Latest / Corie Sheppard Podcast / Nailah Blackman: You Don’t Know My Story | Childhood, Legacy, Struggles & Stardom

Transcript

Nailah Blackman: You Don’t Know My Story | Childhood, Legacy, Struggles & Stardom · Corie Sheppard Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Actually, around that time I was trying to move to Hawaii.
0:03
SPEAKER_01: So that mosquito talk was iconic.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: That definitely does sound like a mosquito.
0:13
SPEAKER_01: My grandfather is Rash Oti, the inventor of Toka music.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: He's my granddad.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: I love him.
0:20
SPEAKER_01: Pat came into the studio that night to record a song.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Kat, fancy seeing you here tonight.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: And he was like, hi, do I know you?
0:30
Corie: At one point it felt like you realized hey, I just started.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: But I always thought I was a stop.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: Oh motherfucker stop.
1:01
Corie: Not looking good on the team, David.
1:03
Corie: We gotta do something about it.
1:05
Corie: I want to welcome to the show.
1:07
Corie: Somebody who've been looking forward to talking to for a long time is Nyla Blackman.
1:11
Corie: Good morning.
1:12
Corie: How are you?
1:12
SPEAKER_01: I'm well.
1:13
SPEAKER_01: I'm well.
1:13
Corie: You good?
1:14
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing good.
1:15
Corie: You bring your drillily this morning?
1:16
SPEAKER_01: Not really, you know, but um it's it's a good time.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: It's a fair enough time, not too much traffic, yeah.
1:22
Corie: All right, good, yeah.
1:23
Corie: Well, all right, good.
1:23
Corie: So we move into earlier times now, David, right?
1:26
Corie: The artists approved.
1:28
Corie: Let me start with this year now, Nila Soaker Origins.
1:31
Corie: Oh, I saw it bubbling, I saw the show bubbling and people talking about it.
1:35
Corie: I saw the social media and stuff.
1:36
Corie: How was it for you?
1:38
SPEAKER_01: So go Origins this year was I feel like if every year I do it, it feels like a lot of work.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: And this year, even though it was probably even more work, it felt like less work for me.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: Um, just because I've been doing it and I know what to do, and I loved it so much.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: Like there was this sort of intimacy and connection I had with my fans, even first time um moving to Porta Spain, you know.
2:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, different venue, different energy.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: But it had this like I would just the word I want to use is intimacy because literally my fans just felt so we we felt at home.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: I felt very connected, and just everybody who came out.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: The fact that I put out a dress code two days, was it two days or one day?
2:25
SPEAKER_01: I think it was one day or two days before the event, and literally everybody came on dress code.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh my god, what was the dress code?
2:32
SPEAKER_01: And the dress code was white and gold.
2:34
Corie: People come out for it.
2:35
SPEAKER_01: They did, and I was like, How'd you all even get to buy an outfit?
2:38
SPEAKER_01: Like, this is Sunday.
2:41
Corie: People know what to expect from you, though.
2:43
Corie: People know what to expect from you as well.
2:44
Corie: Before we start, I was looking at your interviews and I see your dress code usually.
2:48
Corie: You do you put a lot of effort into that?
2:50
Corie: I kind of want to ask you about budget and thing because it feels like you spent a lot of money.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, it it may look like if you spend a lot of money, if you have a lot of creativity.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: So for me, I am not just like a regular fashion girly.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: Like, some, you know, as a fashionista, some people hit, some people miss.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: Like, for me, I'm not gonna say that I'm always hitting, but like my mind, I think in fashion.
3:12
SPEAKER_01: When I think about anything, I think, okay, what am I gonna wear?
3:15
SPEAKER_01: That's like literally the first thought that comes to my mind, and most times I have no idea.
3:20
SPEAKER_01: But oh, but all to say is that I love it so much.
3:25
SPEAKER_01: Like, I started sewing when I was nine years old.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: I've literally been like obsessing over fashion like my whole life.
3:33
SPEAKER_01: I hand sewed a cold shoulder um Polka Dot dress at nine, and then I was like, all right, this is definitely my thing.
3:40
SPEAKER_01: When I was in high school, I used to sew all my friends' outfits for us to go to parties, we used to go to real parties, and I used to make us matching outfits with the little booty shops and like it was really like part of my identity, and even when I first began um singing and doing music in soccer, I mean I used to do it a lot before when I was doing my acoustic shows, which were a bit more spaced out, but um in soca, I used to the year I came out with us, I sold my outfit every single night.
4:14
SPEAKER_01: Like day before the night, I sold an outfit every and that was so hard.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna lie.
4:20
SPEAKER_01: That was really hard.
4:22
Corie: I could imagine.
4:22
Corie: Yeah, I hear you're talking about 300 and something shows and thing in one of them.
4:26
Corie: Yeah, so you so trade resumed, you're so in that much.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: After a while, after that carnival season, I had to stop buying, and that's when I started putting up the budgets because I come from Abby Blackman cloth, right?
4:37
SPEAKER_01: Abby Blackman is the cloth lady.
4:41
SPEAKER_01: She don't want to hear about buy, she wants to make everything.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, mommy, Anoe could buy this, right?
4:47
SPEAKER_01: She don't want to hear nothing about buyers, just make she is that kind of creative.
4:52
SPEAKER_01: So for me now, yes, a lot, yes, the budgets have gotten much, much, much.
4:58
SPEAKER_01: I want to stress on that much, much bigger, but I'm still making my clothes, I'm still designing it, I'm still, I mean, I'm not physically making it.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: I have seamstresses on stuff like that now.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: But the thought process is still going into let's make something brand new.
5:12
Corie: Gotcha, gotcha.
5:13
Corie: So it's not a label thing.
5:14
Corie: You you is your expression.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: It's an expression, definitely.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: And you know, there are a lot of things I buy and I just style and I just, you know, put together and I I however I feel, it's really about my feelings.
5:25
Corie: So you enjoy it still, you still enjoy putting them things together?
5:28
SPEAKER_01: If I if I ever lose this joy, I think I might die.
5:32
SPEAKER_01: Really?
5:32
SPEAKER_01: I yeah, I think I might die.
5:33
SPEAKER_01: If I stop having the joy for clothes, I will no longer be me.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: You could I gone.
5:40
Corie: Interesting.
5:40
Corie: It's something you think you'll do, like labels, like do to sell and because if you're doing it for your friends already from small.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: You know what I would say?
5:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, I've had my um fashion brand Soker Golo, which came from my mom's brand Soka Couture, and uh I've been wanting to launch it officially.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: I've launched a couple swims um online and it's been doing pretty well, but I've never like fully launched that label side of things because it's hard and it's a lot of work.
6:08
SPEAKER_01: And you're busy.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: I'm very busy, you know what I mean?
6:12
SPEAKER_01: So we'll see.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: I think this year might be the year um to do some really cool collaborations that might really stamp my designer eye and what I really see um fashion-wise, because my fans have been asking for a long time.
6:26
Corie: I would imagine I had Kit Israeli and he was talking about his um his take on it was a little controversial at the time because of how he said I think it's my editing was the problem.
6:36
Corie: Okay, but what he was trying to say was that the Calypsonian back in the day had a very distinct look.
6:41
Corie: And you you you know the history.
6:43
Corie: 100%.
6:43
Corie: Yeah, and he was talking about these soaker artists for a particular era, kind of fitting into a little bit of our American mold of what uh star should look like.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: I think um, I think so.
6:53
SPEAKER_01: I don't I wouldn't say American, I would say worlds.
6:56
SPEAKER_01: Or global.
6:57
SPEAKER_01: I would say global because life has changed now.
6:59
SPEAKER_01: We like before with Calypso Time in, everybody didn't know what was happening on the other side of the world.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: Nobody knew what was happening in Japan or London or America or Canada.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: You had to take a plane, you had to see something on TV, it had to be a big deal for you to see it.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: Now you open your phone and you're like seeing your cousin from Switzerland, like you know what I mean?
7:26
SPEAKER_01: So it's like now, and fashion is also so fast as well.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: So back in the day, they probably had to make their clothes, they probably had to to look unique or to look different, like an artist, they had to do a lot of work.
7:39
SPEAKER_01: Guess what?
7:39
SPEAKER_01: You don't have to do that work anymore.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: You could go online and order something from Revolve or whatever, yeah, yeah.
7:45
Corie: Or the boutique designers too, like you see a lot of people on Instagram who pop up, exactly.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: So it's like you don't need to do the work, so you're just gonna get it because you're busy.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah.
7:56
Corie: So let's talk about our business, right?
7:58
Corie: Yeah, you said that source came to Tong for the first time.
8:00
Corie: Where you were doing it before?
8:01
SPEAKER_01: I was doing it in different places in San Fernando.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: The first one started on San Fernando Hill, which was um 2017 Soke Origins was literally magical, like it was a magical um event, my first, and then we went to I believe we went to no, we went straight to Brian Lara.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: Okay, and then the third year we went to Paris, so that was a bit of an out-of-the-way venue, and we said, Okay, let's go back to Brian Lara.
8:31
SPEAKER_01: Oh no, I think we ended up in Sappa and we did Sappa for two years until we realized the venue was way too small, and then we went back to Brian Lara.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we went back to Brian Lara.
8:41
Corie: Yeah, it's interesting to hear you talk about 2017 because we'll call it been you consider it your breakout.
8:46
SPEAKER_01: Like that was that's my first song.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: That's my first song I've ever released.
8:50
SPEAKER_01: Before that, um I released, I soft released one song called Cigarettes, um, but I did not put it out on all streaming platforms, I just put it out on radio and I don't even think it was on YouTube.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: I was like, okay, let's just test and see because I wasn't really happy with the way it was done.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to, I'm up, I was a very much a perfectionist back then.
9:15
Corie: Yes, it was.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: I want to leave those ways behind.
9:19
SPEAKER_01: I really want to leave those ways because it doesn't for anybody that is a perfectionist out there, perfectionism doesn't help you.
9:25
SPEAKER_01: You think you might like strive into the ultimate goal, but nothing is perfect in life, and the moment you like take all the time to get to perfection is like the best mask on Ashwand's Day is no mask.
9:38
Corie: Yeah, 100%.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: That's what I learned real quick, and I was like, all right, let's get this.
9:44
SPEAKER_01: And that was actually my first time ever doing like soccer music professionally, so it was like I'm trying to think.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I did soca compositions all my childhood.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it was always like somebody was writing a song for me, somebody was um doing something for me, and I did it.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: But I've been writing music since I was 12 years old, and it was never I was never writing soak music.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: I was always doing this a different style, something unique, something that just felt like me.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: And uh, I wanted to try so very badly, and I I went to everybody because I was working with everybody at that time, Casey, Kit, I mean, Hill and Rose, so many people, and like Johan.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think I was working with every producer in Trinidad and Tobago, literally, just every studio, I was probably there, and uh, everybody was like, no, so spoiler, don't do so.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, why?
10:44
SPEAKER_01: This is like what y'all do, and they're like, nah, you don't need to do that.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: That is what we do, but it's like and I was just like, but why?
10:52
SPEAKER_01: And they was like, because you're so nice and soft and you know, like you, and I was like, okay, but like why not?
11:00
SPEAKER_01: And they was like, this is great, keep doing this.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I know they said it in good intentions, I know it was never like bad, you know, it was always to like just be authentically who I am, you know.
11:12
SPEAKER_01: And I remember going to Anson as well, and I said, Let's do Ahsoka.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: And he was like, Oh, I thought you'd never ask.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: Because we were doing so much songs together at that point in time, and he was just like, I thought you never asked.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Really?
11:26
SPEAKER_01: My eyes opened big, like, really?
11:28
SPEAKER_01: You would let me do this?
11:30
SPEAKER_01: And he was like, Yeah, and actually around that time I was trying to move to Hawaii.
11:35
Corie: So all right, wait, let me slow walk this dog a little bit.
11:38
Corie: A lot happening right now.
11:41
Corie: This is teenage years, yes?
11:42
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I was 18 years old.
11:44
Corie: What are you going to Hawaii?
11:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, well, I was going to UDT, I was studying opera, right?
11:50
SPEAKER_01: And uh it was fun, I was doing well, and I just felt like if I didn't have any time because the schedule was rigorous, you know, yeah, 5 a.m.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: mornings, coming back home, eight, nine in the night because I was living sandow, so the south traffic was too much.
12:09
SPEAKER_01: And we were in Napa, um in Napa, and it was just really hard that I I just didn't have any time for my music, and I was like, we're gonna find a time to just do my music because yes, opera is great, and getting this degree is great, but it's like it's taking up all my time.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: So I was like, Mom, can I drop out of school?
12:31
SPEAKER_01: She was like, No, I was like, please, can I please drop out of school?
12:35
SPEAKER_01: She's like, in no way you're dropping out of school.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: I was like, All right, okay.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: I linked up with this guy who offered me a record label deal from Hawaii, and all I had to do was just get my visa and get out of here.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: And I went, did not get my visa.
12:52
SPEAKER_01: I had my visa before I was a child, but they were like, nope, you're 18 years old, you're not getting out of here.
12:57
Corie: And I was like, They didn't know you wasn't coming back, you see the writing.
13:01
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
13:03
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, you know what?
13:05
SPEAKER_01: I uh I really want to move to Hawaii, but I wasn't sure because I was like, I'm so young, I'm gonna go out in this world by myself.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: And it did, I was like, you know what?
13:14
SPEAKER_01: What if I try?
13:15
SPEAKER_01: I was just trying to find avenues.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: I was like, what if I tried soca?
13:18
SPEAKER_01: So the same day I went and I asked Anson, let's do a soca.
13:23
SPEAKER_01: He's like, Yes, I thought you'd never ask.
