‘The Voice’s’ J.Paul: Out, Proud, and Singing Soprano

“I really love hair. I just really love doing hair.”

Any other prepubescent son of a Black Christian pastor and church music director might have been strongly dissuaded, to put it mildly, from following their gender-nonconforming passion for styling women’s hair. J.Paul’s parents, by contrast, not only encouraged their son’s interests, they set him up to succeed.

After his son first revealed his interest in hairstyling, J.Paul’s father immediately responded with, “Okay, let’s go to the beauty supply store and get you some stuff to do hair.” He soon had a mannequin, wigs, and various products with which he was able to practice his developing craft. His mother, meanwhile, helped turn all that practice into reality while simultaneously broadening his hair horizons.

“My mother had me doing her hair when I was 11 years old, just because she wanted me to be comfortable,” he says, adding that she “made it a point, if she went to get her hair done at a salon that I had to come, because she knew I had the interest.”

Each parent, says J.Paul, “lifted me up [and] made me feel secure. They were just very affirming of me.”

That’s always been the case, from J.Paul’s early and career-starting pursuit of hairstyling to his later coming out as gay, as well as his subsequent marriage to another man. In fact, while the particular apostolic Christian community he was raised in wasn’t exactly LGBTQ-affirming, J.Paul didn’t face rejection or discrimination from his family or fellow parishioners after coming out.

Among other words of wisdom and expressions of acceptance he received, J.Paul singles out one especially encouraging axiom.

“My godfather taught me that just because you sexually desire another man doesn’t make you less than a man,” he recalls. Not to be totally outdone by her other half, his godmother is, in part, to thank for J.Paul’s vocal style and what he refers to as his “natural” range as a “singing soprano.”

The musical protégé — real name Jason Calhoun — lately has been garnering increased attention due to a very visible stint on NBC’s The Voice. As a contestant on the current 26th season of the reality series, J.Paul has been granted broad national exposure to the show’s millions of viewers, who have seen him give several performances showcasing his stunning and sturdy soprano-rooted, multi-octave vocal spread. Right off the bat, he won over three of the four celebrity judges with his “blind audition,” after which he opted to join the team of Michael Bublé over Gwen Stefani or Reba McEntire.

“Honestly, The Voice has been such an amazing, beautiful ride,” J.Paul says. “And I’m not just talking about being on national television. I work in the music industry, and I have the amazing opportunity to sing for a legend,” he says, referring to Stephanie Mills, the Grammy-winning R&B artist and Broadway sensation who was the original Dorothy in The Wiz.

J.Paul has spent years supporting Mills as a background singer. “Working with someone of that caliber, I understand what it means to be treated well in the music industry,” he says. “And The Voice as a conglomerate treats its artists very well. So I just want to always make sure that I put that out there, because not everyone has that same testimony.”

A California native who has called the D.C.-area home for over a dozen years, the 38-year-old mostly juggles his time between tending to the hairstyling demands of his established local clientele and putting his musical talents to use through Stems Music, a local vocal staffing company. In addition to occasional work with Mills, he also dabbles in producing original music, such as his 2023 release Post2020, a succinct, seven-song set emphasizing the importance of togetherness, compassion, and community — positive themes that came to light during the pandemic that he feels are worth remembering and celebrating.

A somewhat atypical Leo in the realm of astrology, J.Paul describes himself as “naturally quiet, naturally introverted,” and also as a person who shines, or roars, loudest when engaged in music-making. “That’s when I let myself, as a lion, kind of fluff my hair out,” he says. “And honestly, that’s probably some of the most vulnerable times for me, but it’s also the most creative.

“There is strength in creativity,” he continues. “When you’re creating something, you’re going from whatever you created before. So whatever you’re pulling from, however you’ve sung before, whatever your creative art is, you’re taking from your experience and now adding something new. So you have to have some level of confidence. You have to have some level of wherewithal of knowing who you are and what you can do so that you can create something even greater.”

