Just over 2,500 miles separate Tampa’s Robles Park from Hollywood, California. But those worlds collided in a big way last December thanks to Gabriel Jacoby. In a livestream from Justin Bieber’s Twitch studio, the 27-year-old songwriter riffed and jammed with the pop star’s band while thousands of viewers dropped comments left and right. Bieber himself took photos and videos on his own phone, chiming in here and there, vibing and smiling nearly every time he appeared on camera.
That kind of joy and awe about Jacoby’s jaw-dropping talent should be no surprise to anyone who’s been listening.
A month before the stream, Jacoby dropped Gutta Child (stylized all-lowercase, like every cut on the record), a debut that’s the culmination of a life that’s already seen more than its share of hard times. Clocking in at just 20 minutes, the outing sounds unlike anything else in the world. Over eight tracks, the King and Wharton High School product delivers a funky, distinctively Southern, blend of blues, pop and R&B that channels Prince, Nina Simone, Anthony Hamilton, Anderson.Paak, N.E.R.D, and even D’Angelo while remaining wholly unique. Critics have been falling over it since.
Billboard called the title track “an instant contender for one of the year’s grooviest R&B songs.” NPR’s Sheldon Pearce said there was “some kind of voodoo taking place” on “The One.” The notoriously pretentious Pitchfork lauded how Jacoby—who lived in Tampa between the ages of nine and 20—yoked together “backwoods blues, bayou funk, and earthy R&B with Dungeon Family bombast…”
Jacoby—a self-taught multi-instrumentalist who played piano exclusively until he was 12 or 13, before picking up drums and the guitar—doesn’t get too caught up in the hype.
“I don’t know, man, I feel like he’s more like my friend than a known artist,” he told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay about the livestream. It’s been dope to connect and collaborate, he said, and added that he and Bieber are working on stuff that will come out sooner or later.
He said that Gutta Child, a record that tracks his growth from a young man to who he is today, had to be damn near perfect. “I needed to show people who I was and what it really meant to me to be Gabriel Jacoby,” he said.
While he calls Los Angeles home now, Jacoby’s affinity and connection to Tampa is all over Gutta Child where he is trying to pay TECO bills, searching for the ghost of a friend near the Martin Luther King Jr. mural in Robles and getting freaked out by palmetto bugs floating in the toilet.
“We would just play over there if we were around that part of town,” Jacoby said about Robles Park, a neighborhood where residents have since been relocated ahead of redevelopment.
His family bounced around town, between neighborhoods off Fletcher Avenue, Temple Terrace, and the Del Rio area known to some as “Nuccio.” Despite coming up in what some see as the roughest parts of Hillsborough County, Jacoby’s record doesn’t necessarily frame life in a sad or tragic lens.
“When you grew up with people who are in the same situation, you realize that it’s not like life is out to get you just because you grew up in poverty,” he said. Sure, he’s lost friends but others he’s kept in touch with have become successful, a testament to their drive and talent.
“There’s always someone who’s going through something worse, and so you’ve got to find joy and happiness and whatever you have while you have it,” Jacoby added.
That jubilation is all over Gutta Child, and comes to life in the videos.
“Bootleg,” featuring legendary Tampa rapper Tom G., shows crank dancers, including some from Jook City Heroes, in front of the Silver Dollar Food store on N 40th Street and the recently-renamed Pix & Mix Fried Chicken in Seminole Heights.
Curtis Mattear, who appears in the Juan Nieto-directed video, hears the pain in Jacoby’s delivery on the record, but said that dancing the way dancers do in the clip is a way to release energy and bad vibes.
“Cranking is a big movement in Tampa. When drill took off everyone started to talk about Chicago and pushed a different narrative, but Tampa’s been cranking with Tom G.’s ‘City Boy Wit’ It,’ and Tae Bae,” Mattear, 36, added.
The singer even surprised the local crew with his own moves. Jacoby—who was born in Anderson, South Carolina—agreed, and told CL that he started dancing like that pretty much the moment he moved to Tampa.
“That’s just like something every kid knew how to do in school. And, I mean, every kid’s parent knew how to do,” Jacoby added. “It’s just, like, second nature coming from Tampa.”
Shining light on the city, Jacoby said, was paramount, despite him not being born here because every location, even in the U.S., has a thing that makes it what it is.
“I didn’t really feel like the world has seen enough of that from Tampa,” he said, promising to showcase even more of the depth and expression—including cranking and jooking—from the place that raised him.
Another graf in Jacoby’s love letter to Tampa is the clip for “The One,” a straight up celebration of life filmed inside the United Skates on N Armenia Avenue in West Tampa. He told CL that his first touch with the skate dancing in the video happened on a date. That’s when he saw more experienced rollers doing tricks.