13:25
SPEAKER_01: And then literally, he was like, Oh, I just made this beat called Hawaii.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: Well, I told him the story about Hawaii.
13:31
SPEAKER_01: He was like, Yo, I just made this beat called Hawaii.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: I was like, Are you serious?
13:35
SPEAKER_01: He's like, Yeah, and that was without instrument on it.
13:38
Corie: Oh my god.
13:38
Corie: Thanks, Anson.
13:40
Corie: Appreciate your contribution.
13:43
Corie: Most people don't have that story.
13:45
Corie: Most people try, and I'm not talking about music or or the industry or anything, in anything anybody try, most people don't have that breakthrough with the first thing that they did.
13:54
Corie: Because workout stamped.
13:56
Corie: Classic.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it is a classic.
13:58
Corie: You think yeah, I think so too.
14:00
Corie: I think so too.
14:01
Corie: Classic, classic, classic.
14:02
Corie: And I was here any story about you, not just um at that time you're you're writing.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, I've been I've been a writer for like I think writing is what started my love for music.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was singing from the time I know myself, but you know, my parents would write my music, and I didn't know if I really wanted to do music because you know, it's just something the black ones kind of do, you know.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: So I was just like, okay, we're doing this as because all my siblings sang and did songs like me.
14:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, but they don't do music now because you know, it was just like, all right, we did that as kids, but like, you know, like what now, you know.
14:37
SPEAKER_01: And when I was 11 years old, I went into my aunt's all-female gospel band.
14:43
Corie: Nice.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: And just being around all these female musicians and stuff like that really inspired me to want to learn how to play the guitar.
14:51
SPEAKER_01: And once I learned how to play the guitar, well, in my process, I realized I just started writing a lot, a lot.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: And to the point when I was 15 years old, I had a book of over 300 songs.
15:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like a lot, a lot of songs, and those were just the ones that I liked because I obviously had like a whole bunch of other songs that I didn't write down or I didn't like pay the attention to like those songs.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: And my aunt was like, You don't need to be in my band, you don't, you're not even a Christian, like, get out.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: But I was she was mad that I played Juvet.
15:27
SPEAKER_01: She really was mad that I played Juvet.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: But she was really like, you know, you are doing something so great.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: There's so much music you're writing here.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: You need to just do this, you know.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: And that's when she introduced me to a bunch of different producers, and that's when I really started my journey as a professional artist at 15 years old.
15:46
Corie: God, it was Auntie Name.
15:47
Corie: You need to get people to see.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: Auntie Nehala, yeah.
15:49
SPEAKER_01: She she's the auntie from Auntie Land.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
15:53
Corie: So gospel band at that point in time.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
15:55
Corie: It's a workout.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, work out was later, but like I was doing from 15 to 19 years old because workout was released in December of 2016.
16:07
SPEAKER_01: I was 19 years old.
16:09
SPEAKER_01: And from that four years, I did so much work.
16:15
Corie: I mean, you need some more writing, you need some more physical book that you could you have.
16:18
Corie: You have written things.
16:19
SPEAKER_01: Like written books of like songs, yeah.
16:21
Corie: Yeah, all those things that you keep.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: Of course, my mom, my mom makes sure I keep it.
16:25
Corie: Yeah, she'll make sure.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: That kind of one.
16:28
Corie: Of course, good, good, good.
16:29
Corie: I like that.
16:30
Corie: No, other than just your first song being a breakout, which I want to get back to that story with you meeting KESS, which is to me is a bold move.
16:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:37
Corie: But that would mean that in your first year, releasing your first soaker, you doing your first show as well.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: Um not.
16:43
Corie: Because Soaker Origins was 2017 as well.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: So Origins was 2017.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: I did all of that in that was for my birthday 2017, for my 20th birthday.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: So it was 11 months into my career.
16:55
Corie: Yes.
16:56
Corie: So where again the gumption?
16:57
SPEAKER_01: So like throw your own show and well, things were doing really well.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I feel like if okay, so carnival, I did 40 shows with Kiss that season.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: Mind you, I was mash up.
17:13
SPEAKER_01: Like I was like, oh my god, my poor little voice.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: I sounded terrible.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: I was hoarse.
17:21
SPEAKER_01: I did so monarch.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: Mind you, I didn't want to do so monarch.
17:24
SPEAKER_01: I actually told Anson I'm not doing so monarch because I did uh school soccer monarch and competitions my whole life, from Sunfest to Calypso Monarch to NJ to Tuco to this to that.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: I did so many competitions my childhood years.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: I was against competitions.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: Like name competition, I hate it, right?
17:46
SPEAKER_01: So literally it was like a personal vendetta from like youth trauma, your childhood trauma.
17:52
Corie: You were losing any competition.
17:53
Corie: What makes you against your competition?
17:54
SPEAKER_01: Well, yes.
17:55
SPEAKER_01: I didn't, I didn't win, I didn't win many competitions.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: I think the only competition I really won growing up was School of Rock.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I did school of Nigel Roha, School of Rock.
18:06
SPEAKER_01: I had my band and we won, we won Fresplay, big up Nigel.
18:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I just felt like it was never about the music or the performance, it was always about politics, so it was always about your supporters, or just something other than the performance.
18:23
SPEAKER_01: And I just felt like that rigging aspect was I didn't like it.
18:27
SPEAKER_01: I was I I was against competitions because it just felt like it was always something settled.
18:32
SPEAKER_01: And when the moment you fix one problem, it was another problem because you, you know, you would get the score, and you'd be like, okay, not enough crowd support, but okay, there you see you know what I mean.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: So it's like, does that mean that my song and my performance wasn't good?
18:46
SPEAKER_01: So I had a lot of trauma as a child from doing competitions, so because I did a lot of it, like I actually was making money as a child.
18:55
SPEAKER_01: Like I I was uh I had a nice little bank account of a good I always placed, you know, top five something.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: I had a nice bank account of much from the time I was four years old.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: Your girl was raking in some some cat.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I'm telling you, I was outside so but I still was against it.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and uh as I came into my adult, I said, no, I is my first breakout here.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm not doing a competition.
19:21
SPEAKER_01: He went and signed me up for Sokamona.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: I hear I listened to the radio about the competitors, and I hear nylon black.
19:31
SPEAKER_01: I said, but how I told you no, I was so upset with him.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: I was so upset with him, but I was already in the competition apparently, and I was just like mad, you know, but I did it and I had no voice.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: It was it was a moment where I got so much like flack on social media for sounding terrible, and it it was because I have a high voice as a high song, and my voice was gone because it was my first time in a season doing so many shows, being so many places, being up for so long.
20:05
SPEAKER_01: I was a sleeper by 9 p.m.
20:07
Corie: I'm in my company, you're in good company.
20:11
SPEAKER_01: Nobody could everybody look around, when Hella, oh she's sleeping.
20:14
SPEAKER_01: Yes, that that was me.
20:16
SPEAKER_01: So you're sleeping shop, yeah.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: Being out 2 a.m., 3 a.m.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: in the morning.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: Oh, forget it.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: I was packed up.
20:24
SPEAKER_01: I started having allergies, my body couldn't keep up.
20:27
Corie: So it wasn't difficult enough for you.
20:28
Corie: Were you going to do your own show now?
20:29
Corie: That's so unstressable.
20:31
SPEAKER_01: That was at the end of the year.
20:32
SPEAKER_01: So after the 40 shows for carnival, and then um Easter came, out came by la mommy.
20:39
SPEAKER_01: Baila Mammy went as soon as that.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: Crazy.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: That was like every car that's where I get the mosquito name from.
20:47
Corie: So wait, you pay attention to this mosquito talk?
20:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I mean, it was it, I think it was like I wanna say pop culture in Trinidad.
20:56
SPEAKER_01: That mosquito talk was iconic.
20:58
Corie: Yeah, memes.
20:59
SPEAKER_01: Yes, that was iconic.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna lie.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: So it was funny too, you know.
21:04
SPEAKER_01: No, no, it was hilarious because really, when when the cars pass, and because every car that passed would be playing the song.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: I know.
21:15
SPEAKER_01: I'm telling you.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: So it was like, I heard it, I was like, that definitely does sound like a mosquito.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: And you know, like the DJs would speed up the stuff.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for sure, for sure.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: So it's like it was that them days are no speed limit neither.
21:29
Corie: People need to drive a little while, so you can hear it going.
21:31
Corie: I mean, uh I didn't realize that was so close together.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: So from Carnival to Easter was Carnival to Easter, Bala Mami was like bam, and then by mami rolling to summer.
21:41
SPEAKER_01: Summer was lit.
21:42
SPEAKER_01: It did so many shows that year.
21:45
SPEAKER_01: I literally did a show in every town and village in Trinidad Vegas.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: We were in Icarus, we were in Santa Flora, we were in Poinkumana, we were in Blanchard.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Like I'm telling you, there's not a place in Trinidad.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: I was that yeah, yeah, I was everywhere.
22:06
Corie: I was everywhere enjoying it, you enjoying performing on the movie.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed the hell out of it.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: It was crazy, it was so crazy.
22:13
SPEAKER_01: And imagine, like, right now, like I don't know what really happens during the year in Trinidad because I'm usually traveling gone.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: But I don't know if Trinidad has as many shows as it had back then.
22:25
Corie: Yeah, I guess different time.
22:26
Corie: In and out of carnival.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: It used to have so that year had so many shows, and Turner came out that year with She Bad as well.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: So he and I were like all over the place, like all kinds of nooks and crannies, and when I tell you, pool party here, thing there.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: It was just very, very exciting.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: And then I came out at the end of mid-August with Badish with Shensi.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
22:54
Corie: So it was like Yeah, this is a wheel with no.
22:59
SPEAKER_01: We were on fire.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: We were on fire.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: So that third release really sent me international as well, too, because a lot of like just other islands were just loving like what we're doing.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: I traveled um actually right after carnival, I did Jamaica Carnival with Kess, and then we did um Stephanie Summer with um St.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: Lucia.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: I didn't travel much that year, but you know, there were a good few bitter shows, and then when my birthday was coming around, I was like, I have to celebrate this birthday big.
23:29
SPEAKER_01: Let's do a concert, you know what I mean?
23:31
SPEAKER_01: Then that year, when I said I was outside in Arena Kencrani, I really was, but most of all, I was the boat ride queen.
23:40
SPEAKER_01: I was the if you haven't a boat ride, you need Nyla Blackman.
23:46
SPEAKER_01: If you see, if you heard boat ride, I think my name came shortly after.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: And I tell you, I did, I think I did over 60 boat rides that year to the point where Anson was like, Nyla, you're not a boat ride artist.
23:59
SPEAKER_01: You're a concert artist.
24:01
Corie: A boat ride artist is a thing.
24:02
SPEAKER_01: Let's do your own concert.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: Because you know, like coming from a girl with in the carnival, or that girl that sang with Kess that had a so had a half a song, and then I had Bila Mami, so I had a song and a half.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: Right.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: And then I had Badish, but like nobody wasn't really booking me for the big fets, like, you know, and we knew Carnival was coming around next year.
24:23
SPEAKER_01: So we're like, you know what?
24:24
SPEAKER_01: Even if I'm not getting like the big, big shows as yet, like I still want to have a big show.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: And we did my own concerts, and that was like amazing.
24:35
SPEAKER_01: I want to I think that year I really understood like who supported me and who didn't.
24:39
SPEAKER_01: Um, like who came, you know, it wasn't necessarily a money-making thing, it was just to celebrate my first year out as an artist.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: And many artists came and um blessed my stage.
24:51
SPEAKER_01: And I want to say big up to everyone, even my family, everybody that came out and supported me.
24:56
SPEAKER_01: And and that was when I think things started to change for me, you know, like started to feel like, oh yeah, she's she's a big artist or something like that.
25:04
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
25:05
SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh, okay.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, um, and it was I brought out an entire EP at that day on Soca Urgent.
25:14
SPEAKER_01: So songs like Olado, it songs like Soca, all of them came out at the same time that night.
25:19
Corie: Yeah, I suppose you you you're accustomed to producing at a fast rate.
25:22
Corie: If you've done writing a lot of songs, you yeah, yeah.
25:24
Corie: At that point, you're you're sure that artistry is what you want to do for for life.
25:28
SPEAKER_01: I was a lot sure like a long time before that.
25:31
Corie: Really, really?
25:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, at 15 years old, I was sure.
25:34
Corie: I see.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was I was in it like 400% since back then.
25:38
Corie: So if that's the case, then when you went to UTT, why opera?
25:41
SPEAKER_01: Well, I I wanted to get my bachelor's in music, and I chose fine arts um as my vocals, and vocals was opera.
25:51
SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that when I when I came.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that was your only option for vocals and well that was the only option for vocals, otherwise I could do guitar, but like I wasn't necessarily like my vocals was priority to me versus being a musician.
26:06
SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, that's how it ended up like that.
26:09
Corie: You enjoy it?
26:10
Corie: Like, who knows?
26:10
SPEAKER_01: I really did enjoy it.
26:11
SPEAKER_01: It was it was super fun, but it like part to me was like, okay, this is fun, but like what wasn't fun to me at all.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: No, it was very funny.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: No, it was really fun.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed, I love um learning different languages.
26:23
SPEAKER_01: A lot of it was in Italian and French, and it was that for me was exotic and fun.
26:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm very bougie at heart, right?
26:32
SPEAKER_01: So anything that seems very, you know what I mean?
26:35
SPEAKER_01: Like for me, it was like I'm having fun, you know, but it was like what next?
26:41
SPEAKER_01: Like, are you gonna be an opera singer?
26:43
Corie: No, I'm not.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: Because you have all these songs that you want to do, you know.
26:47
Corie: Of course, of course, of course.
