Jay Sean talks Joe Jonas tour, 'The Mistress' mixtape

Q. You happened to be in New York during both Hurricane Irene and the recent East Coast earthquake…

A. Yeah, great timing.

Q. You tweeted that your basement was flooded. How did you get out of that?

A. [I] spent five hours bailing buckets and buckets of water out of the basement until everything kicked in again. Talk about bringing you back down to earth, eh?

Q. Exactly. You were also in a precarious position during the quake…

A. I was in the barber chair! I was like, ‘There better not be no aftershock right now.’ It’s not gonna be a good look.

Q. Hopefully you look OK for your show in Boston.

A. Of course. Super, super, super looking forward to it.

Q. Your co-headlining trek with Joe Jonas and JoJo kicks off in Boston. What can fans expect?

A. My show - for people who haven’t ever been to one of my events - is very, very, super, super high energy. It’s a lot of fun. That’s the one thing I always try to give my audience.

Because they’re my fans, I like to believe that there’s a way that through a concert that you can actually feel like you’re friends. He talked to us, we had fun. We didn’t feel like he was just up there singing on a stage. He involved us. That’s what it’s all about for me. It’s all about that experience. You can’t download that. That’s something real.

Q. You’re hitting the road with two other hitmakers. Can fans expect you to pop up in each other’s sets?

A. I mean, who knows? At the moment, we haven’t really talked anything about doing something like that, but I’m a very spontaneous person. I like to just have fun and do that kind of stuff. Who knows? Let’s see.

Q. You and Joe Jonas are both chart-topping stars, but hail from different musical backgrounds. How did you decide to join forces for the tour?

A. [We have] different backgrounds, yeah, but we still have the screaming 16 year olds. We do share a common fanbase. I’ve done shows with Joe Jonas before and a lot of his fans knew my songs and a lot of my fans knew his songs. It made sense. When I knew he was going on tour, he hit me up about it like, “Hey man, you wanna join me on tour? Let’s co-headline.” I was like, “You know what, let’s do this.”

Q. How did JoJo get involved?

A. She was a last-minute addition. [Her team] came through and they said we’d like to join the tour, and we both think JoJo is a great singer and it just made sense. Because her name starts with “J,” it became the … JoJo -Joe-Jay tour.

Q. Your mixtape, The Mistress, the same day your tour starts. Why did you decide to drop a mixtape before releasing your upcoming full-length album, Freeze Time?

A. I wanted to give my fans a taste of how this next … album is gonna be changing slightly. A lot of my hardcore fans who have really traced it back to the first album know that I have an R&B background and not just [a] pop music [background]. I think a lot of the stuff that America’s heard of me so far has been more of my pop stuff. But the R&B and the slow jams and the sexy songs, that’s really a massive part of my repertoire as an artist, and that’s something I haven’t yet got to show America. The mixtape is my way of doing that.

The whole thing is R&B. It’s all very geared around topics to do with love and lust and sex and love triangles and promiscuity and monogamy and polygamy. It’s a bit more grown up, and it’s an indication of some of the R&B stuff that’s gonna be on the actual album.

Q. That’s an interesting title. Can you break down the meaning of The Mistress?

A. The reason I called it The Mistress was because this is a project which is my love, but it’s a hidden love from America. America doesn’t know this side of me. I always felt like the mistress is always this taboo thing and this thing you can’t talk about or you can’t reveal. You love it, you love her, but she’s never seen, and this is what the album was for me.

I always do stuff in the studio where I’m like, “You know what? People gotta hear this.” I’m a songwriter so I write so many different types of songs. I can write a country song, I can write a pop song, [or] I can write an R&B joint. R&B is my passion, I grew up on it and I’m in love with it.

Q. Aside from a grown-and-sexy vibe, what can fans expect from Freeze Time?

A. There are some songs that I did which are similar to stuff which you might find on the mixtape just because that’s just a style of R&B that I love. Really, you’re gonna get beautiful songs on Freeze Time. Freeze Time is an album which is gonna put together a few different genres that people know me for: the pop element, the dance element, the R&B element, the hip-hop element. It’s all kind of coming together on one album, and that’s been the challenge: to try to do that so it doesn’t sound like a mish-mash of songs or just like a compilation.

Q. You frequently collaborate with your Cash Money labelmate Lil Wayne. What are your thoughts about Wayne’s_Jeggings, the Twitter account inspired by the snug leopard-print pants he rocked at the VMAs?

A. I heard about it [laughs]. People just got too much to talk about nowadays. It’s like so what he was up there with jeggings or whatever. He might just have really skinny legs, you don’t know. Who cares?

For me I think it’s just funny that people pick on things like that. But that’s life. There are some people who are more interested in what he performed and other people are more interested in who sang the best and other people are more interested in who wore the best outfit.