Media experiences are an integral part of your life if you are a musician creating songs for public consumption and, as you would imagine, they can vary from exhilarating to painful, and of course you never know in advance which it will be. I won’t go into details of the painful interviews, but feel obliged to mention the positive ones conducted by the likes of Vic Fernandes of Barbados radio fame, Ron Robinson here, Sam Ghany of Radio Trinidad, and the original Sterling Ebanks of the Grand Cayman’s Radio Cayman.
This week, after the happy experience I wrote about last week with the amazing Merundoi puppets at Guyana’s National Commission for UNESCO during their Year End Review, I was wondering what was in store for me when I agreed to a year-end chat with the folks at Lite 104.1FM in Georgetown but this must be my time to buy some lottery tickets because that Saturday morning encounter was also in the happy category as I spent a fast-moving hour or so with the programme’s host, Natasha Azeez, and her studio assistant Justin. Apart from the obvious biggies like Blade Of Grass, Is We Own, Where Are Your Heroes, etc., I was impressed with the span of Tradewinds material they were familiar with, and particularly how relaxed I was made to feel by the Lite FM crew. Natasha didn’t ask me the kind of “how it was growing up” questions one is often hit with, but was more interested in how song ideas arrive and I took some time to reiterate, as I have recently in print, that the song writing thing is really a gift one is born with, like the ability to run fast, or shoot straight, but that especially the ability to find rhymes readily is in that “born with” category.