26:48
Corie: Now, as they bring up foreign languages and stuff, travel is something that you you've been doing a lot of.
26:52
Corie: I had Marshall here the other day, and he makes it a point to say, I can't, I can't outwork nylon on them.
26:58
Corie: He uses your name.
26:59
Corie: He says when he sees, he says, he said when them release a song, it's visualizer and video, and then social media push on you say, I can outwork nylon.
27:06
Corie: But that travel schedule.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the travel schedule by itself, I would say half of like when when we get paid to perform in places where yes, the performance is what we're getting paid for, but you're really getting paid to travel because the travel is where the work is at.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: For anybody that thinks like artist lifestyle looks fun, I don't want to burst the bubble, but the try the getting through the airport, the time schedules, the connections, the bags, the packing, the clothes, the meeting, every appearance.
27:42
SPEAKER_01: Because you know, when you land in a country, it's interview, it's this, it's it's it's they have a schedule for you.
27:47
SPEAKER_01: So it's very crazy.
27:49
SPEAKER_01: You have no time for yourself.
27:50
SPEAKER_01: We might make it look fun, but it's it's hard.
27:53
Corie: Are you making it look fun for sure?
27:55
SPEAKER_01: I do make it because you know you have to enjoy your life.
27:57
SPEAKER_01: You have to enjoy life.
27:58
Corie: So, what we're seeing on social media is you really enjoying life.
28:00
Corie: You look happy, you know, only on social media, all these videos and things.
28:03
Corie: This is one of those things that before the camera comes on, it's like, Jesus Christ.
28:06
Corie: Like, you ever see Michael Jackson interview where he was like, I don't want to do this tour.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm gonna be honest, like certain places I'm excited to go.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm excited to go most places, but what I would say is I definitely at some point in time was like, this needs to stop.
28:26
SPEAKER_01: Hence why I'm in Trinidad right now.
28:28
SPEAKER_01: I actually said to my team this year, guys, I need a month.
28:32
SPEAKER_01: I need a month home before I go anywhere because I've never done that.
28:36
SPEAKER_01: As soon as Carnival is done, I'm just on the road, gone.
28:40
SPEAKER_01: And if we allow it, I'll always be gone.
28:44
SPEAKER_01: That's why I'm never home.
28:45
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, do I live here?
28:47
SPEAKER_01: Do I live in Trinidad?
28:48
SPEAKER_01: Like, I I've never moved out of Trinidad and Tobago, but I am not sure if I live here.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: When people ask me, where do you live?
28:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, you know, I don't know.
29:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
29:01
Corie: So I want to go back to some of them early days, right?
29:03
Corie: Uh, but before I get there, guitar, it's self-taught, and you just just learn, you pick up home and yeah.
29:08
SPEAKER_01: So my mom taught me her song called Love Life.
29:12
SPEAKER_01: It was three chords.
29:14
SPEAKER_01: I learned that and I was eager to learn more, but I wasn't, my mom worked a lot, so I wasn't around her as much as I was around my Aunt Nihilette, and my Aunt Marge was always around because you know they were all in the band.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: And my Aunt Marge is a really good guitarist.
29:31
SPEAKER_01: So I went to my Aunt Marge and I asked her, Hey, could you teach me how to play the guitar?
29:36
SPEAKER_01: And she was like, No.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: And I said, What?
29:39
SPEAKER_01: She said, No.
29:40
SPEAKER_01: I said, What do you mean, no?
29:42
SPEAKER_01: She's like, You have to learn on your own.
29:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I have to learn.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: She's like, Yeah, you'll learn better if you learn on your own.
29:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, what do you mean?
29:49
SPEAKER_01: She's like, I can teach you some chords, I guess, but that's it.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, okay, but I did learn on my own.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
29:57
SPEAKER_01: And eventually, when I was like 16 and stuff, I did some other guitar lessons.
30:02
SPEAKER_01: Like I went um by Mr.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: Ford and Aruka and stuff like that.
30:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, but that was like after I'd already learned it.
30:10
SPEAKER_01: Gotcha, gotcha.
30:11
Corie: You're playing.
30:12
Corie: And your writing goes along with you playing, you say.
30:13
Corie: So when you when you're writing now, you play acoustic and write a lot of designs?
30:18
SPEAKER_01: Well, um, I do still, but now I write anyway.
30:22
SPEAKER_01: So I could write to a beat, I could write.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: I mean, a lot of my writing over the years has been on Answins Productions or a production sent to me.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I catch a VAP, sometimes I don't, like with Ponnet this year.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: I really was up at 3 a.m.
30:37
SPEAKER_01: any morning, have no idea why I'm up, and the sound like a song would just come to me.
30:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, especially when I'm walking or in the bathroom.
30:45
SPEAKER_01: Those two things, for whatever reason, bring a lot of inspiration.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay, all right.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: Well, that was yeah, like if you take a good walk, like for whatever reason, that stimulation just like really like makes my brain like hear melodies.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: I don't know why.
31:01
Corie: Yeah, all right.
31:01
Corie: Exercise.
31:02
Corie: This way we have the pivot here.
31:03
Corie: We're not gonna do it in this room.
31:05
Corie: It's not the best place.
31:06
Corie: So let me go back to the early days now, origins.
31:08
Corie: You come from a musical family, that's a my to ask that David Sitax you feel.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: I think I think everybody knows this at some point.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: Um, but actually, there are some people out there that don't know that I come from soccer royalty.
31:22
SPEAKER_01: My grandfather is Rash or TI, the inventor of soccer music.
31:26
SPEAKER_01: My mother six.
31:30
Corie: Important to you to put that out there.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, uh I think it's something I think everybody knows, and I know everybody doesn't know.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
31:39
SPEAKER_01: Because when I tell some people that I uh would assume no, they'd be like, huh, really?
31:43
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, wait, everybody doesn't know this?
31:45
Corie: Are people here or abroad or both?
31:48
Corie: I see.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: So I'm just like, oh, I always thought everybody knew this.
31:51
SPEAKER_01: So that's why I was like, okay, I'll keep saying it because you know, he's my granddad.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: I love him.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
31:58
SPEAKER_01: You know, he he he was a really, really impactful guy.
32:02
Corie: Like do you have memories of him?
32:03
Corie: You you'd have been pretty small anyway.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: I was real I was two and a half when he died.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: And I have so much memories of him.
32:12
SPEAKER_01: I have a very good long-term memory.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: Don't ask me what I did yesterday.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: I don't know why.
32:20
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's just like that, you know.
32:22
SPEAKER_01: And I think like after he died, a lot of things changed, um, just around like in life.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, like when somebody is no longer in the picture, just the things that would have never happened if they were around, like would happen.
32:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, but he was very much somebody who took over everything that was happening.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: So he would make it a point to show up unannounced to get us just because it would annoy my dad.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: Like he'd be like, I'm coming from a grandchildren, you know, so like stuff like that.
32:53
SPEAKER_01: He allowed us to eat KFC, and my my dad never liked us eating meat.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: So he would be like, No, the children need protein, and like, you know, just these things.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: And so, like, just a thing that my dad did that when I grew up, my dad was like, Your grandfather died from eating KFC.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: Like you would tell me, he would tell me stuff like that.
33:13
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, why would you say that?
33:14
Corie: So daddy, keep them guessing.
33:17
SPEAKER_01: It's all about the health, you know.
33:18
Corie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
33:20
Corie: But it's interesting to hear you have those memories of him.
33:22
Corie: I mean, it'll be really small, but you have this sense that he's because everybody describes him as larger than life, consuming the rooms.
33:29
SPEAKER_01: Very much consuming the room.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: I feel like my dad was like that too, you know.
33:32
SPEAKER_01: My dad, Carly Thornhill, was very much.
33:35
SPEAKER_01: I I would say he was a fan of my granddad.
33:38
SPEAKER_01: They didn't really get along very well.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: Um, but he was like a fan who he wanted to have the he wanted us to have the life that he saw my mother have.
33:49
SPEAKER_01: So, like, you know what I mean?
33:52
SPEAKER_01: My grandfather, for people who don't know the story, took my mom and her siblings out of school, moved to the countryside, and basically made them live off the land.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: So it was like off-grid, like going from being Calypso Superstar to that very raw.
34:13
SPEAKER_01: That's when he made his change and became Ra Shorty.
34:17
SPEAKER_01: But before that, he was Lord Shorty, and my dad saw that life and idolized that life and wanted that life so bad.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: But that life, that life was not an easy life.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: So he, I mean, obviously, over a couple of years, you know, over a lot of years, it would have been a decent life to have for them.
34:44
SPEAKER_01: Piparo, he had like a village.
34:46
SPEAKER_01: I want to stop short of saying a cult.
34:49
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
34:50
SPEAKER_01: Um, my grandfather, he was really that influential person that everybody with their families would come up, see, play music, worship God.
35:00
SPEAKER_01: Like it was very, it was very wholesome.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: It was very wholesome.
35:06
SPEAKER_01: And so my dad was like, okay, how do I do my own version of this?
35:12
SPEAKER_01: And that's why I had one of the most unique childhoods where I grew up in the bush as well.
35:19
Corie: Right.
35:20
Corie: But you were born in San Lou?
35:21
SPEAKER_01: I was born in San Lou.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: So how long?
35:23
SPEAKER_01: Um, we lived there for two years until my grandfather went to the hospital, and then we um moved to Belmont to be close to him because he was in Port of Spain General while he had cancer, and he was living in a house in Belmont at that time.
35:41
SPEAKER_01: My mom needed to be close to him to take care of him.
35:44
SPEAKER_01: He had bone cancer, so it was very hard.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: And um for the year that he was going through that transition, and then when he passed, my dad was like, All right, guys, we're going to the bush.
35:56
SPEAKER_01: So I was like four years old when we moved to the country North Coast.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: How do you know I live North?
36:05
SPEAKER_01: I didn't tell you that.
36:07
Corie: I didn't manage reading a big baby than the first thing research and say Naila used to live in La Filette.
36:11
Corie: That's what it's about.
36:12
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I live La Filette close to Chapara Bay.
36:16
SPEAKER_01: And I would say because I was so small, it was some of the most beautiful years of my life.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: I really enjoyed that period of my life.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: But if I was not so small, like my older siblings, it was really, really hard because my dad, we live where we lived, we basically lived in a shock, right?
36:36
SPEAKER_01: We had no doors, we had no running water, we had no electricity.
36:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, off the grid of the floor.
36:42
SPEAKER_01: It was off the grid, like fully.
36:45
SPEAKER_01: We had to go to the river to wash our clothes.
36:48
SPEAKER_01: Like it was really, and my aunts and uncles, knowing that they came from that life, they were like, This is we are in we are in 2000 and something.
36:59
SPEAKER_01: Like there's things, there's things like y'all don't need to live like this, you know.
37:04
SPEAKER_01: And they were always like very concerned because they know about that life way back when, like in the 80s and stuff.
37:10
Corie: It's our internet, it's no, yeah, it's a different world.
37:13
SPEAKER_01: It's a different world, but we live that life in like current modern times.
37:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, times where you know, actually, to go to school, I would have to iron with you know those like block irons that you put on a fire, and yeah, the coal, what's it called?
37:27
Corie: Yeah, they would usually heat it up over coals.
37:29
Corie: Yeah, so even though some older people still say a heater, they always say iron.
37:33
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
37:33
SPEAKER_01: We might my I ironed my butt I didn't do it, but yeah, you see a big loan.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was that was the type of life we lived.
37:41
SPEAKER_01: I learned to sew on those pedal machines.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: Oh serious in this era, in this era, you know the one that you have to do your foot like that, yeah.
37:49
Corie: Well, a lady called Mummy Janet, she's about 150 years old now.
37:52
Corie: That is no thing you're talking about, you know.
37:54
SPEAKER_01: David's on that, David is so and and to be honest, my dad was like a health freak, right?
38:01
SPEAKER_01: So he was like, everybody will be fit, everybody will be healthy, nobody will have diseases.
38:06
SPEAKER_01: And we woke up 5 a.m.
38:09
SPEAKER_01: every morning.
38:10
SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, we were vegetarian, well, Pascatarian.
38:14
SPEAKER_01: Um, we woke up 5 a.m.
38:15
SPEAKER_01: every morning.
38:16
SPEAKER_01: We had devotion where we would um sing and pray, and then from 5:30, we were running.
38:24
SPEAKER_01: We would run, swim across the ocean, and run back up, and he would time us like to see like what's your time.
38:31
SPEAKER_01: And then by six, you had to do your chores.
38:37
SPEAKER_01: You had to do your chores, and then you had to get ready for school.
38:41
SPEAKER_01: And mind you, he had a car, but you had to walk to school.
38:45
SPEAKER_01: You had to walk, he was not dropping you to school.
38:48
Corie: I see, so he was in the normal school system, you said it wasn't normal schooling.
38:50
Corie: Okay, no.
38:51
SPEAKER_01: Um, he did take me out of school midway through because he decided I was special and that I needed special care, which I was.
39:00
SPEAKER_01: I was an artist, everybody could see.
39:02
SPEAKER_01: But you know, my dad was a very educated man, he had his master's, and uh he that's a long story.
39:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, moving on.
39:11
Corie: Yeah, no, but it's funny that you bring up uh your grandfather's influence on him, even though they say they might not get along.
39:17
Corie: But what at the time, as you rightly said, that idea of a a superstar that is Israel the equivalent of you now saying, I've given up all this, I'm gonna live in the hills with my family and stuff.
39:28
Corie: It was a huge, it was a national thing, and it inspired a lot of people to maybe rethink capitalism and rethink life and rethink living off the land and those things.