“I was like, ‘Oh, damn, I got to do that,’” he said. “I just kind of fell in love with it. And so for two years, I was going every week until I got good at it.”
Edward Johnson is the featured skater in “The One,” and vividly remembers Jacoby’s positive and creative energy when they first met around 2021. A shared love of expression through movement made for a natural connection.
“The vibe at the rink is always full and free. It’s a different kind of energy when you go to the skating rink. It’s more of a family feel,” Johnson, 24, told CL. “It’s just like a community that’s built within its own. It’s unity. There’s so much power in that alone.”
Jacoby’s record, he said, brings a smile to his face.
“It’s something you play at a family reunion. You dance with your queen to this, late night with some wine,” Johnson added. “We need more happy music.”
These days, there’s a lot to be happy about if you’re Jacoby, who is the eldest of seven kids.
“Dirty South Baby” is transparent about his darker days. A non-Gutta Child track, “Brother and Sister” from 2024, plays like an ode to his siblings. On it, he sings: “Ain’t got to give me nothing. I just don’t want to see you suffer… Beautiful baby brother, make sure you love our mother.”
The song includes heart-wrenching samples of voice messages where young kids pray for their brother, express their love and hope out loud that he comes home soon.
The DJ in “The One” is Gregory Greenway, AKA DJ Nilla Greene. He met “Gabe” through Jacoby’s mom, a photographer and artist who remains connected to her craft. She told Greenway, 41, that her eldest son was getting into music, so he gave Jacoby a MIDI controller. Jacoby was probably 17 at the time, and working at Bent String Studios now located in Lutz.
“Five years later, I see him posting music and putting out songs. And I was like, ‘OK, that’s pretty cool, man,” Greenway told CL.
Jacoby told CL that Greenway DJ’d his first show ever, back in 2016 at The Orpheum’s second Ybor City location.
Greenway—who has a residency at Red Thread in St. Pete—hears the Prince influence pretty explicitly in Jacoby’s music, but more than anything, he hears a rebel.
“I’m hearing fearlessness,” Greenway added. “Not just being yourself, being unique.”
As the world discovers Jacoby’s one-of-a-kind sound, fans and observers in the Bay area have a chance to see it for themselves. next Thursday when the homegrown songwriter opens for L.A. R&B singer Khamari at Jannus Live.
“It’s just me and my guitar,” Jacoby said when he checked in between dates in Vermont and Connecticut. “Once I do my own tour later in the year, I have a band that I’ll bring with me on stage, because I feel like my music demands that.”
Khamari w/Gabriel Jacoby
Time Thu., March 19, 7 p.m.
Location Jannus Live, 200 1st Ave. N, St. Petersburg
Jacoby’s next record, he added, will be kind of like Gutta Child 2 because there’s a lot more he needs to say. There’ll be hope and love baked into the album, but there’ll be a heaviness to help listeners who came up like him feel even more heard.
“It’s not all roses and daisies,” he told CL. “Gutta Child is for people who grew up in the gutter who need something to smile about. This is for everybody outside of the gutter who don’t realize what it is. This is gonna be like a wake up call, like, ‘This is really what the world looks like, and this is how we can fix it.’”
Jacoby added that while his music is meant to help people fix parts of their lives, he had to do healing of his own, mentally and emotionally, to get to this point.
“If you went through what I went through, it damn near makes it easy to not want to move. You don’t want to do anything, because you feel like the world is trying to break you down,” he said. “I had to just kind of fight through that. And then it was like, right after, where the light kind of showed up.”
All of it might seem like a heavy load for a 27-year-old to carry, but Jacoby said that his mother always encouraged him to fulfill his purpose to be a musician. His rise, he thinks, isn’t a surprise to mom—but more of a relief. “She knows how much I’ve been through, just as a man and even when I was a child,” he said.
“Be Careful,” the tender closing track on Gutta Child, feels like a message from Jacoby today to his younger self.
“It’s gon’ be OK,” he sings. “I’ve done all I can and said all that I need to say.”
It’s a theme Jacoby reiterated when asked what he would say to the kid in Tampa who sees his come up, and wonders how they might do the same.
“I would tell them you don’t even have to be like me. Just be you. Just know that life, everything’s going to be OK as long as you want it to be OK. It might not be perfect all the time, but just have fun, keep a good attitude, do your best and take care of those around you,” he said. “Even if you feel like you’re just a kid—take care of yourself.”
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This article appears in Mar. 12 – 18, 2026.