Toronto producer, songwriter and MC Miles Jones has musical wanderlust in his blood. His photographer father, Deadly Hedley Jones, is a former CFNY-FM host and pioneering club DJ. Grandfather Hedley Jones Sr. was a Jamaican jazz and ska musician who helped design and build the massively influential rocksteady and reggae recording studio Studio One.

“They could never be stuck in one space,” recalls Miles Jones. “They were always moving towards the future, to wherever a progressive movement would take them.”

As a youngster, Jones favoured the music of Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder, but by age six, his father had introduced him to ’80s hip-hop artists like Kool Moe Dee, Big Daddy Kane, LL Cool J and the especially influential Eric B. & Rakim.

“When I heard Rakim rap, it didn’t sound like the way anybody else rapped,” says a still-appreciative Jones. “He could command the mic.”

Encouraged by his schoolteacher mother, Jones wrote poetry as a youth and started freestyling at high-school ciphers. In 2002, he headed to Hamilton to study multimedia at McMaster University. Here, he started DJing and made beats that he then sang and rapped over. Two years into his studies, Jones was invited by family friend (and famous Canadian singer/songwriter) Dan Hill to participate in a Canadian Idol songwriter’s conference.

“My response to Dan was, ‘I don’t write adult-contemporary music,’ and he said ‘Well, you write lyrics don’t you? I think you could do it,’” laughs Jones. “I went there at 21, the youngest guy in the camp. There were 50 writers from all over the world, you’d be sent into a room, four people at a time, and had four hours to write a song. You’d demo it and then do another in the afternoon. It was intense.”

Armed with newfound confidence and skills, Jones wrote, produced and recorded his 12-song debut album, One Chance, as a thesis project and released it on his own Mojo Recordings label in 2006. Surprisingly mature, the album signaled the emergence of a new Canadian hip-hop talent. Jones now follows on its promise with the musically diverse Runaway Jones.

“Post–One Chance, I really had a phase of writer’s block and didn’t know how I was going to approach another album,” Jones admits. “I needed to be able to create something new, something that wouldn’t sound like the ten other artists I just heard on the radio or saw videos for — something that would make me want to get up and dance.”

He chose to collaborate with a number of favourite producers for inspiration and innovation, including Mr. Attic, Slakah the BeatChild and DJ Serious who crafted both the hip-hop heavy “Rhyme Like This” and the clubby “Runaway.”

“Serious is always ahead of the pack, way off doing his own thing,” says Jones. “He’d already done two hip-hop albums and I think in his head there was no real reason for him to come out with more music unless I could tell him why. He came over and let me hear about 20 tracks, saying ‘Do you want to hear hip-hop shit or do you want to hear everything?’ I chose ‘Everything.’”

On the denser hip-hop tip is “Never Too Late,” produced by Detroit’s Black Milk. Jones had written him in 2007 as a fan, “to say how much I loved his music and what he was doing for hip-hop.” Milk’s participation in Runaway Jones was later requested.

“The fact that he checked me out and gave me music to hear was really inspiring. Right now, Black Milk is the hip-hop beast producer who’s pumping out track after track and everything that he does seems to smash what everyone else is doing in that hip-hop bubble. Everything he does has a feel or sound to it — it’s so heavy and emotional in some sense.”

Also contributing are MCs and vocalists including Bronx-based Percee P, London’s Shad (“This is the kind of rap that I’ve always wanted to hear come from Canada”) and Ghanaian born singer-songwriter Kae Sun for whose upcoming album Jones is contributing production.

“I’m really interested in stepping outside of the hip-hop box and producing other artists,” says Jones of his future. “That’s part of why I’ve created Runaway Jones as a character. Runaway Jones is the one up on stage and touring; Miles Jones is the guy in the studio and making business decisions.”