39:36
Corie: So it's huge, it's interesting to hear you because I always wondered if you like grew up in the hills and them kind of things too.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: I did, yeah.
39:42
Corie: You had your own bunch of.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: We had to plant, we I know how to plant cassava with the sticks, you cut them, put it in the ground.
39:48
SPEAKER_01: I know how to light a fire from scratch.
39:50
SPEAKER_00: Really?
39:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know how to cut down a tree.
39:52
SPEAKER_01: I know how to do a lot of things, uh-uh.
39:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, things that people my age don't know how to do.
39:57
Corie: Uh well, your age, most people don't, most people don't know how to do what you're talking about.
40:03
Corie: You feel like you have interest in doing that, like going back to that?
40:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, does it look like that?
40:07
SPEAKER_01: Oh no.
40:08
SPEAKER_01: I have no interest in that.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: I have interest in luxury.
40:12
SPEAKER_01: I like luxury.
40:15
SPEAKER_01: Uh uh.
40:16
SPEAKER_01: I like money as well, too.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: I like the things that money can buy.
40:19
Corie: I with you, I with you.
40:20
Corie: So, what age is that?
40:21
Corie: From what what age you would have been doing?
40:23
SPEAKER_01: Um that was like from five years old to 11 years old.
40:26
SPEAKER_01: I see, yeah, I see.
40:27
Corie: And then after primary school, by primary school, if you say at four years old, you're done in competitions and you're doing stuff.
40:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um, you're from it's what primary school competitions, what what it was competitions my entire life, all the way up to form five in high school.
40:42
Corie: So what what secondary school you went to?
40:43
SPEAKER_01: I went to real clarity secondary, bah, bah, bah.
40:47
Corie: Oh, this is a good thing.
40:49
Corie: Well, I would I would say because you know mine.
40:53
SPEAKER_01: I would say I I really enjoyed my country life because I think it made me the artist that I am today.
41:00
SPEAKER_01: If I didn't live such a if I didn't live such an off-grid type life, I probably would have been more preoccupied with other things and not be so I was very obsessed and consumed with music.
41:13
SPEAKER_01: From the time I was 13 years old, I was never well, I lived Rio Clara at that point in time.
41:19
Corie: Yeah, oh yeah, there's a big movement.
41:21
SPEAKER_01: My parents split up and my mom was like, let's go to the furthest place that your dad can't find us.
41:26
SPEAKER_01: So that's literally what she did.
41:30
SPEAKER_01: And uh we we went to Rio Clara, she got a job in in the high school, and uh it was it was fun, it was fun, um, but then I also hated it low-key because I was a teenager.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: So um I wanted to do things and I didn't really have friends in Rio Clara.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: Most of my friends were like friends from everyone because I was a child that was everywhere.
41:55
SPEAKER_01: Like my mom used to take me to the Calypso tent with her.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: I used to be with my aunts everywhere, with the girls' band everywhere, with like I was just all over.
42:06
SPEAKER_01: My brother, Siobon, he moved down from America.
42:10
SPEAKER_01: His daughter and I were like best friends.
42:12
SPEAKER_01: So she grew up in that very West white world of Trinidad, I would say.
42:18
SPEAKER_01: And I was part of that world as well, too.
42:20
SPEAKER_01: So I was just kind of like everywhere, but then going back to Rio Claro, it was just it was just a very interesting life.
42:26
SPEAKER_01: And you know, I grew up with a lot of rich kids, um, but I wasn't, I never had money.
42:32
SPEAKER_01: We were never like financially um well off in any type of way, and I just had my music and it just always grounded me and kept me very hopeful and dreaming and feeling excited about life.
42:47
SPEAKER_01: So I would reach the school late every single day, every single day.
42:55
SPEAKER_01: They used to call me the principal, actually.
42:57
Corie: You roll in when you're ready.
42:58
SPEAKER_01: I roll in whenever I feel like like there was a time that I came to school at lunchtime and they watched me and they say, Nah, you beat your lunchtime.
43:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, lunchtime kind of late.
43:08
SPEAKER_01: They said, Naila, you outdid yourself this time.
43:10
SPEAKER_01: I was like, Yeah, I know.
43:11
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, but I was always coming from the furthest point of Trinidad and Tobago.
43:16
SPEAKER_01: So like I would do band rehearsal every Wednesday evening in Aruca, and I would stay the night in Shagonas, and I would be in Port of Spain on Fridays.
43:29
SPEAKER_01: Every Friday I would head to Port of Spain.
43:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, I'd be in San Fernando every weekend by my brother, and like I was always headed to school from some other parts of the country, not real Clara.
43:44
SPEAKER_01: There were a few days that I'd be coming from real, but very.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she's like two and three hours late.
44:03
SPEAKER_01: Like, what's happening?
44:04
SPEAKER_01: And I always had to explain it.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: I always had to be like, you know what?
44:08
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing music.
44:09
Corie: Of course, of course, of course, of course.
44:11
Corie: Even some of the things they say, like when you talk about hopeful and dreaming and music, those things don't fit well with our secondary school system.
44:17
SPEAKER_01: At all.
44:17
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't work very well.
44:19
SPEAKER_01: So they didn't really support me when coming to the competitions because they're like, you're not a good student anyway.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: No, no, they didn't have it.
44:29
SPEAKER_01: But I still love the school and I still love a lot of the people that were in the school.
44:33
SPEAKER_01: But I couldn't wait to get out, huh?
44:34
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
44:35
SPEAKER_01: But in hindsight, I was like, oh, this was great.
44:37
SPEAKER_01: You know, but while I was there, I was like, Gabby, out of here, you know.
44:42
Corie: You can talk about Abby's influence on your life, your mom.
44:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, first of all, my mom is like a superhuman.
44:48
SPEAKER_01: I don't know how she did what she did.
44:52
SPEAKER_01: And I think that I want to see somebody else do it because I believe that she is absolutely Wonder Woman.
45:00
SPEAKER_01: She was always a super hands-on mom, like in every form of fashion.
45:05
SPEAKER_01: My mom made me breakfast every morning.
45:08
SPEAKER_01: She made me dinner every single night.
45:10
SPEAKER_01: Like, as a woman who had three and four jobs to make ends meet, also working in the tent in Port of Spain, living in Rio Claro, also teaching Best Village in Beach, um, Guaguiari, and Rio Claro.
45:28
SPEAKER_01: Like, she was somebody who, when she had no money for us to go to school on her way to her teaching job, she would make pies on a morning and sell it at the maxi stand just to make a little extra money.
45:42
SPEAKER_01: Like, and she had three of my my siblings and I, her three children, and she adopted a fourth child.
45:52
SPEAKER_01: My sister, she adopted her, like as a teenager because her parents died.
45:58
SPEAKER_01: And like, that's the kind of woman who would literally do anything for anyone, like a heart of cold.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: I think as a teacher, she had a huge impact on her students as well, to the point where they would be showing up at my house and I'd be like, yo, this is not school time.
46:15
SPEAKER_01: Get out of here.
46:16
SPEAKER_01: Like, what are you doing here, you know?
46:17
SPEAKER_01: And they'd be like, Miss Abby, I come to check you.
46:21
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I used to be, I used to get jealous.
46:23
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, this is my mom, my mom time.
46:25
SPEAKER_01: They would like, they loved my mom so much.
46:28
SPEAKER_01: She had such a big impact musically on so many children's life, to the point where today I will still meet people in the streets or wherever, and they'd be like, Oh, um, your mom was my teacher.
46:38
SPEAKER_01: I love her so much.
46:40
SPEAKER_01: Like school was hard, and I think she just made life easier and brighter, especially for country kids who like life just seemed really daunting, and like everything is rules and boxes, and she was kind of just the person who said, Okay, let's take the rules and make them fun.
46:59
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
47:00
SPEAKER_01: She's really just that person to make any situation light and nice, and she was just always making a space for me to be an artist because she felt like growing up being the first of 14 children.
47:14
Corie: Well to go do your opinion, you know.
47:17
SPEAKER_01: Being the first of 14, life was really hard for her, and she couldn't put her artistry first, yeah.
47:23
SPEAKER_01: And she was like, That'll never happen to you, Naila.
47:26
Corie: I understand, but you know what's unique?
47:28
Corie: Like, just reading, looking as a fan from the outside, her name was the first black man name that we heard as a superstar.
47:35
Corie: You know, so I mean, that's an enormous amount of pressure I would think for anybody because of, as you say, your consuming years, who he was nationally, and so forth.
47:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she was the first um 14-year-old to win the Calypso Queens, youngest Calypso Queen ever.
47:49
SPEAKER_01: They gave she won the competition.
47:51
SPEAKER_01: You're supposed to be 18 years and older, and they didn't ask her age because she looked big.
47:57
SPEAKER_01: They assumed she was older, and she won.
48:01
SPEAKER_01: And literally, yeah, she was the first like artist in Trinidad to like model for brands.
48:08
SPEAKER_01: She modeled for Kapolani and that's at that time.
48:13
SPEAKER_01: That was a big fashion brand.
48:15
SPEAKER_01: She was like an influenza for back in the day.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: She used to do school tours, like she had her real superstar days, and then my grandfather took her and carried her to the bush.
48:25
SPEAKER_01: I was like, no.
48:26
Corie: Yeah, you know for that.
48:27
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I see.
48:28
SPEAKER_01: Yes, he'd done all that.
48:29
Corie: He done it.
48:30
Corie: So she had it done too.
48:31
Corie: I like that.
48:32
Corie: I suppose it'll be a man.
48:32
Corie: You had a run of that.
48:34
SPEAKER_01: I thought that was too much.
48:35
SPEAKER_01: I thought, like, like, how could you take everything away from her?
48:38
Corie: You know, that was rough.
48:39
Corie: Particularly for artists like we were talking about before, you know, that expression and so on.
48:43
Corie: But so much of what you say connects to to the life that you're talking about her living.
48:47
Corie: Yeah.
48:48
Corie: Because children is something that I've noticed that it has a it plays on you.
48:52
Corie: I hear when you talk about children.
48:53
Corie: I see when you show up in these schools and so on.
48:56
Corie: I see you have children's book somewhere in the mix la la la and is what it is.
49:00
Corie: Yeah.
49:00
SPEAKER_01: Um, that book came during COVID, and I was really excited because on my second year of being an artist 2018, I did uh my own children's concert because you know I am very ambitious, but you know, I would say the team is ambitious.
49:15
SPEAKER_01: Anson is right there with me.
49:17
SPEAKER_01: We have a lot of, you know, like when you meet your tribe and your tribe is like feeding into your madness.
49:23
SPEAKER_01: Like that's what happened when Anson and I linked up, to be honest.
49:28
SPEAKER_01: And we did our own children's concert.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: It was very expensive and it was a lot of work, and it it was just a lot, you know.
49:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, it was very successful, and we felt like, wow, this is so great.
49:41
SPEAKER_01: We wish we could do it again, but it was just so hard.
49:44
SPEAKER_01: We were like, I don't think we could do this again, you know what I mean?
49:48
SPEAKER_01: So when COVID came, we found a way for Lala to live on because Lala was my childhood nickname.
49:54
SPEAKER_00: Right.
49:55
SPEAKER_01: The name of the event was Lala Lan, and they always used to say, La la la la, La La La La, Naila's world.
50:05
SPEAKER_01: Naila has her goldfish.
50:08
SPEAKER_01: Her crazy.
50:10
SPEAKER_01: It was really Lala.
50:13
SPEAKER_01: That was that was my childhood nickname, and uh I just remember everybody always like, Naila, you always in La La Lana.
50:21
SPEAKER_01: And like they used to say it in this bad way, like you just living in your own world.
50:26
SPEAKER_01: And when I thought about, you know, what I was becoming, I always felt like if I didn't live in my own world, I would never be the person that I am today.
50:35
SPEAKER_01: And that was so important for every child to have that freedom to be themselves and to live in La La Land.
50:41
SPEAKER_01: Because when you look at the stress a lot of kids are going through these days, how could they be functional adults if they don't get the time to be a child?
50:50
SPEAKER_01: A real child, you know what I mean?
50:53
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, that's so important.
50:55
SPEAKER_01: I want to create a space for that.
50:57
SPEAKER_01: I want to create and and Lala is not done.
50:59
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's it's still definitely more to come because it's something that is my passion and just forging because the children are our future, you know what I mean, and how we shape them and mold them dictates the kind of inventors and creators and engineers and what society will look like.
51:21
Corie: Exactly.
51:22
Corie: Like a lot of people say the children are the future.
51:23
Corie: So congrats on doing something for them, and I'll I see how they look at you.
51:27
Corie: You see, we were talking about the auntie thing before, my cut is part of, but they see always look at you, you know.
51:32
Corie: It's important for them to see because you talk about the tent, for instance, and um the tent used to have the children's show and those things.
51:40
Corie: I remember is it Nikki Land and Tim Tim used to have one, but no, you don't see much of it, you know, since at First.
51:46
SPEAKER_01: They were all doing it very much charity-like, of course it would be.
51:50
SPEAKER_01: It's not something that makes money like that, and it's something you just have to have a passion for.
51:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's very expensive because you know you have to get Bonxy Castle and this and that, and it also has to be safe.
52:02
SPEAKER_01: Of course, you also have to it's a lot of a lot of overheads that let's say normal events don't have.
52:10
SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, it's kids, you can't really charge them an arm and a leg.
52:13
SPEAKER_01: You can't say this is the best.
52:18
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: Do an all-inclusive section, all inclusive kids show up to something answers.
52:28
Corie: 10% answers.
52:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but it it's something that you know we we did and we enjoyed and we loved.
52:37
SPEAKER_01: But um, during COVID, I said, I want to tell the story of my very first carnival, and also to have a carnival story international for a child.
