“Everyone in my family does music. I mean, I’m a Jackson,” Paris said during the ‘Unfiltered: Paris Jackson & Gabriel Glenn’ Facebook Watch premiere episode on Tuesday (June 30).
After dropping a debut EP with her boyfriend Gabriel Glenn for their new musical group The Soundflowers last week, Paris Jackson shines under her own spotlight for the premiere of their Facebook Watch docuseries Unfiltered: Paris Jackson & Gabriel Glenn today (June 30).
“Everyone in my family does music. I mean, I’m a Jackson,” Paris said in the opening scenes of the first episode titled “Who Is Paris Jackson?”. “It makes sense that I’m a musician, but like, a Jackson doing folk/indie? What?”
From the get-go, viewers learn Paris’ dreams of following in her father Michael Jackson’s stunning footsteps came to her as early as her fourth birthday. When the King of Pop asked her in the home movie clip what she wished for when she blew out the candles on her princess cake, she innocently replied, “Um I do what you do.” He then asked her what he did and Paris responded, “You dance and sing.”
In a never-before-seen clip, Michael Jackson’s This Is It film and tour director Kenny Ortega reminisced with the now-22-year-old singer about how he and Michael took her and her older brother Prince Jackson to their first-ever concert, High School Musical: The Concert, and introduced them to the entire Disney Channel cast backstage.
Despite the cool opportunities afforded to Michael’s children, Prince described the “unique circumstances” surrounding their childhood in his cameo. “I feel that she has come a long way and she has learned a lot in how to carry herself,” the 23-year-old described Paris in the interview segment. “When I get to see my sister sing, I feel very proud in a way because I’ve seen where she came from and everything she had to deal with when she was growing up and how that singing has been an outlet for her.”
Aside from Michael’s recording legacy and Prince’s support at her shows, the Jackson family continues showing up for Paris’ blossoming musical career. Her cousin and famed singer-songwriter Austin Brown currently serves as Paris’ producer. But she didn’t pick her bandmate from her bloodline: She picked Glenn out from one of his intimate L.A. shows.
He used to perform with a heavy metal group called Trash Dogs at Hollywood’s Rainbow Bar & Grill when his Mötley Crüe T-shirt and Ohm necklace caught Paris’ eye one night and she definitely caught his. “I know when she was walking up, my body was saying, ‘Be cool,’ but my brain was saying, ‘Just run! Just run!'” he recalled the night they first met.
From spending three days straight together to living in his van within that first week, Paris quickly adjusted to the nomadic life she always knew from her father’s superstar days as well as life in front of the cameras, which Glenn began to understand.
“I never realized how much she was around at that age and how many people and how much she was really involved in the day-to-day in her father’s life, whether it was being on the road with him or being at rehearsals or she was really by his side for pretty much as much as he could keep her,” he said in an interview portion of the episode. “For me, it was nice to kind of see that window into how much extended family she really has, how many people she considers part of that tribe.”
Watch the “Who Is Paris Jackson” premiere episode of Unfiltered below.