METRO WEEKLY: The past few weeks have been pretty huge for you. Let me start by asking: How are you doing?

J.PAUL: I am amazing! Just coming off of The Voice Knockouts. So much love, so many blessings have been poured my way, so I’m just grateful.

MW: I can’t believe you were eliminated from the competition last week, just before The Playoffs round started with the final Top 20.

J.PAUL: Oh, it’s fine, it’s fine. Shows like The Voice and American Idol, it’s always such a gamble, and you just want to enter those situations with grace, humbly, but you never want to be too certain.

MW: Have you done any of these shows before?

J.PAUL: No, this is my first time.

MW: What inspired you to do it now?

J.PAUL: That’s a great question. I’ve been asked to do these shows before, to be honest with you, for years and years and years. For me, music probably is the loudest part of my life. I’m a very quiet person, always been. I like to stay in my little corner of the world. I like to just kind of do my thing with my family and my friends. I don’t like to make a big splash. I’ve come to learn over the years, music is a beautiful experience, but it’s a very loud thing when done right.

And so I wanted to wait. If I never had done a show like this, I still would have been okay. But this was the perfect time. This effort specifically with going on The Voice was to give my mother back the love that she deposited, the knowledge that she deposited, the musical genius that she deposited inside of me, to give that back to her.

MW: It was great to see your mom on the sidelines during your rounds, cheering you on, alongside your dad, too.

J.PAUL: Yes, yes. My mother is my everything: my best friend. And she’s been rooting for me. She’s been so close my whole life and always pushing me. Y’all wouldn’t believe how many times she’s asked me about other shows in other countries since this experience. It’s wild and crazy that she even knows this information. I’m like, “Mom, why do you even know about The X Factor in Britain?” She just knows about all this stuff because she’s always thinking about me in her mind. And so that’s why I did The Voice. I wanted her to know that as much as she thinks about me, I think about her more.

MW: She was obviously a big reason you decided to do the show. Is it fair to say she pushed you to do it?

J.PAUL: She did. She pushed me. She said, “The Voice keeps calling you. I don’t know why you won’t answer.”

MW: So you’d been getting calls from producers of the show to participate.

J.PAUL: Yes.

MW: And before this year, you always said no.

J.PAUL: Yes. I know how competitive situations can get — especially when it comes to singing. Singing is such a sensitive art, such an emotional craft, that when done right, it can change people’s hearts about how they feel about themselves, about how they feel about the world around them. It touches a very deep emotive place.

Other than being a singer, I’m a hairstylist. I’ve spent most of my life catering to women’s needs. So I’m a very sensitive person, which is why I haven’t been that much of a public person because a lot of my time has been spent dealing with a lot of emotional needs.

Before, in the world that we grew up in, it wasn’t cool to be public about stuff like that. But now we live in a world where they expect you to be public about everything. The expectation, if you want to pursue something like music or anything in the arts that comes from a personal state. The world now expects you to just rain down all of your information. Rain down your life, rain down what you’re doing on a daily basis. All we see on Instagram is, “Get ready with me.” We wake up every day to get ready with so many other people. That’s some people’s story, and I’m not knocking it, but that’s just not everyone’s story.

MW: Are you active on social media?

J.PAUL: I am active on social media. I’m probably not as good as some would want me to be. I’ve just decided I’ll take it at my own pace. So I do it at my own will. I don’t try to feel forced to be anything that I’m not.

MW: When did you come out?

J.PAUL: I was about 16. I was very heavy in my church. Don’t ask me what the urge was. I had made some really great friends who are still — I call them my three angels to this day. Like Charlie had his angels, Jason has his angels, too. And we were in the choir singing, and I pulled my angels to the side. I said, “Hey, I got something to tell y’all.” They said, “Okay, shoot.” We had the conversation about my sexuality.

It’s like a road when you’re coming out, you never know what you’re going to get. You don’t know how cold the water might be, how much the winds and the waves of everybody’s emotion and their accepting or denial of you is going to change your view of yourself. But they were just the easiest conversation I ever had in my life. And those three sisters, for me, literally are still my best friends to this day.