52:47
SPEAKER_01: So this is actually the very first book that is a children's book that's talking about carnival and trinidad and culture, Trin Begonian culture.
52:56
SPEAKER_01: It is something that it's um distributed by Penguin Random House.
53:01
SPEAKER_01: So it's like you could get it at Target, you could get it at Barnes and Noble.
53:05
Corie: Those big publishers, right?
53:06
Corie: Absolutely children's books, yeah.
53:08
SPEAKER_01: So it's like it's legit.
53:09
SPEAKER_01: And I I felt very proud to be able to do something like that.
53:12
Corie: Yeah, congrats on the though.
53:13
Corie: I don't know if I'm like, oh, you're gonna penguin.
53:15
Corie: How do these things happen?
53:16
Corie: Because this is not normal.
53:17
SPEAKER_01: You know what we do?
53:18
SPEAKER_01: We we spend a lot of money to be in a lot of unique places that is not necessarily like the normal Caribbean circle, and we just spend time working, building relationships, and I have a lot of really people in high places that know who I am and follow my journey and are rooting for me and support me.
53:42
SPEAKER_01: And it's not something like you know, or like somebody who you need anything from.
53:49
SPEAKER_01: It's just a friend, just somebody who you check for and they check for you.
53:54
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes those relationships pay off, you know.
53:57
Corie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
53:57
Corie: And I I could understand now because I noticed that there's a glossary that tells you about like things like bacchanal, like explaining some of the towns.
54:04
SPEAKER_01: So you're you're yeah, because you're not gonna know these things.
54:07
SPEAKER_01: Like people from abroad they may not understand what carnival is about, they may not understand exactly what the steel pan is and where it came from, or you know, like bacchanal or like lime or all these things.
54:19
SPEAKER_01: It's very trendy, yeah.
54:20
Corie: Yeah, we take it for granted.
54:21
SPEAKER_01: We do take it for granted.
54:22
Corie: Yeah, we feel like everybody should know.
54:23
Corie: And you know what we do well too?
54:25
Corie: It's like, you don't know what's bacchanal?
54:27
Corie: Like almost like if somebody's a born like, are you dumb?
54:32
Corie: As a people, we don't make joke with it.
54:33
Corie: I want to come back to that because it explains a lot to me about the way you create and the way your team creates that you're not thinking of the Trinidad market alone.
54:40
Corie: But I had to ask you like school days, all you do in school, you didn't go to school much, you do your passes, people's subjects, and things or hold on.
54:46
SPEAKER_01: I surprisingly got all my pass.
54:49
SPEAKER_01: No, I didn't.
54:49
SPEAKER_01: I I failed one because I didn't show up to the exam because I paid this, but FA.
54:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
54:59
SPEAKER_01: Um, that was Spanish, and that was my big, that's my biggest regret in life right now.
55:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because I'm learning Spanish right now, actually in my adult life, taking so much time.
55:08
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, you know what?
55:09
SPEAKER_01: My form, she was my form teacher, my Spanish teacher.
55:12
SPEAKER_01: She said, Nyla, you will regret this.
55:14
SPEAKER_01: And I said, No, I won't.
55:16
SPEAKER_01: But you know what?
55:17
SPEAKER_01: I definitely do.
55:18
SPEAKER_01: So, Miss Ford, if you're seeing this, I do regret this.
55:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, I did regret it.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: And she she was a great teacher, but I never, I never made her class because I was always late.
55:28
Corie: She was literally she was only first.
55:30
SPEAKER_01: She was always in the first period, and I never made it.
55:33
SPEAKER_01: So I was like, damn, I'm not gonna pass this exam.
55:35
Corie: And you know, them is when you're brain young, 90 times a little language, you know it's hard when you see it.
55:40
SPEAKER_01: Yo, I was like, why didn't you take this off opportunity?
55:45
Corie: Yeah, yeah.
55:46
SPEAKER_01: You had it, you had it, yeah.
55:47
Corie: Of course, of course.
55:48
Corie: That's how we go.
55:49
Corie: Regrets, yeah, you know.
55:51
Corie: So yeah, at that time you leave in school, you have intention to go to university.
55:54
Corie: I think 45 minutes already.
55:56
Corie: All right, sorry.
55:56
Corie: You have intention to go to school and and stuff like tertiary, yeah.
56:00
SPEAKER_01: Well, I oh I told my mom I need a year off.
56:03
SPEAKER_01: My mom was like, university is non-negotiable because she didn't get, she wanted the opportunity.
56:10
SPEAKER_01: Remember, they did they got taken out of school, so all she was very big on education is the way because you uh artist life is hard.
56:18
SPEAKER_01: I don't want you to live the life I lived.
56:21
SPEAKER_01: And uh I was like, okay, pause.
56:25
SPEAKER_01: I'll just need one year to gallivant myself.
56:28
SPEAKER_01: And I took at 16 because I finished high school young.
56:33
SPEAKER_01: My mom paid, and no mom does this, mind you.
56:36
SPEAKER_01: I said, Mommy, I can't live here, Clara.
56:38
SPEAKER_01: She paid for me to rent an apartment in Aruka with my sister.
56:43
SPEAKER_01: Right.
56:44
SPEAKER_01: And she paid for me to go to um guitar lessons, piano lessons, dance classes, acting classes.
56:52
SPEAKER_01: So that entire year I was just developing myself, writing songs, living like I was basically living on my own because my older sister she worked a lot, so it was basically just me there.
57:04
Corie: I was gonna ask when this partying thing starts based on a record.
57:07
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, no, no.
57:07
SPEAKER_01: This partying starts a long time.
57:09
SPEAKER_01: This party, this partying start from 14 years old.
57:13
SPEAKER_01: I was outside, my boy.
57:15
SPEAKER_01: I was outside.
57:17
SPEAKER_01: And to the point where when I got to 18 years old, I was tired and I was like, damn, how much more partying can you do?
57:22
SPEAKER_01: Like, I was like, okay, I'm ready to be serious about life.
57:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, yeah.
57:25
Corie: Hell of a way to get serious because a wrong 18 is what go to.
57:28
SPEAKER_01: Because you yeah, because I did everything there was to do.
57:30
SPEAKER_01: I went every party, I went every club, I did everything.
57:33
SPEAKER_01: I it was like you can't just do the same thing over and over.
57:36
SPEAKER_01: It's like, okay, now I got it.
57:38
SPEAKER_01: This was so fun, let's do something else.
57:40
Corie: Gotcha.
57:41
Corie: Yeah.
57:41
Corie: So by that time, you now had into a real adult life.
57:44
Corie: I mean, you start early by yourself into an adult life or wrong 18 legally now, right?
57:48
Corie: And um you do an opera in school, you went through gospel, you do jambo music and things.
57:54
Corie: That was you, you're there for all that.
57:56
Corie: So you had to.
57:58
Corie: So you had you had genres in mind when you were writing before, like before you tried to do soccer, or you were just well, I had my style.
58:06
SPEAKER_01: I have my style, and this is a style that is still unknown to everybody that knows me.
58:13
SPEAKER_01: They don't know this side of me.
58:15
SPEAKER_01: They're the OGs that know me from before singing cigarettes and you know, all of that.
58:22
SPEAKER_01: But my musical style was very alternative, very singer-songwriter.
58:26
SPEAKER_01: I would say rock influence kind of, but more alternative than anything.
58:31
SPEAKER_01: I call it Caribbean folk because I still had my Trin Begonian flair.
58:35
SPEAKER_01: Um and it was guitar, so it was singer-songwriter, indie, for lack of a better word, to describe it.
58:43
SPEAKER_01: I guess alternative is now indie now, so you know um that was my style, and that's what I just innately started writing from one playing the guitar, and then two, just my influences.
58:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'd love Taylor Swift and Natasha Benefield and um Lily Allen and Nellie Fattado.
59:05
Corie: That was in my mind, you listen to Shorty every day, you know.
59:09
Corie: That's what they've had.
59:09
Corie: You can't listen to nothing else but kaiso.
59:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I listened to a lot of kaiso growing up, but I really, I really was more of an alternative rock um uh cranberries.
59:22
SPEAKER_01: Like that was white girl together.
59:25
SPEAKER_01: Why do you call it white?
59:26
SPEAKER_01: It's not white.
59:27
SPEAKER_01: It's not white.
59:27
SPEAKER_01: First of all, can we just say that it's can we just say that it's cultured?
59:32
SPEAKER_01: Why do we say white?
59:33
SPEAKER_01: Why do we use that word?
59:34
Corie: That's a very every band you call it so far.
59:37
SPEAKER_01: Natasha Benefield is Hispanic.
59:40
Corie: Oh, yeah, well, this might use here nowadays.
59:42
SPEAKER_01: See, I don't see um I just see like you know, or okay, so there's people like Asha, like Angeli Kojo, like I love different type music.
59:54
SPEAKER_01: Like I love world music a lot, so like nah, um, like um rhythms from Africa, like Sally Kata.
1:00:01
SPEAKER_01: You may not know these people.
1:00:04
Corie: You just had a nod and smiling.
1:00:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that's why I call people that you would more know.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I understand.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: Because you see, you would more know the white, you know what I'm saying?
1:00:13
SPEAKER_01: I I loved a lot of different things, you know what I mean?
1:00:16
SPEAKER_01: And uh I just created what sounded like me.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_01: Like I didn't try.
1:00:22
SPEAKER_01: Like when I went to write a song, I never tried to write a song.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_01: I opened my mouth and a song came out.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_01: It was like God-given talent, I would say.
1:00:31
Corie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:00:31
SPEAKER_01: You know?
1:00:32
Corie: So same for Workouts.
1:00:33
Corie: I want to go back to this thing with how you're gangster kissing again in any song.
1:00:37
SPEAKER_01: Oh, after so that in that session with Anson, there was another art artist writer named Zone in the session, and he and I would have basically he wrote Kess parts.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_01: Well, before, yeah, he wrote Kess parts and I wrote my parts.
1:00:55
SPEAKER_01: And uh basically, and Anson helped us both with you know constructing melodies and stuff like that.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_01: He's a melody boss, and we did that in a half an hour, it was quick.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_01: Like, we wrote that song like literally in a half an hour.
1:01:13
SPEAKER_01: That song was done, top to bottom, we never over a whole song, right?
1:01:18
SPEAKER_01: And then Anson was like, Well, because Zone was there and he was singing with you, he was like, Yo, you should do this as a collab.
1:01:25
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Really?
1:01:26
SPEAKER_01: He's like, Yeah, he had just done memory for Marshall Montano, and I had uh done background vocals actually on memory because that's how Anson and I worked.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_01: We I would do backgrounds for him and he would produce songs for me.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_01: It was like a barter system because ain't no free beats out here.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_01: That's what he said.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_01: He was like, ain't no free beats, you have to work for your keep, you know what I mean?
1:01:48
SPEAKER_01: I liked the professionalism, it was very um, he was very on point with the way he did things.
1:01:52
SPEAKER_01: So I would come do background vocals for whatever song he was working on, and then he would give me my studio time as an artist.
1:01:59
SPEAKER_01: And uh he was like, yo, you know, I just did that song with Marshall, like I could probably get Marshall on this song for you.
1:02:07
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Well, you know, I think I would like to do the song with Kess.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_01: And he was like, Kess, how are you even gonna get Kess on the song?
1:02:14
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I think I could get him on a song.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_01: He's like, You know Kess?
1:02:16
SPEAKER_01: I was like, No, I don't know Kess.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_01: He was like, but Kess kind of funny, you know.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, What do you mean?
1:02:20
SPEAKER_01: He's like, Yeah, like he does he doesn't just do any song, and I was like, but he would do this song.
1:02:24
SPEAKER_01: He's like, Okay, what make you feel?
1:02:26
SPEAKER_01: He's like, Do you know him?
1:02:27
SPEAKER_01: I was like, no, but I could get him.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_01: He's like, okay, delusional girl, right?
1:02:34
SPEAKER_01: So he said the song to Marshall, right?
1:02:37
SPEAKER_01: Um Marshall heard it.
1:02:40
SPEAKER_01: He says a good song, it's song.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, Angela, I don't know, maybe I might, you know, he kind of beat around.
1:02:48
SPEAKER_01: Two weeks later, I was working by Johan, and I was actually doing a Johan Seater and Mad Men, Bap Bap, love Johan.
1:02:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, so he was like, Oh, um, we we did a song called Kills, which was actually on my first EP, Johan and I.
1:03:04
SPEAKER_01: And uh then Kes came into the studio that night to record a song because he worked a lot with Johan back then.
1:03:12
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Kes, fancy seeing you here tonight.
1:03:17
SPEAKER_01: And he was like, hi, do I know you?
1:03:19
SPEAKER_01: I was like, no, you don't.
1:03:21
SPEAKER_01: My name is Nyla.
1:03:22
SPEAKER_01: I shaked his hand.
1:03:23
Corie: Wait, wait, you say Nyla alone or black man too?
1:03:25
SPEAKER_01: No, I just said Nyla.
1:03:26
SPEAKER_01: My name is Nyla.
1:03:26
SPEAKER_01: I I you know, I'm come on, I still, when I meet people, I still say my name is Nila.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_01: Because my name is Nila.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_01: Imagine if I'm like, I'm Nyla Blackman, like that's kind of weird, you know.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_01: Like, even though me.
1:03:36
Corie: I wouldn't say I'm blackman, Nyla, my grandfather.
1:03:41
Corie: They open doors immediately.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_01: Nah, because because that's not really how it, that's not really how people, like, that's not my vibe.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't try hard.
1:03:48
SPEAKER_01: Like everything I get in this life is from my energy.
1:03:52
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
1:03:53
SPEAKER_01: So Kess was, I mean, Johan was like, Kes, this girl have a song.
