Jon B is walking back earlier comments he made about Chloe Bailey and Gunna’s track that sampled his 1997 classic, “They Don’t Know.”
During his visit to The Breakfast Club — in an interview that aired Friday (November 14) — the singer-songwriter revisited his first reaction to their 2022 song “You & Me,” and revealed that he’d actually love to collaborate with Bailey.
“Come collaborate with me for real,” Jon said (around the 55-minute mark in the video below). “Let me have a chance to really work with you. She’s so incredibly talented that I just don’t feel like that showed the real, what I want to see.”
“It worked for what they did for it. It was just like a joint to put out — and I don’t know if I can really get behind that and say I liked that joint,” Jon added. “Now, I feel bad about saying that.”
The R&B veteran — who has collaborated with 2Pac, Jay-Z, Michael Jackson, and many more — originally shared his thoughts about “You & Me” on the Can We Talk R&B? Podcast in 2024, calling it a “ratchet record.”
“I wish they never did [that],” he said at the time. “[They] actually never got my rights to do that record, either, so Gunna we gotta holler about that. … That’s some business shit we got to handle.
“You know what? It’s all a compliment to what we did. That’s Tim [Kelley] and Bob’s [Robinson] compliment, that’s my compliment, but at the same time my lane is my lane and my area is my area and I earned that.”
Jon continued, “If you made a hit in your area, you do your song whatever it is, I’m not going to just come into your area, take your joint, make it mine, and not pay you or whatever.”
After his critique, Bailey later appeared on The Breakfast Club and responded with grace. “Jon B is an incredible artist,” she said. “If that song didn’t exist, we couldn’t sample it. I love what Gunna and I did to it, and I’m sad he feels that way but hey, everyone has an opinion.”
Jon B eventually shared that he regretted how he initially reacted, telling the Shirley’s Temple podcast that he was simply unfamiliar with the vibe of being on podcasts.
“It hurt me because I was like, ‘Man, that could be my daughter right there,'” he explained, noting that as a father of two daughters, ages 11 and 17, and a husband of 18 years, there’s a “respect factor” and “a lot of chivalry” in his home. “It hit different because I never wanna come off like a hater.”