MW: That’s great. Not everybody can say that. A lot of people upon coming out don’t have such a great experience, especially at church.

J.PAUL: They don’t have such a great experience, which causes a lot of trauma. And it starts what I call the relationship between sexuality and spirituality.

Especially as young human beings, most of us are taught whether something is right or whether something is wrong. And it hits the human side, but nine times out of ten, it doesn’t hit the spiritual side of who we are. Usually, that spiritual side is sparked when you find romantic love. Once you find romantic love, then it really sits in your spirit. It really sits deep, deep down in a space where right or wrong, now it doesn’t matter, when you’re in love. A lot of times we’re given all these predetermined notions about who we should be without time to figure out who we really are.

I feel blessed to be doing music as long as I have. And I’ve still been able to kind of walk my own journey to find out who I am without critics, without comments — I call it the comments section on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok — and everybody has a comment about how you live your life. I haven’t had to deal with that.

I’ve been extremely blessed to come out at my own leisure. I first came out to my friends and my spiritual family, I was around 16, 17. But it took me another 10 years to come out to my parents.

MW: The connection between sexuality and spirituality, as you put it, is often romantic love. Did you have that then?

J.PAUL: No. I was not even sexually active at the time. I wasn’t doing anything, not dating. But I always knew that I had God’s love.

MW: How did you know that?

J.PAUL: Oh, it was shared with me as a child. My family shared it with me. My father was a pastor, and my mother, she wasn’t a pastor at that time, but she definitely knew how to operate in the role of being a spiritual leader for me. At a young age, I knew God loved me. It was never a question. I had parents that affirmed me. I know a lot of people in the LGBT community have stories where they weren’t affirmed.

I was having a conversation with my mother, and she shared something that was so precious to me. When I was about three or four, my parents got divorced. As I was telling my mom, “It’s funny to see myself operate in the world today like I do, but it’s all because of how I was affirmed as a child.” And my mother said, “You know, Jason, I believe by the time you came around” — I’m the fifth of five boys, the last of the litter — “by that time, your father and I had realized that we couldn’t love each other the best, so we loved you the best.”

My brothers were all into sports and all of the things that young boys were doing in the early ’90s. When I started coming of age in the late ’90s, early 2000s, I expressed to my father, “I really love hair. I just really love doing hair.” And my father said, “Okay, let’s go to the beauty supply store and get you some stuff to do hair.” My father didn’t condemn me. He didn’t put me down. He lifted me up. He made me feel secure.

I vividly remember buying that mannequin and changing her hair so many different styles. And my dad said, “Go ahead, son. You’re rocking it.” You know what I mean? I was so excited, and his approval gave me so much affirmation. I didn’t feel like I should be ashamed — but I knew what the world was saying out there. Because this relationship with my dad made me feel so secure, I wasn’t worried about it.

And my godfather taught me that just because you sexually desire another man doesn’t make you less than a man. And that has stood with me all of my life. I had this sexual desire that I wasn’t conjuring up, no one made me say this. Some people that I’ve known had been molested, or they have these different stories. I didn’t have that story — this is just what I liked, and I knew what I liked. I wasn’t going, “Oh, let me go and get a girlfriend,” just to please people. I never felt like that.

MW: You never felt the need to deny your inner being. You didn’t try to fight it at any point.

J.PAUL: It was a total acceptance of who I was. And as a child, I knew how to care for women. My mother had me doing her hair when I was 11 years old, just because she wanted me to be comfortable.

My mother was just very affirming of me and wanted me to be in the spaces that she knew I would grow in. And having that love led me to other places where I felt loved. And so I feel godly blessed because I have been around the world and I’ve heard stories and talked to people who are still experiencing some sort of hurt deep within their soul, deep within their hearts, of just not feeling accepted by themselves, let alone having to go to church and freely lift your hands and freely give praise to someone who you feel is judging you, someone who you feel ultimately doesn’t like you. And that’s a hard thing, I know it.