1:03:57
SPEAKER_01: Oh no, actually, no, I was like, first.
1:03:59
SPEAKER_01: I was like, Kess, did you hear the song I sent for you?
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: He's like, You sent a song for me?
1:04:02
SPEAKER_01: I was like, yeah.
1:04:03
SPEAKER_01: He's like, no, I didn't hear it.
1:04:05
SPEAKER_01: Johan was like, oh yeah, it real bad.
1:04:08
SPEAKER_01: Let me play it for you right now.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: He was like, Yeah.
1:04:10
SPEAKER_01: He was like, Yeah, let's just chill.
1:04:13
SPEAKER_00: This is a good thing.
1:04:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so he was like, okay, we record Kes recorded a song.
1:04:18
SPEAKER_01: I then did background vocals again on the song that Kess did.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_01: We vibing, we chillin' whole night.
1:04:23
SPEAKER_01: Kes was like, All right, let me hear that song you had for me.
1:04:26
SPEAKER_01: He was ready for it then, right?
1:04:28
SPEAKER_01: Johan played him the song, he's like, it's a good song.
1:04:31
SPEAKER_01: He said it's a very good song, but the male part of it needs some work.
1:04:37
SPEAKER_01: At that point in time, I was like, cool, I pull out my guitar, I start singing my songs.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_01: Kess and I are jamming, all of a sudden he's freestyling, I'm singing, we're just like vibing, like it's just a good time.
1:04:49
SPEAKER_01: And then after all of that vibe session, he was like, Yeah, I'll do the song, but that that male part needs some work.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, okay, I called Anson immediately.
1:04:58
SPEAKER_01: It was like 2 a.m.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_01: in the morning.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_01: I was like, no, it was like 12.
1:05:02
SPEAKER_01: I was like, yo, Kes said he'll do the song, the male part needs some work.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_01: That exact same night, Anson mustered up in the studio, same zone who originally wrote the male part, Pready, who is his brother, Mikhail Teja and himself, and they rewrote the male part by the morning.
1:05:19
SPEAKER_01: By the morning, they sent him a new version to the song.
1:05:24
SPEAKER_01: And Kess was like, Yeah, they're slapping, let me do it.
1:05:27
SPEAKER_01: And he took his time, he took his time, but he cut the song.
1:05:32
Corie: Yeah, boy.
1:05:33
Corie: Classic.
1:05:34
Corie: Yeah, yeah, thanks for admitting that.
1:05:37
Corie: No, life changing, no, yeah.
1:05:40
Corie: And and you're you're you're into what I mean, three rally bangers at a point in time.
1:05:44
Corie: But our third one was with with Chen C.
1:05:46
Corie: You have a similar story with Chen C or two.
1:05:48
Corie: That wasn't planned, no?
1:05:49
SPEAKER_01: No, well, no, it wasn't planned.
1:05:51
SPEAKER_01: Um, she was coming to Trinidad for the first time for an event, actually, Hollywood sat, she was putting on in um a club in Sando.
1:05:59
SPEAKER_01: Um He booked me for the event as well.
1:06:02
SPEAKER_01: And he wanted me to do a radio tour with her.
1:06:05
SPEAKER_01: And in my mind, I was like, I don't want to say no, you know, but why am I doing a radio tour just for an event?
1:06:10
SPEAKER_01: Like, that makes no sense.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_01: But like, why do I have to do it with her?
1:06:13
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I was like, if we have a song, if we had a song, it might make sense.
1:06:20
SPEAKER_01: And literally, I was like, let's make a song for her.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_01: And we made the song that exact same day.
1:06:26
SPEAKER_01: That was the same day he got the call to do the radio tour, mind you.
1:06:29
SPEAKER_01: We were already in the studio.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_01: We worked on his song.
1:06:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, Anson reached out to Romish, which is her producer.
1:06:35
SPEAKER_01: Well, true sachie, because he was already talking to her manager.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_01: Um, she was set to come the next day because it was the day after.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_01: I think this was like a Friday.
1:06:44
SPEAKER_01: This was a Thursday, and they were coming on the Friday.
1:06:47
SPEAKER_01: The show was on the Sunday, and uh oh no, the show was on the Saturday, and then there was another show in Tobago on Sunday.
1:06:55
SPEAKER_01: And I was doing both events with her because you know she had Lodi with Cartel.
1:06:59
SPEAKER_01: I was a big song, but we basically did the song, she wrote her part on the plane to Trinidad.
1:07:08
SPEAKER_01: The night that she came, she recorded the song Friday night.
1:07:12
SPEAKER_01: The show was Saturday, we performed the song on Saturday, we went to Bago.
1:07:15
SPEAKER_01: In the day to Bago, we shot Piece of the Music video, and then we performed the song again the same night.
1:07:22
Corie: Oh, for the next second party show.
1:07:23
Corie: Yeah, but these things don't happen.
1:07:25
Corie: Do you talk about this real matter of fact?
1:07:27
SPEAKER_01: Like, we're just so Shansea just say, Yeah, she just Well, the thing about it was that Shansea was a brand new artist.
1:07:31
SPEAKER_01: Like Lodi was Lodi was her was like her third song.
1:07:35
SPEAKER_01: I think she had like two songs on her own before that song with Cartel.
1:07:38
SPEAKER_01: But actually, that event in um Sando that we did, like there was nobody at that event.
1:07:44
SPEAKER_01: That event was not necessarily she didn't really have a fan base here.
1:07:48
SPEAKER_01: People knew the song, but people didn't know her, and it was actually so my brothers had planned this um family vacation in Jamaica, actually a week from that weekend, and uh we were in a grill, this very fancy hotel, and uh I ditched them to go and finish shooting the music video.
1:08:12
SPEAKER_01: I was not there at the vacation and I went and we finished shooting the music video.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_01: I just happened to be in Jamaica too, and it was just like stars aligned, and by the time we released that song, pushed that song, right time I did my concerts, that was really when Shen Cia had a fan base here and trying now.
1:08:31
Corie: I see, I see, I see.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_01: Because that song was huge, yeah.
1:08:34
Corie: But it's nice still, right?
1:08:36
Corie: Yeah, you all have a good relationship because you all do plenty of work together after that.
1:08:39
Corie: Is it genuine or is it Instagram thing?
1:08:41
SPEAKER_01: It's definitely genuine.
1:08:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she's she's a nice girl and she's just about her business, and she's just very matter-of-fact and straightforward.
1:08:48
Corie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:08:49
Corie: So again, most people don't have these beginnings, like first your first song pop off, your first show work collaborations of people you can't just walk up to.
1:08:57
Corie: And what do you think it is?
1:08:58
SPEAKER_01: Um, I think it's just my energy.
1:09:00
SPEAKER_01: Like, I'm just somebody who, and you know what?
1:09:03
SPEAKER_01: Like, I have seen over the years that many, many people have changed around me.
1:09:08
SPEAKER_01: Like, many people I would say, like when people say you get famous or whatever, you think that people change.
1:09:15
SPEAKER_01: Maybe some people change.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_01: Maybe one day I might change, but I just feel like I'm the exact same girl that I was when I started.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_01: Like, I feel like I've never changed who I was, and that's why I I know who I was, you know what I mean?
1:09:31
SPEAKER_01: I spent time with myself, a lot of time with my I didn't have TV, I didn't have any distraction, it was just me and music, and that home time with music really makes it's energy.
1:09:49
SPEAKER_01: Music is energy, and you attract, like if something doesn't work out for me, I say it wasn't meant to be.
1:09:56
SPEAKER_01: That would that's not supposed to be my story because every single thing that is mine, it's just a matter of time.
1:10:02
SPEAKER_01: I don't have to work or try too hard for things that if I work in too hard and I feel like wow, I have to like put all my energy to get, it's not mine.
1:10:12
SPEAKER_01: It's not mine.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's false, and anything great that has happened to me was never forced.
1:10:18
SPEAKER_01: It just happened, stance, and I was prepared.
1:10:20
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, you have to do the work to be prepared.
1:10:23
SPEAKER_01: I don't want anybody listening to me thinking like, oh, you could just have the energy and show up and it's right.
1:10:29
SPEAKER_01: No, you have to do it because in every circumstance and situation, I was always prepared because I already thought about it.
1:10:36
SPEAKER_01: I already saw it in my mind, I already knew it was gonna happen, and it happened because I said it was gonna, because I saw it.
1:10:42
Corie: Yeah, and you're playing your reps too.
1:10:43
Corie: Because the truth is, if you ask, if I woke up to Kes, ask him to sing a song, and then I go and do background, he listened to that song.
1:10:48
Corie: I could tell it.
1:10:49
Corie: So you had to be playing in your work and doing it.
1:10:51
SPEAKER_01: I think I think it was, and he actually told me, he says, No, no, no, I'm doing this song with you because you see that vibe you have there.
1:10:56
SPEAKER_01: Like you see, when I pull out the guitar and I start playing my music, and he really got the sense of who I was as an artist.
1:11:03
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't just a girl coming to sing a tune for the guitar.
1:11:06
SPEAKER_01: You know, it was really like a raw artist who was just looking for an opportunity to do something different, you know what I mean?
1:11:14
SPEAKER_01: And the song was a different song, you know, from the production.
1:11:18
Corie: Everything sounded different.
1:11:19
SPEAKER_01: It was it was different, and he and he felt that energy from me like being somebody who was authentic and he liked that.
1:11:28
Corie: Yeah, yeah.
1:11:28
Corie: And I think it was David, could it could have been Wendell Man Warren?
1:11:32
Corie: He was here talking about the fact that every 10 years or so, like music changes.
1:11:36
Corie: You see, that's 2016, 1780, and the music, the sound of our music change, and and I mean you you are at the heart of that.
1:11:42
Corie: But I suppose is a coal industry still, I suppose that's what Casey and the whole lot was trying to protect you from at first, but the energy seemed to remain the same.
1:11:49
Corie: There are some selfish questions I want to ask because I like Juniel a lot.
1:11:53
Corie: He was really going carrying, but yeah, he was the only soaker too.
1:11:56
SPEAKER_01: I really was.
1:11:56
SPEAKER_01: I yeah, I really, I mean, why not?
1:11:58
SPEAKER_01: If you want to roll, roll, what's the big deal?
1:12:02
Corie: Like, I see him doing a video saying that.
1:12:05
Corie: You say Nile's such a sweetheart.
1:12:06
Corie: You know, she called my back to take me but he doesn't forget.
1:12:08
SPEAKER_01: I really thought he was because you know, like for me, well, Anson said, Yo, Juniel wants your number.
1:12:13
SPEAKER_01: Can I give it to him?
1:12:14
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, sure.
1:12:15
SPEAKER_01: So I'm not expecting him to be doing a skit.
1:12:18
SPEAKER_01: So I was half- So you didn't get no prep.
1:12:20
SPEAKER_01: Half of that.
1:12:21
SPEAKER_01: No, nobody told me he was gonna be doing otherwise I'd bring up my funniest bow and hear me being so gullible and naive.
1:12:29
SPEAKER_01: I listened, I listened to the half, and I said, Look at me, the one big ass, thinking that you rather serious.
1:12:35
SPEAKER_01: Like the one big ass.
1:12:37
SPEAKER_01: Like you have a wedding.
1:12:38
SPEAKER_01: Um Yeah, I was like, you know, the yeah, I was really just like, why do you why do you want to come this weekend though?
1:12:45
SPEAKER_01: Like there's so many other nice events to go to like very confused, very innocent.
1:12:51
SPEAKER_01: That's what I am.
1:12:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm innocent.
1:12:52
Corie: Yeah, which is an action.
1:12:55
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm so yo, when people tell me something, I believe it, unless you give me a reason not to believe it.
1:13:01
SPEAKER_01: But I should have known he's an ass, you know what I mean?
1:13:03
SPEAKER_01: But I was just so gullible.
1:13:06
SPEAKER_01: I feel I watched back that video and I said, I look like a real fool here.
1:13:10
SPEAKER_01: You find so I was like, look at me.
1:13:12
SPEAKER_01: So violent, so naive.
1:13:15
SPEAKER_01: You look cool, you look normal.
1:13:17
SPEAKER_01: But that's how I am.
1:13:18
SPEAKER_01: That's how I am.
1:13:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm just genuine, just normal, chill, because I didn't know.
1:13:22
SPEAKER_01: I didn't know he was doing it.
1:13:23
Corie: You know what was the most genuine part of it when you say okay.
1:13:27
SPEAKER_01: I was very confused.
1:13:29
SPEAKER_01: I was like, why?
1:13:31
SPEAKER_01: Come at me.
1:13:32
SPEAKER_01: This is strange, okay.
1:13:33
Corie: Yeah, and I have it down now.
1:13:35
Corie: I hear in this even in the beginning when we start talking, and I hear just acting and I think it is all an act, another act that I I I assume it is.
1:13:42
Corie: I saw you and Answer.
1:13:42
Corie: Answer don't like to be on camera, but which means flip.
1:13:45
Corie: It was one of the funniest sets of collaborations I see you do with flip just you being yourself all you have to do with us, naturally.
1:13:52
Corie: So you really mash up that wall and thing.
1:13:54
Corie: That was a lot.
1:13:55
Corie: You really hit up.
1:13:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that that that was fun.
1:13:57
SPEAKER_01: That was fun, yeah.
1:13:58
SPEAKER_01: That was fun.
1:13:59
Corie: It looked like a lot.
1:14:00
Corie: Your fans were snappy, you know.
1:14:01
Corie: You saw that?
1:14:02
Corie: I I love what they weren't.
1:14:03
Corie: What people was in the comments saying why flip treated Nyla like this, and look, he hit the girl at one point in time.
