Jeanne Louise Galice doesn’t spend much time on social media. But the French singer-songwriter, better known as Jain, understands why it’s such a big deal that a good chunk of the world this summer is listening—and dancing on TikTok to—a song that she released in 2015.

Jain, 31, doesn’t use terminology like “going viral” in reference to “Makeba.” And yet…

“I was really happy about it. Something that everybody wants, as an artist, is to have their songs go international,” she said in a recent video call from her home in Paris. “It was a great surprise.”

Jain, who’s just completed a summer festival circuit in Europe, was in Belgium in early June when a rep from her label called her and said, “‘Something is happening with ‘Makeba’ again.’” So she opened up her TikTok and Instagram, and sure enough, there it was: reel after reel after story. Sometimes it included a particular dance. Sometimes it was paired with a video of Bill Hader dancing in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

The extremely danceable, percussion-heavy song was suddenly everywhere. It’s actually about South African artist and anti-Apartheid activist Miriam Makeba, the one-time wife of Hugh Masekela (he told RIFF he credited her for getting him to America). Jain said she’s an “audience” to this trend, going along for the ride.

The song, from her 2015 debut album, Zanaka, had already been a hit once, and had gone viral after it was featured in a Levi’s TV ad. Jain’s initial reaction wasn’t joy, necessarily, but concern. She’d just released her third album, The Fool, in April.

“I am quite proud of it. I’m trying to promote it,” Jain said. “To have ‘Makeba’ come back again, it was like, ‘Oh, so nobody’s gonna listen to the new one now.’ But actually, it’s cool, because people are getting curious, so they listen to ‘Makeba,’ and then they want to listen to what I’ve done these past few years. I think ‘Makeba’ is also nourishing the new album.”

She was shown streaming and sales numbers for the title track of the new album, which have spiked since the “Makeba” went viral. So now it’s become a great opportunity and additional promotion, she said.

If there’s a mystique about the rhythms of “Makeba” and its earworm of a chorus, “Oohe/ Makeba, Makeba/ Ma qué bella,” it’s likely a product of Jain’s multicultural upbringing. Her mother is half Madagascan. Her grandfather on her mother’s side is from the southern Africa island nation. So Jain was raised in the southwestern France with those influences right off the bat, listening to artists like Makeba and Malian singer Salif Keita.

“I think that’s really influenced me on my first albums because I discovered that not a lot of people of my age [were] listening to the same kind of music,” she said.

At 8 years old, Jain started taking drumming lessons at a French music school. The next year her parents, who worked at an oil company, moved the family to Dubai for three years, where she learned Arabic percussion. The next move was to the western Africa country Republic of the Congo, where the family lived in the small coastal town of Pointe-Noire for four years. That’s where she wrote her first songs, like “Come” (her first hit in her home country) and “Makeba.”

She was about 15 at the time, and with the help of her parents, she found a music engineer, producer and makeshift “studio” to record herself, as well as a record deal with a French label.

“I felt really free over there because you just went to someone’s yard, and they had a little mic and a computer,” Jain said. “You just could record whenever you wanted, and it was really fun because my parents came with me, and my friends came with me. It was a festive thing to do.”

Uploading the songs to MySpace was a different story.

“Then I had to upload them on the internet. In the Congo … for one song, I had to wait for like two days to put it on the internet. It was kind of hard working,” she said.

Before returning home to France, the family also spent some time in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Over all these travels, Jain fell even more in love with African and Middle Eastern music and rhythms.

In Dubai, she picked up the darbuka, an Indian instrument. In the Congo, she learned about djembe and tam tam. In UAE she started drumming again.

“It was always about the rhythm for me—the music,” she said.

On Zanaka, which means “childhood” in Malagasy, the main language of Madagascar, the percussion elements came first, with the rest of the music following along, she said.

“It was really about the rhythm and the placement of the voice in the rhythm,” Jain said. “That’s what is working with ‘Makeba.’ People often ask me what is the theme of the song because they don’t know what ‘Makeba’ and ‘Ma qué bella’ means, but they like the rhythm of it.”

The album was a hit in France, and the video for “Makeba” was nominated for a Grammy for best music video in 2018 (following the album’s U.S. release in 2016).

“On the last one [2018’s Souldier], I really tried to make my voice the leader of the song and the melody, and have something more ethereal.”

The album reached No. 1 on French charts and was certified double-platinum there, while single “Alright” was certified diamond.

But The Fool is different from both of those albums. Jain wanted a more classic singer-songwriter record, and she wrote all of these songs from her guitar or piano. Thematically, it’s different as well. The first two albums mostly spoke to a larger world, with big picture looks on bigger issues. But The Fool is mostly personal, looking inward on what Jain described as falling in love for the first time.

“I wanted something about the melody, and the cosmic kind of feeling that you have when you fall in love, something like this kind of magical state,” she said. “I wanted people to come to this world and to be able to feel what I was saying. … It was in all the possible ways; it was a really different album to make.”

Jain, who’s also a visual artist (her first dream was to design album covers for others), designed the cover for The Fool, as well as a separate drawing for each of the album’s songs. The artistic theme pulls from Tarot de Marseilles, a game popular in France several hundred years ago, which her mother taught her. It was all part of the plan to bring personal elements from her life together.

“The fool is the first card of the tarot. It [represents] a new journey into the unknown,” Jain said. “It made me think about the way that when you fall in love, you don’t know where it’s gonna go. You don’t know if it’s gonna hurt you or not. But you’re still going with it. I think it’s beautiful, and in this way the fool is kind of braver than the wise one.”

Despite the different tone on the album, Jain saved one song for a broader conversation. The keyboard-led “To all the People” talks about climate change and is directed to those who try to combat it, with lyrics about “Walking on a fiery land/ Your land/ My land.”

In this way, she continues the trend she started with the likes of “Makeba” and on Souldier (combining the two worlds) with the title track pulling from the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre and “Star” looking at women’s place in the music industry.

“To All the People” is the album’s global and political song, Jain said, adding that she hasn’t tired of telling people who “Makeba” is about.

“They think that it’s just a meaningless song, and for me it’s much more than that,” she said.

“Makeba” is global in more ways now. It has reentered Billboard’s Top 200 Global Chart and at one point charted in 27 countries on Spotify. More than 80 percent of streams originated outside France. Jain hopes it’ll help her get her music to an even wider audience. She’s got another Europe tour lined up and plans on working on new music next, but wants to go farther.

“’Makeba’ is really helpful for that in the States, so we are working on that right now,” she said, adding she hasn’t created her own dance reel for TikTok, “but maybe I should!”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.