MW: What kind of church did you grow up in?

J.PAUL: Apostolic. The apostolic faith.

MW: That’s Pentecostal, so definitely not traditionally, or typically, affirming of LGBTQ congregants.

J.PAUL: Not at all. Not at all. The Pentecostal faith, whether you are Black or white, it doesn’t matter what color you are, the large majority of the church as a whole is not the biggest LGBT-loving space to be in.

I shout out my church, which is called Truth City. It’s led by pastors Khaalida Forbes and Chris Forbes within the Maryland area. Started in Washington D.C. on U Street. That’s where I first started going in 2020 during the pandemic. And we’ve moved, but it’s still in the DMV area. We’re a non-denominational church, but we still move within the apostolic principles.

MW: Is it affirming?

J.PAUL: Yes, yes, yes. One of the best spaces that I’ve ever been in, honestly, in my life spiritually. Just because I [grew up in] spaces that accepted me doesn’t mean that all of the spaces that music took me into accepted me. So I still ended up in some places where I didn’t feel comfortable. I’ve still been asked uncomfortable questions. So I’ve dealt with my fair share of discrimination. I’ve dealt with it with grace only because my core foundation has always been love. I’ve always had people in my corner who fought for me. I never was standing alone. I have a full tribe, a full village, that loved me from the first day any of them met me and still supported me. And so I’ve made that my rock.

MW: You mentioned it was a full decade after coming out to your friends before you had the conversation with your parents. Why did it take you so long and how did they respond?

J.PAUL: It took me a while, because I was just comfortable. I was comfortable in the life that I had built for myself. I had security, and my parents knowing whether I was straight or gay at that time didn’t matter to me. It didn’t matter to me until I came close to the point where I was getting married.

Marriage changed everything. It changes everything. And I’m grateful that it changes everything because it makes you mature, because you’re literally now coming from being a sole individual, just thinking your own thoughts. Now, I have to not only think my thoughts, but I have to include my spouse in my thought process from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep.

And so that allowed me to see the world from a bigger perspective. It allowed me to step back and say, “Oh, there are some conversations that, maybe before last year, I didn’t feel like I needed to have, now I have to have.”

I changed my last name when I got married, just because my husband has been that great to me, that I wanted us to share his last name. And so that became a thing. The little things that you don’t ever think about in life now become a thing, a topic of conversation, something that you have to deal with. And so I dealt with it.

MW: Tell me about your relationship. How long have you been together?

J.PAUL: My husband and I have been together for 15 years. Since I was 22. We’ve seen our fair share of all of the days of life and all of the gays of life, just everything that comes along with being in a relationship in the LGBT community. We’ve seen it from afar, we’ve seen it up close, and we’ve just decided that we are each other’s best friends. We meant it the day we met, and that’s helped us fall just even deeper in love.

MW: You’re a Leo. What’s your husband’s sign?

J.PAUL: He’s a Virgo, like Beyoncé.

MW: Are those compatible signs?

J.PAUL: Yes. We always tell each other that where I’m weak, he’s strong, and where he’s weak, I’m strong. Over the years, through grace and endurance, we’ve just understood that, “Oh, it’s not that we have these different, horrible weaknesses. I just need to tap into you more. Okay. Tap out of me and tap more into you.”

MW: I know your stint on The Voice was filmed over the summer and that you’ve been back to regular life in D.C. in the months since. What keeps you busy day-to-day?

J.PAUL: I am part of a vocal staffing company called Stems Music. It’s a worldwide business, but it’s based in the DMV, and we’re staffed to do background vocals work — studio work. And last month, I got a chance to perform at Thurst Lounge. They featured me for their “Thursday Bliss.”

MW: How was that?