1:14:08
Corie: Maybe they don't know.
1:14:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, but that's how that's his brand, you know.
1:14:11
SPEAKER_01: It's like if I decide, okay, yeah, I will go and do content with you.
1:14:14
SPEAKER_01: I have to at least know what I'm getting myself into.
1:14:17
SPEAKER_01: And to this day, he's still a sweetheart.
1:14:20
SPEAKER_01: I would say, y'all, he's misunderstood.
1:14:22
SPEAKER_01: He's misunderstood.
1:14:23
SPEAKER_01: He's a sweetheart.
1:14:24
SPEAKER_01: Yes, he's a real sweetheart.
1:14:26
SPEAKER_01: I really have, I really like him.
1:14:27
Corie: Yeah, he was here for Carnival to say he looked like he had a great time.
1:14:31
Corie: But something I also enjoy seeing you on, I'm a huge fan of Joe Button Podcast.
1:14:35
Corie: So imagine my surprise when I see you sit on the on the with these.
1:14:46
SPEAKER_01: For me, like, I just love building just genuine relationships with people.
1:14:50
SPEAKER_01: Like, it doesn't have to be for anything.
1:14:52
SPEAKER_01: And he was like, yo, it was a cool vibe.
1:14:53
SPEAKER_01: Like, come true, you know what I mean.
1:14:55
Corie: Enjoy it, it looked intense.
1:14:56
SPEAKER_01: It was intense.
1:14:57
SPEAKER_01: I did enjoy it.
1:14:57
SPEAKER_01: It was a different world.
1:14:58
SPEAKER_01: I it was nice taking a zoom lens in to see like what men think because it's very men, it's like very man-oriented.
1:15:05
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, not I not that I have anything against men, but you know, like sometimes we need to balance the scale a little bit, you know what I mean?
1:15:11
Corie: Yeah, you're gonna balance the scale, no, you put them in their place a little bit, and I enjoy seeing a trinidad, you know, one tell them because some of these things I mean it's men arguing, so it's gonna make a hundred percent sense all the time.
1:15:22
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if we're I'm happy that you as a man could say it for yourself.
1:15:25
Corie: You gotta go back past these cameras at some point with all the other men that you know.
1:15:29
Corie: We're not aiming for sense, we we try and enjoy ourselves and get loud and say, well, it's a stosterone, the world change, so we had to express ourselves.
1:15:36
Corie: But it was nice seeing you in that space, and and you're I guess there's a natural ability that you represent us all the time with the way you speak, you accent, the fact that you make it a point there too to say that hey, my grandfather created this thing, so music is what I do, even explaining to them because I think the debate was the cultural thing of whining on a woman.
1:15:56
Corie: Yeah, I don't say no, you embarrass them a little bit, you know.
1:15:59
Corie: It's one of my favorite moments, but the idea of whining on a woman meaning nothing to us, not not what it would mean in their culture, yeah.
1:16:05
SPEAKER_01: It's different, you know, culturally, like it's just different, and people just have to understand that because now social media corrupts everything, social media corrupts everything, and sometimes we just have to be like, you know, before there was social media, people were doing this and nobody like would say anything about it.
1:16:21
SPEAKER_01: They would come to Trinidad and enjoy it, you know what I mean?
1:16:24
Corie: It's supposed to, yeah, I guess the social media is no one making it look away.
1:16:27
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, okay.
1:16:29
Corie: When it comes to social media, you're just one of the queens, right?
1:16:32
Corie: You you do it, you you you enjoy that?
1:16:33
Corie: That's a lot, it feels like a lot of work.
1:16:35
SPEAKER_01: I will tell you, I have a very weird relationship with social media because I am not necessarily a social person, actually.
1:16:42
SPEAKER_01: And I was never very social, like I never had many friends.
1:16:46
SPEAKER_01: I had few friends, I still have few friends.
1:16:49
SPEAKER_01: It's not, I'm not like I'm not chatty chatty, I'm not talking, like you know what I mean?
1:16:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm just like a kind of introvert that had to become extrovert to be a soca artist.
1:17:02
SPEAKER_01: I will let me just say, before so music, I would call myself an introvert.
1:17:07
SPEAKER_01: But there was no way I could be an introvert doing soca music.
1:17:12
SPEAKER_01: It's not possible.
1:17:12
SPEAKER_01: It's not possible.
1:17:13
SPEAKER_01: If you're an introvert, don't do so.
1:17:15
SPEAKER_01: That's my one recommendation, unless you want to become an omnivert.
1:17:20
SPEAKER_01: Now I'm an omnivort and I feel proud about that because but sometimes I still need to say, yo, silente, yeah, inside it.
1:17:28
SPEAKER_01: Like, let's get it, you know, because I just get so overwhelmed.
1:17:32
SPEAKER_01: I had I used to have anxiety, not because of anything, but just because there was a lot going on and like just too much contact with human beings, you know, energy, sounds.
1:17:46
SPEAKER_01: I can't take sounds, like too much sound.
1:17:51
SPEAKER_01: Oh my god.
1:17:52
SPEAKER_01: So these are things that introverts might hear this and understand this feeling of yeah, I'm with you 100%.
1:17:58
Corie: After a while, you need to disconnect.
1:18:00
Corie: Go back up in the hills.
1:18:01
Corie: You see, I see back up in the hills, you know.
1:18:03
Corie: You have it in here.
1:18:03
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
1:18:04
SPEAKER_01: I love a hill, but I need a mansion on the hill.
1:18:07
Corie: Absolutely.
1:18:08
SPEAKER_01: I need, I need, you know, a little a little hot tub.
1:18:12
SPEAKER_01: I need I need it.
1:18:13
SPEAKER_01: I can't do the no-doors.
1:18:15
SPEAKER_01: No, you ain't doing that like, but a close.
1:18:16
SPEAKER_01: I don't need a lattrine.
1:18:18
SPEAKER_01: I need, you know, the thing that is squid like with the water, like a beadle.
1:18:22
SPEAKER_01: I need a beader, like, you know what I mean?
1:18:25
SPEAKER_01: Like it's a different level now.
1:18:27
SPEAKER_01: You're a soft life.
1:18:28
SPEAKER_01: You need to be a good idea.
1:18:30
Corie: You again went from very, very young to becoming one of the uh people complain about it a lot, right?
1:18:35
Corie: On social media, that it's very hard for younger artists to break through and reach that superstar level of soaker.
1:18:40
Corie: It is, it's very difficult.
1:18:42
Corie: You've done it, and you're continuing to do it.
1:18:44
Corie: At what point you felt like you realized, hey, as a star in this thing.
1:18:51
SPEAKER_01: To be honest, okay.
1:18:52
Corie: Axe answer.
1:18:53
SPEAKER_01: So, okay, let me be honest with you, right?
1:18:56
SPEAKER_01: I am the kind of person that I still feel like I need to prove myself to this day.
1:19:02
SPEAKER_01: I still feel like I'm I haven't made it.
1:19:05
SPEAKER_01: I still feel like you know when you say you make it in life, I still feel on until I am on like let me see, what would be a stage that until I'm like performing on a Grammy stage, I haven't made it.
1:19:18
Corie: So that's still important to you.
1:19:19
Corie: That doesn't matter.
1:19:20
SPEAKER_01: It's still very important to me.
1:19:22
SPEAKER_01: But I would say that I always thought I was a star.
1:19:25
SPEAKER_01: Like from before I even did anything.
1:19:28
SPEAKER_01: Like before I even released a song, I was like, yo, I'm a can I cuss on this?
1:19:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I'm a motherfucking star.
1:19:35
SPEAKER_01: Like I always had that attitude, you know what I mean?
1:19:37
SPEAKER_01: So it's like a balance of thinking you're not you haven't made it, and also always thinking that you are the shit, you know what I mean?
1:19:47
SPEAKER_01: So it's really a balancing act, but I would say it was 2017 when I did Boom Champions kids events.
1:20:00
SPEAKER_01: Those children, well, I brought up some of them on stage to dance for Bala Mommy, and they were dancing, and then they found that like the people who were dancing were getting attention, and they started to swarm the stage, and then they took me the the the children, it was like a wave, like a wave, and they dragged me off the stage and they took things from my hair, and they like I was fully mobbed by these babies, and I there was nothing I could do because they're children.
1:20:29
SPEAKER_01: So, what are you gonna do?
1:20:30
SPEAKER_01: Fight them, they're pulling at your hair.
1:20:31
SPEAKER_01: I had rats at that time, they're pulling at my hair, they're pulling at my clothes, they took me away.
1:20:37
SPEAKER_01: I was on the stage here, and then I was gone.
1:20:40
SPEAKER_01: And so, and that was the moment my answer was like, Yeah, we need security.
1:20:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:20:44
SPEAKER_01: We need security, you know what I mean?
1:20:47
SPEAKER_01: But and that was from the jump, you know, that was in the year, that was in the summer of 2017.
1:20:52
Corie: Oh yeah, out the gate.
1:20:53
SPEAKER_01: That was out the gate, you know what I mean?
1:20:55
SPEAKER_01: So I felt like from the jump, I always felt like, yeah, I made it.
1:20:58
SPEAKER_01: I didn't see I didn't see this happen to nobody, but at the same time, I was like, this is not the benchmark of made it.
1:21:03
SPEAKER_01: Okay, gotcha.
1:21:04
SPEAKER_01: But then when I got nominated for the BT Award, that was like another moment for me because I thought they were pranking me when Anson was like, yo, we just got an email from BT saying that you have been nominated for best international artists.
1:21:17
SPEAKER_01: I was like, You're pranking me, you're lying, you are lying.
1:21:22
SPEAKER_01: He's like, No, I'm not lying.
1:21:23
SPEAKER_01: This was in 2018, mind you.
1:21:30
SPEAKER_01: And that was to go to BT in June.
1:21:33
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, You are lying.
1:21:35
SPEAKER_01: This is a lie.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_01: I couldn't believe it until everything, and then they sent you things to vote.
1:21:41
SPEAKER_01: Uh and I was like, This is a dream.
1:21:43
SPEAKER_01: How?
1:21:43
SPEAKER_01: I have four songs.
1:21:44
Corie: Yeah, but what was the follow-up song for the 2018 carnival, remember?
1:21:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, Soca.
1:21:48
SPEAKER_01: Oh, oof, yeah, it's just somebody say so car.
1:21:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was a lot, and it was Olado.
1:21:54
SPEAKER_01: It was like, well, no, it was yeah, so it wasn't four songs.
1:21:56
SPEAKER_01: I had a good bit of songs, but it was like seven songs at that point in time.
1:21:59
SPEAKER_01: But that was the second carnival, and yeah, so at that point I was like, A B-E-T, yeah, one year outkids.
1:22:08
SPEAKER_01: No, come on, that was big.
1:22:10
SPEAKER_01: And it I we met a lot of amazing people that year as well, too, going to LA.
1:22:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, we went to Tiana Taylor's um birthday party.
1:22:18
SPEAKER_01: I mean, just being around the circle of like just the internationals, you know, and it kind of was always that way from the jump, you know.
1:22:26
Corie: Yeah, yeah.
1:22:27
Corie: You used to feel that pressure of artists, so if you feel it now, because Soka is a unique place.
1:22:31
Corie: You're talking about artists who, for instance, have hits on catalogue that they could throw around for the rest of their life.
1:22:35
Corie: Yeah.
1:22:35
Corie: But Soka seems to be this um, but they say only as good as the last performance, okay?
1:22:40
Corie: This every year thing, you you under that pressure, you feel it at all?
1:22:45
SPEAKER_01: No, I don't feel it.
1:22:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously, I want to have a song every year because it's something that you should watch.
1:22:51
SPEAKER_01: If you're working, like if you're not working, then maybe, but if you are working, then something have to give, you know.
1:22:58
SPEAKER_01: Um, but no, I don't feel the pressure because I think I'm beyond that, me personally, because I believe I have fans, like real people who really love my music, whether it's carnival, not carnival, people that will buy tickets to come to my event, people that would say, Yo, Naila, you inspire me so much every day.
1:23:21
SPEAKER_01: Like, that is something that's feedback I get on a daily, and I feel like I have I have a responsibility to those people because those are the people that I'm doing this for.
1:23:32
SPEAKER_01: Like, y'all are my people, and I will continue to feed that regardless.
1:23:36
SPEAKER_01: If everybody is not on a unanimous decision that this song is a hit, they're gonna think it's great.
1:23:42
Corie: Yeah, they just wanna hear it.
1:23:43
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna think it's great, and I'm gonna do it for them and for me.
1:23:47
SPEAKER_01: And if I think it's great and they think it's great, then it's just a matter of time, you know.
1:23:51
Corie: I understand.
1:23:51
Corie: Yeah, you know, it makes so much sense that y'all decided to do your own show because you know it's hard ticket sales all the gates.
1:23:56
Corie: You know what's a pain audience.
1:23:58
Corie: Yeah, it's makes sense.
1:23:59
Corie: Or they're gonna kill me if I ask about certain songs, right?
1:24:00
Corie: I know you're fed up talking about these songs.
1:24:02
SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay, okay.
1:24:03
Corie: Which one you start in with?
1:24:04
SPEAKER_01: Which one?
1:24:05
Corie: Sweet and local and them things.
1:24:06
Corie: Which one is that?
1:24:07
Corie: Yeah, let me go with that now because that was that again, the sound of it so unique.
1:24:12
Corie: So I don't know what you would call it.
1:24:13
Corie: If you in your mind you're creating a specific genre of music, or you're just being you?
1:24:17
SPEAKER_01: Um, so sweet and local was unique where I didn't start that song.
1:24:21
SPEAKER_01: That song was started, but that was when the first song I ever released that was like technically written by somebody else.
