David Sanders (born December 22, 1995), better known by the stage name Jean Dawson, is a Mexican-American experimental pop musician. Since 2018, he has released four albums and over a dozen singles via his own record label P+, and toured across the US and Europe with artists including Brockhampton.
Early life
Dawson was born David Sanders on December 22, 1995, in San Diego, California, and grew up in Tijuana, Mexico,a and Spring Valley, California. He is of mixed heritage, with an African-American father from Long Beach, California, and a Mexican mother from Sinaloa. His mother learned English by listening to West Coast hip hop. He would cross the border to San Diego every day since he went to elementary school there, requiring him to wake up at 3 a.m. He would spend those long bus rides listening to a wide variety of music, including grunge, hip hop, Britpop, new wave, and rock en español. In an interview with MTV's Patrick Hosken, Dawson described himself in school as having never been "the popular kid in school", instead "the kid in the library with one friend. And we'd sit, we'd talk every day about the internet and what we saw on the internet."
Dawson grew up in a musical family, with his parents' interest in each other's culture having been what connected them. This led him to deciding he wanted to make a career out of music at age 13.