J.PAUL: It was amazing. Their owners, Shaun Mykals and Brandon Burke, I’ve been friends with them since I’ve been in D.C. And they’ve always kind of been on the sidelines pushing me. Like I said, I moved to D.C., I kind of put singing on the backburner and made hair my focus. And I was working in the salon seven days a week just so that I stayed busy and built my clientele to where I wanted it to be. Singing, honestly, it just wasn’t a factor. It’s been something that I’ve done for so long that I wasn’t fazed by not doing it. And so that really helped me. I was blessed to be able to have that time to go back to the drawing board and say, “Who is Jason as an artist, not just a singer? What category do you fall in as far as artistry?”

MW: You’re asking the questions now. What are the answers?

J.PAUL: The answer is, J.Paul is someone who finds love and life through music. But because I am still connected to mankind through hair and through servicing people, I’m still understanding the needs of where we sit emotionally, so that when I’m picking music, when I’m picking playlists, when I’m picking songs to sing for concerts, it’s just not about how much I want to sing something, it’s about what people need to hear. It’s about music that resonates with people after they leave the concert, not just about what’s cool for an Instagram 30-second clip. Social media has, in my opinion, kind of dumbed us down as far as what we go to hear music for.

I watch a lot of old-school performances from Earth, Wind & Fire, Patti LaBelle, The Manhattan Transfers, Sam Cooke — the way the performers were able to interact with the crowd is priceless. As I was explaining to my husband a couple of months ago, what we on this side, as the performer, have to deal with now, we’re looking at this now. [He holds up his iPhone.] We’re not interacting with people who know our songs, singing back to us. They might be singing, but they’re doing it behind here. So you might be having a good time, but I don’t know, because you’re trying to savor the moment for tomorrow.

It’s so much better to be in the moment, in the present. And as an artist, especially coming from my church background, sometimes those moments are saving people’s lives. Sometimes those moments are changing people’s perspectives on themselves forever. Sometimes those moments mean something more to the [listener] than it does the artist, because the artist is really just thinking about, “Okay, so what’s my next line? What’s my next move? What’s the next song?” And the last song you sang just resonated with someone’s heart. It’s sitting with their spirit so much that they can’t get it out of their mind.

So many times, people will send me messages, send me DMs a couple days after concerts and say, “I’m still singing this part.” Or, “Something is still lingering with me.” Moments that resonate with people. So let me not be so quick to jump out there and just try to be the singing IG man and the singing TikTok man when it means something to someone.

MW: Along those lines, I found it noteworthy, in your duet of “Toxic” on The Voice, the degree to which you collaborated with your partner/opponent Kamila Kiehne: developing joint choreography, taking turns sharing the limelight, and ensuring that you both had moments to shine. As the older, more experienced singer, you could have easily overshadowed the 17-year-old and dominated the performance, and that would have been perfectly fine, after all, given that it was a “Battles” competition, with only one of you advancing from there. You purposefully didn’t do that. And yet you still won.

J.PAUL: I appreciate that. Thank you for your kind words. Sharing the spotlight just comes natural to me. When you grow up in a family full of musicians and everyone has their thing, you learn to fine-tune your thing very well, but you also pay attention to the other person’s thing, because you know that their thing works for you, just like your thing works for them. At this point now in music, that collaborative spirit [isn’t always present] because, ultimately, people are looking to win.

I was really blessed to have that moment with Kamila because she had never had a shared musical experience like that before. So even though we had a small time to really get it together, I was able to deposit something into her that came naturally to me and gave her that experience. And we’ve talked since then, and she texted and said, “I’ve now been able to share a little bit of how to collaborate in music with people who have never done it before because I worked with you, J.Paul.” And I’m like, “See, that’s why we do this.” You know what I mean? To share knowledge, to share something that I have that you don’t get on Instagram.

MW: I’m not sure if you’ve seen or heard, but you’ve gotten some great comments on YouTube in response to clips from your performances on The Voice. Take, for instance, the lead comment to your performance of “Kiss from a Rose.” “Do you know how hard it is for someone to sing ‘Kiss from a Rose?’ The way he was able to hit all the notes and still put a twist on it to make it his own…that’s incredible.” Commenters also praised your range, your diction, and your command and showmanship, and a majority also expressed dismay that you’re already off the show, and that no judge saved you.

