? Will your friends enjoy this song? What about teachers at school? What about grandma and grandpa?
We have different ages, different references and different instincts, so naturally we disagree. And that’s actually one of the strengths of the project. JEAN MICHAEL PAUL isn’t designed around three people trying to sound identical. It is about three people bringing different perspectives into the same creative space, studying and seeing what happens.
You have described the project as being operated almost like a tech startup. What does that mean in practical terms, and how do you balance that strategic mindset with music that still feels joyful, rhythmic and emotionally direct?
When we say JEAN MICHAEL PAUL operates like a startup, we mean that we experiment 24/7. We are open to testing, trying, making mistakes, learning and trying again at a speed that the traditional music industry may need to get used to. It is a business approach to music in terms of tools, procedures, management and goals.
My corporate background definitely influences that mindset. Over the course of my career, I launched more than 100 products and services, from smartphones and tablets to accessories and food products.
You don’t launch a single product per year and wait months to discover whether it worked or not. You study the market, you study the consumer, you study the competition, you build the best product you can, you test, you learn and you iterate. And that movement never stops. We apply the same philosophy to music.
Music is increasingly becoming about individual experiences and utility listening rather than a purely mass market approach. That changes how we think about audiences, discovery and even what a successful release can mean.
We still make creative decisions based on emotion, instinct and taste. But we use strategic data to help us balance those elements and make better decisions. This combination helps us create better music.
Your 2026 FIFA World Cup Anthems project reached more than 9 million views, appeared around FIFA Host Cities, Fan Fest events and Times Square, and attracted international press attention. What was the first moment when you realised the music was travelling much further than you expected?
The World Cup project was my younger son’s idea. We were working on another song when he heard Shakira’s Waka Waka and asked if we could write for the tournament too. I heard a strategy inside his question. Not one single anthem but many of them. Each one built to carry the pride, the history, the rhythm and the language of a nation that would be on the pitch.
We studied so hard and triangulated so much data before even starting to develop the tracks that you cannot imagine. But it was a lot of fun, as we were learning different cultures and testing sounds even we had never heard before.
21 songs, 21 distinct styles, 21 stories, 21 targeted messages in 10 different languages.
Relatives and friends called us crazy, but we stood by our convictions and by the feeling that no other artist in the world was doing anything like that. And this gave us a boost in passion and dedication that made a huge difference in the project.
Right after launching we started to observe an interesting increase in plays and streams on both YouTube and Spotify. One week later people also started to use our songs on TikTok and Instagram, but when the World Cup really started everything exploded. Our monthly listeners multiplied by more than five times, people started to buy our singles on Apple Music, started to add them to their playlists and we reached more than 60 countries. We were able to follow in real time a boost in song performance happening exactly in the cities that were hosting the matches, with both teams’ songs when available. It wasn’t just statistics anymore. It was real love and passion.
It became a deeply surreal experience. Specifically about our most viral song, the Algeria Football Anthem, we were having a pizza at home and suddenly we got a video of thousands of people celebrating in Times Square in New York playing it. Then everything started to spread organically at a speed we could never have dreamed of. Elderly people, youngsters, families, influencers, politicians, FIFA Host Cities, FIFA Fan Festivals.
A few days later, major international media reported that a second song of ours, the Saudi Arabia Football Anthem, was selected as a FIFA Goal song to be played during the tournament.
Together with these examples we also saw a surge in our songs dedicated to the Brazil, England, South Korea and Turkey national teams. So seeing people from completely different ages, backgrounds, countries and languages, all united by an anthem we created, was really the best feeling in the world.
You are open supporters of using AI in music, which is still a very divisive topic. How do you use AI in your process while keeping the human ideas, family dynamic and melodic identity of JEAN MICHAEL PAUL at the centre?
Many artists have been using AI tools for a while, but they are afraid to tell their fans. This is the conversation the music industry really needs to have.
When we look back in history, every time a disruptive technology arrives, people panic. When the MELLOTRON was introduced, musicians debated what it meant for traditional instrumentation. Then The Beatles used it on Strawberry Fields Forever and changed pop history. When SYNTHESISERS left the lab, critics treated Kraftwerk and Gary Numan as non musicians. When the ROLAND TR 808 arrived, people called it a fake drum. Then Marvin Gaye created Sexual Healing with it. SAMPLING was called stealing until hip hop made it a high art form. AUTO TUNE was a studio secret until Cher turned it into an iconic vocal instrument. And so many other examples.
AI is the same situation repeating itself throughout music history. AI is a tool. The artist remains responsible for the creative direction, the choices and the final work.
We use several distinct AIs to optimise our workflows, test variations and break through creative blocks. But the raw emotion, the father and two sons dynamic, the choice of theme, the choice of lyrics, the choice of style, the cover art development and the reason why the song exists? That comes entirely from us. And we simply love doing it together. We don’t believe AI replaces the artist. We believe it simply optimises the artist’s toolbox.
When we first thought about making music for the world, I told my sons that we would study hard, fight hard, put all our efforts into the project and the magic would happen sooner or later. Of course, I would not have expected such great results in 90 or 100 days, but this is just the confluence of passion, belief and hard work. And this applies to everything in our lives, not only to music.
JEAN MICHAEL PAUL puts #AI in our public bios on purpose. Listeners can know the stack. What they should judge is the quality of the song, the cadence, and whether The Father and Sons Trio is still clearly at the centre.
At the same time, just to make it clear, we understand the legitimate concerns around copyright, consent, training data and impersonation. We also advocate for fair artist pay, greater transparency and regulatory oversight around streaming data across platforms. Being pro-innovation in AI doesn’t mean being pro-anything. We believe artists deserve rights, attribution and control.
Your music now connects with listeners across more than 60 countries and over 10 languages. Looking ahead, what kind of global story do you want JEAN MICHAEL PAUL to represent for families, independent artists and listeners from different cultures?
The world is becoming increasingly tech connected, but sometimes it also feels increasingly divided and individually approached. Music is one of the few languages that can cross those divisions naturally and beautifully without previous permission.
We want JEAN MICHAEL PAUL to be a testament to the power of reinvention in the AI Era. The message that The Father and Sons Trio can build in public, every week, across cultures, without waiting for gatekeepers to assign them a lane is strong. #MUSIC4ALL and #MUSIC247 are our operating systems.
Our project represents something bigger than a particular band, genre, country or generation. We hope to encourage other families to get closer and start creating things together. Not necessarily music. It could be technology, art, filmmaking, gaming or something that doesn’t even exist yet.
For CEOs and Marketing leaders, my experience is also a reminder that when we put the consumer first, combine the right methodologies and tools with deep analysis, and add genuine passion, there is no limit to what can be created.
For independent artists, we want to reinforce that they don’t have to wait for permission to start experimenting. They don’t need to be afraid of making mistakes along the way. The music industry is a marathon, not a 100-meter race.
For listeners and fans, it is all about human connection. We make multi-style music to sing, dance and share. We want to be the soundtrack to their real life moments, constantly delivering renewal of happiness and emotion. Just like our first album recently launched “The 24/7 Flow State” that brings together our best EDM, House, Big Room and Dance tracks launched in 2026. What about the next? The next will always be an unexpected surprise…
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Connect with JEAN MICHAEL PAUL on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
Interview by Amelia Vandergast
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