BIOGRAPHY
I am a songwriter, which in today’s world needs to be defined properly as a lyricist. Songwriters are usually seen as the people who compose the music for songs and write the lyrics. Though the proper definition might consider a songwriter as someone who composes the music ‘or’ writes the lyrics, it’s a clear enough difference to point out. I lack the ability to compose music, but have the small gift of being able to string a few words together, and sometimes the ability to relay how I hear them in my head. Though I have always wanted to share those words, it took me a couple decades to manage to pull that off.
I have lived in Trinidad and Tobago my entire life, barring some important years in Winnipeg Manitoba, where I met good people and managed to get a degree at the University Of Winnipeg. I also managed to survive some of the harshest winters I could ever have possibly imagined. But the warmth of the friends and family there made it all worth it in the end, and I would never change those years. They helped shape a young me into a man.
I started writing songs in my head when I was a young boy, laying in my bed at night, staring at the ceiling. What I never did, was write anything down. In my late teens, with a lot of angst and teenage pain, you all the know the kind, I started writing poetry to vent all the things I was feeling. It became somewhat therapeutic, and I ended up writing a lot. The odd song began propping up in my writing. Sometimes only part of one, or really short ones, but they started to rise from the darkness. But with time, and the inevitable rush that teenage life holds, I got swept away with living, and stopped writing.
In my early twenties I was at it again with writing poems and even stories that never went anywhere other than in scrap books that nobody ever saw. This was with very few exceptions. Most of those things I wrote got lost. Moving, losing touch, not believing that those words might have significance beyond when I wrote them, all facilitated me losing most of it. The few things I managed to find were those I wrote in Word documents or emails. Not that I could vouch for the quality of anything I wrote back then, but it still does make me a little sad that I lost so much. Life again stepped in, and work and relationships took precedence to everything.
Decades later, with emotions bubbling over for one reason or the other, I turned again to words for solace. Though this time I didn’t use a pen and paper at all, but exclusively my phone or laptop. And the words came flowing. They didn’t seem to stop for quite a long time. I’d long before discovered that the deeper I let myself sink into any emotion, the easier the words came. So I sank. And I wrote. This time I made sure to save everything. This time I guarded my words like little gems. This time I was ready, willing and getting able, to let someone else hear them.
In 2020, when I was embracing this unique and freeing therapy of releasing my words, it was clear that the ability to convert your words to sound, to put them to music, was easier than ever before in my lifetime. The plethora of talent so easily available online made a little dream I once had as a boy, seem so achievable. The trick then moved from how I could get this done, to who would I get to help get it done. In that I was remarkably lucky. In fact, far too lucky.