J.PAUL: Wow. That’s amazing. Man! I mean, if you think about it, Doug, in 2024, with everything that’s going on in the world, to be receiving that kind of love in this climate, in this day and age, I’m so grateful. I’m so grateful to God, to my family, to my parents. I told my mom and my dad a couple of days ago, I said, “The fact that you guys were able to shine off of this opportunity, [and] seeing my grandmother’s face on TV because of me, I could retire.”

They showed her on my second episode, where I kind of mentioned the legacy of pastors and ministry workers that I’ve had in my family, and they tossed two pictures up there of my grandmother and I. If you only understood the level of sacrifice that my grandmother [made] so that my mother could have the classically trained musical abilities that she has and the knowledge. My mother is — she’s beyond a genius. At 72, she’s still in school to get her Ph.D., and that’s how my grandmother was. My grandmother received her doctorate in her eighties. And so that’s kind of just what they instilled in us, to always stay working, always keep your hands busy doing something, and always stay in education.

MW: Did you go to college?

J.PAUL: No, after I graduated high school, I went straight to cosmetology school, got my license, and never looked back. But once the pandemic hit and we were stationary at home, that’s when I called my mom and said, “I’m going to go back to school for music, and I’m going to take online classes just to learn theory, and once I get the theory under my belt, then I’ll start taking piano lessons from you.”

So at the top of this year, I started with piano lessons with my mom while I was still taking theory and stuff like that. So I’ve just been combining the information, rehearsing and practicing, and she’s ready for me to do my first recital and all that. It’ll be my first time ever playing piano in front of people, it’ll be classical. Old world, as my mom says.

MW: I can’t let you go without asking you about your vocal range, and specifically your affinity for singing as a soprano. Has that always been true?

J.PAUL: Yeah. My mom mentions all the time how she would sit me in the soprano section, because that’s where my godmother was in my mother’s choir. Because she was a choir director and a piano player, my mother was always doing five things at one time, and so, you got to sit the baby somewhere. So my earliest memories are hearing women sing soprano.

MW: When asked on The Voice, you said that you naturally sing as a soprano, although you went on to demonstrate your range as being much broader than that.

J.PAUL: That is the section that I sit in. But easily in one day you can see me in a show singing soprano for Stephanie Mills, and then I switch over to my Stems Music family where I could be singing tenor, and then I could be in a studio session, and I have to sing alto.

MW: It should be noted that your speaking voice is more masculine and in the range of a tenor, I would guess.

J.PAUL: Yep. Yep. And it’s like a secret weapon that no one knows you have until you use it. And then when you use it, they want to know where it comes from.

MW: It was amusing to hear Reba McEntire say, upon turning around for you, “I thought you were a woman. I really did.”

J.PAUL: Yeah. And my natural response was to say “Thank you,” because I really have gotten that my whole life. As a child being in music, people would tell my mother all the time, “Well, you know his voice is going to change. He’s going to hit puberty, and his voice is going to be something different.” They used to tell her all of these things, and she would just say, “Okay.” That was always her answer: “Okay.”

MW: As you grew, your voice did drop a little though, right?

J.PAUL: My voice definitely dropped — and got higher. I don’t know where any of the videos are — hopefully in my lifetime, I’ll be able to find them — of me singing as a child. My voice was incredibly high — and I still sing higher now than I did back then.

I’ve worked on my tool. I haven’t stopped singing. I’ve been singing soprano for a long time, so I keep my voice fluid up there. So when it’s time for me to call my gift, it’s there.

Find links to J.Paul’s music on LinkTree at www.linktr.ee/jpaul.exp.

Follow J.Paul on TikTok at @TheJPaulExperience and on Instagram at @JPaul86.

To watch clips of J.Paul from The Voice’s 26th Season, visit www.youtube.com/@nbcthevoice.