Long-time friends, music producer Damion “Traxx” Nelson and singer Jah Silent bonded over family challenges in recent years. Challenges that led to their first creative collaboration.

That song My Closest Friend is a heartfelt tribute to Jah Silent’s mother, who died this year from complications related to Alzheimer’s disease.

The track is released on Nelson’s Breaking Records llc. He considers it the most personal project since his début as a producer in 2009.

“The latest song came about through pain, the artiste Jah Silent is a very good friend of mine, we are what you consider ‘fambily’. He referenced the song while playing his guitar a several years ago and after losing my mother, in my grief I would remember the reference of the song playing in my head,” he recalled. “However, several years later he lost his mom and so he asked me to mix a song for him that he made for her funeral. He sent me the a cappella he made of the song and it was the same song I remembered years ago.”

After some restructuring by Nelson, My Closest Friend became reality and is Jah Silent’s first released song in almost three years.

Nelson, who lives in the United States, is not as prolific as his counterparts in Jamaica. He got into professional music as an engineer for producer Clive Hunt whom he credits for teaching him the ropes of production.

He has engineered or produced songs by Luciano, D’Angel, Devonte and Shawn Storm. Like Hunt, Nelson is from Linstead, St Catherine, and developed an appreciation for music as a child playing drums in his church band.

In 2002, he was a finalist in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission Gospel Song Competition with the entry, Lead Me. It was not long after that his association with Hunt began.

Hunt, whose lofty resume includes producing albums by The Abyssinians, Pierre Poljak and Alpha Blondy, influenced Nelson’s studio methods.

“Uncle Clive is a musicologist, he can be hard on you if he trusts you and believes in you. So, if I would make a beat he could just replay the whole thing for it to make sense where it would take me a longer time to put it together,” said Nelson. “He always put me with artistes, musicians and other engineers who are trained, who actually went to school to master what they do and those experiences I never took for granted.”