1:24:29
SPEAKER_01: And that was a huge difficult challenge for me because I'm a songwriter and I write my music.
1:24:35
SPEAKER_01: So it was like difficult for me to take a song from somebody else, but we realized with how much things I was doing, like my creation rate slowed down, and we you need music, you need you're you're all over the place, you know what I mean.
1:24:50
SPEAKER_01: So Anson had the bright, expensive idea, the bright, expensive idea to do a writing camp in Miami, right?
1:24:59
SPEAKER_01: Don't even ask me how we funded this.
1:25:01
SPEAKER_01: What like like literally two years out the gate?
1:25:05
SPEAKER_01: Like we reached out, we literally went on Instagram, found people like music that we loved, and reached out to them to fly to Miami to just work on creating songs for me.
1:25:17
SPEAKER_01: So we reached out a team salute, which at that time they had Joanna.
1:25:21
SPEAKER_01: Joe, Joe, so they were the ones that like not necessarily local rights.
1:25:25
Corie: We looking for what you want.
1:25:26
SPEAKER_01: We we I told you expensive.
1:25:28
Corie: Yes.
1:25:30
SPEAKER_01: So we we flew all these people from London.
1:25:37
SPEAKER_01: You know what that ticket costs?
1:25:39
SPEAKER_01: You know what that there was two of them, and they had a manager.
1:25:43
SPEAKER_01: We also got um uh uh fanatics who did um just touch down at the airport.
1:25:49
SPEAKER_01: That's more that's more Europe.
1:25:51
SPEAKER_01: That's more um UK UK again, come now, you know what I mean.
1:25:55
SPEAKER_01: It was two of them again, you know what I mean.
1:25:57
SPEAKER_01: We got um producers from America, producers from Colombia, songwriters from America, literally so much.
1:26:03
SPEAKER_01: And we had our Trini contingent, we had my musical director, Janine.
1:26:07
SPEAKER_01: We we carried Teja on this trip because Teja was Teja had had just um co-written Iron Love with Anson and I.
1:26:14
SPEAKER_01: So we were just off of working with him doing that song, and we flew all of these 19 19 24, okay, 24 songwriters and producers to Circle House Studios.
1:26:30
SPEAKER_01: If you know anything about Miami and Studios, Circle House Studios is like a prestigious studio, they have many rooms.
1:26:39
SPEAKER_01: We took the entire two buildings and we had everybody working at all at once for seven days.
1:26:48
SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, seven days, yeah, transport, per diem, hotel, everything.
1:26:54
SPEAKER_00: I like it.
1:26:55
SPEAKER_01: And this was for my first EP, which was supposed to be an album.
1:27:00
SPEAKER_01: We still have so many songs from it that like uh that we can still use to this day, and that was where Sweet and Loco was born.
1:27:08
SPEAKER_01: And I finished writing that song because it wasn't finished, so I wrote the bridge of that song, but it felt like me, and what I've realized about um songwriters and working with songwriters is that it's all remember how I said it's all energy, like the fact that these songwriters were able to articulate and write like if it was me, because it's my story.
1:27:31
SPEAKER_01: It like when I heard the song, I was like, yo, this is my story, this is how I feel, this is what I'm going through.
1:27:37
SPEAKER_01: How do you know this?
1:27:38
SPEAKER_01: How make it make sense?
1:27:40
SPEAKER_01: How do you know this?
1:27:42
SPEAKER_01: Like, and it just landed on me, and I was like, This is so beautiful, and we got so many unique songs out of that writing camp, and that went on to even open up markets for me, like where people like Hennessy, Cardi B's sister, she's been following me ever since then.
1:27:59
SPEAKER_01: I brought To Trinidad for my third Soka Origins, um, as you know, their mom is Trini, and we would have built that relationship.
1:28:06
SPEAKER_01: I mean, so many different people, like just from me being me and just having my energy and doing what I thought was best for me back then.
1:28:16
SPEAKER_01: Because trust me, I was troubled.
1:28:18
SPEAKER_01: Uh those years were really, really hard for me.
1:28:21
SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't even know how I survived, to be honest, because I I was depressed and I did feel like the world was falling on me a little bit because everything going so great?
1:28:32
SPEAKER_01: Trunny time that everything is going so at least externally externally.
1:28:37
SPEAKER_01: But for me, I'm a creator.
1:28:39
SPEAKER_01: For me, I'm a songwriter who needs that inside time, and I'm just going, going, going, going, going, going.
1:28:49
SPEAKER_01: So, like, I don't know this life, and since it started, it never stopped.
1:28:54
SPEAKER_01: So I just started to deal with a lot of like inner conflict from just the life.
1:28:59
SPEAKER_01: Because one, I was never this artist.
1:29:02
SPEAKER_01: Like, I just said, let me try a soca song, you know what I mean?
1:29:05
SPEAKER_01: And then they just took off and ran with me.
1:29:08
SPEAKER_01: And I felt very inspired to do so.
1:29:10
SPEAKER_01: One, because you know, my grandfather created the genre, but two, because I saw an opportunity.
1:29:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like if your grandparents died and left you a mansion, and you're like, wow, I have this mansion, what do I do?
1:29:24
SPEAKER_01: You're first gonna think, oh, I'm gonna paint, change the wallpaper, make some renovations, but then you realize, okay, this house is living and breeding, and you have to, you have to understand, you have to learn before you could lead.
1:29:37
SPEAKER_01: And I took the time to learn before I led, and I said, you know, I'm gonna commit to soaker because it makes sense and it's my legacy.
1:29:48
SPEAKER_01: And I got super passionate about it to the point where I was getting label deals left, right, and center from people who just wanted to sign me, wanted to do work with me, heard my sound as being very international.
1:30:00
SPEAKER_01: And when I was like Captain Soka in these buildings, yeah, yeah.
1:30:05
SPEAKER_01: You know, but they didn't understand it and they didn't know what to do with it.
1:30:09
SPEAKER_01: And they it was something that I felt like was important because who's next?
1:30:14
SPEAKER_01: When I'm gone, who could come from Trunan Tobago and just be and and so doesn't have to be what it is, it could be anything, and it it should be what my grandfather always wanted it to be, which was an international son of international music.
1:30:30
SPEAKER_01: It is that today, but it's just not done in the format that everybody is on the same page as in the whole wide world to say we understand this.
1:30:40
SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of people don't.
1:30:42
SPEAKER_01: They don't understand.
1:30:43
Corie: There's a context to it, yeah.
1:30:44
Corie: And I mean, you break the mold in a lot of ways.
1:30:46
Corie: You all you all put out music that is hard to box it.
1:30:51
Corie: Israel trying to try to box it in, like, where's this we listening to?
1:30:53
Corie: You know, I mean, simple minds like myself want to hear, okay, listening to rap now, I'm listening to RB, I'm listening to so, but uh, but but you force us almost to to listen to it differently.
1:31:03
SPEAKER_01: To just be I suppose.
1:31:05
Corie: I suppose to just be.
1:31:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, to just be, like, you know what I mean?
1:31:09
SPEAKER_01: And that was like my point to just be whoever you think you are, whoever you know yourself to be, just be that and not try to fit a soccer mold, not try to be something that you're not, because what soccer is was, I was never that.
1:31:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
1:31:26
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
1:31:27
SPEAKER_01: And it's like, I'm so not this, let's figure it out.
1:31:31
SPEAKER_01: You know, so it was very complicated for me.
1:31:33
Corie: It doesn't it explains a little bit for me why year to year your sound, so it's hard to predict what you're gonna do next, you know.
1:31:39
Corie: I mean, it's hard to predict what the sound of Nyla is.
1:31:41
Corie: I'll show you all the problems because all the time.
1:31:43
Corie: At so at some point along the way, as a writer, you're going into a writing room with people who like it's you're calling names who write some of the biggest songs in the world at that point in time.
1:31:52
Corie: How raw is it for you as a writer to sit in that room having to write now, like with people?
1:31:59
SPEAKER_01: How raw is it?
1:32:00
Corie: Yeah, is it is that a good feeling like you enjoy that, or is it uh you feel exposed?
1:32:04
SPEAKER_01: It's a little bit intimidating, I would say, because you know you want to make sure and and and be your best self.
1:32:11
SPEAKER_01: I think I write best in my personal time while I'm alone.
1:32:15
SPEAKER_01: Whenever I want to write like a smash from Smashland, like I would say some people would debate this, but I would say that Ron and Rosie is a smash from Smashland.
1:32:26
SPEAKER_01: And and that song, it was on a very beautiful, bright, and sunny day in Japan, and I wanted to see what life in Japan was like.
1:32:37
SPEAKER_01: I left the hotel at 8 a.m.
1:32:39
SPEAKER_01: in the morning, and I just went walking by myself.
1:32:42
SPEAKER_01: I know this country is safe, ain't nothing's gonna happen to me.
1:32:46
SPEAKER_01: I walked by a tennis court, I saw people playing like tennis, all kinds of things going on in the city, and I was just there with the song and with the rhythm in my head, and I just wrote this song.
1:32:56
SPEAKER_01: For me, as I told you, walking.
1:32:58
Corie: You see, yeah, back to daddy, daddy do it singing, and I like that, daddy lady in print.
1:33:03
SPEAKER_01: But for me, by myself is when I write my best because I don't feel uh self-conscious.
1:33:11
SPEAKER_01: I feel like if you do it good or you do it bad, it doesn't matter, it's just you, you know what I mean?
1:33:15
SPEAKER_01: So writing in a room with songwriters sometimes can be a little bit intimidating, like, oh, am I gonna be the best of me?
1:33:23
SPEAKER_01: I know you know you're great, but are you gonna be that right now?
1:33:26
SPEAKER_01: Are you gonna impress?
1:33:27
SPEAKER_01: Like there is a little bit of a thought there, but I'm very confident as a person, and sometimes it shows me different sides of myself that I didn't know exist.
1:33:36
SPEAKER_01: So I love that part about it because different people influence you in different ways that brings out different things in you that make you create different things, and I'm like, wow, this is unique.
1:33:46
SPEAKER_01: So I like that.
1:33:47
Corie: So enjoy the collaborating.
1:33:49
Corie: I would say I'll with you.
1:33:50
Corie: Two more songs, fellas, and we done because your grandfather writes a song about me, right?
1:33:54
SPEAKER_00: Did he?
1:33:54
Corie: Yeah, it's called Cory Iron.
1:33:56
Corie: Corey Iron Expo.
1:33:57
Corie: You know what I mean?
1:33:58
Corie: David write a song about you.
1:34:00
Corie: What inspired that when you when you took that song?
1:34:03
SPEAKER_01: And on I always love that song.
1:34:05
SPEAKER_01: I always loved Cory Iron, and I always felt like it was just a very good song.
1:34:11
SPEAKER_01: And I love the melody, and I always wanted to interpolate it and make it new because I felt like it needed to live on.
1:34:18
SPEAKER_01: And I started the interpolation in Belize actually.
1:34:22
SPEAKER_01: I was walking again, and uh it came, I couldn't really like break through in the idea, but oh, I had the wrong beats.
1:34:30
SPEAKER_01: I was actually singing it on a different rhythm from Anson before.
1:34:36
SPEAKER_01: When we came back to Trinidad, that idea kind of cemented, and we were in the studio with Mikhail Tesha, and he built a new beat for it.
1:34:43
SPEAKER_00: I see, I see.
1:34:44
SPEAKER_01: And that was when it just came to life.
1:34:47
SPEAKER_01: It just it honestly, the the songwriting of that song and the way it was done was just very natural and back and forth.
1:34:54
SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't even like if we wrote the song, it was just the song came out, it was that moment, you know.
1:34:59
Corie: Yeah, with you.
1:35:00
Corie: Like I was playing this on the podcast, I was asking how the podcast started.
1:35:02
Corie: That was one of the things I enjoyed doing because when I hear that, I see this this come from somewhere, you know.
1:35:07
Corie: I could hear some of the references, even in the way the interpolation was done, because you still make it about I and it's about Corey Fraser, right?
1:35:13
Corie: Yeah, and um big song back then, big big name to call in a song, and so so so the fact that y'all took it and introduced it to you to Enterprise Teasure involved because he's been doing a lot of this y'all as a group of artists, if you want to call it that, maybe 2016 and onward, there's a connection to the to the music that came long before me that that I appreciate a lot.
1:35:36
Corie: Mevon will kill me if I announced about come home, right?
1:35:39
Corie: Nevon, you know what I mean?
1:35:40
Corie: Mevon is able to kill me.
1:35:41
Corie: So he told me that he for the first it was Jeffers, yes.
1:35:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, Jeffers, um who else?
1:35:50
SPEAKER_01: It was a second person, Kyle, Mavon, Kit, Kit.
1:35:55
SPEAKER_01: Kit is who I was thinking about, right?
1:35:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um, they all did this song together, um, and beautifully written, beautifully put together song.
1:36:10
SPEAKER_01: And uh when I heard it, I was doing another writing camp in Trinidad where I flew all those sets of people to Trinidad instead.
1:36:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, budgets, um, budgets, the budgets, you know, something we are just very aspirational human beings, and we also this is all we do, like you know, some people like they make money and then they put it into other things.
1:36:34
SPEAKER_01: No, we just put it right back in here and just see where it goes, and that was for my album, Technique, um, which was my very first album, actually.
1:36:45
SPEAKER_01: And uh, when we heard that song, we were like, This is so special, this is so beautiful, and actually at that point in time, I was struggling with a vocal nodule.
1:36:58
SPEAKER_01: I had the beginning stages of nodules from poor dieting and poor lifestyle, let's say, shouting as an entertainer and doing all of these things that soak artists do every day.
1:37:11
SPEAKER_01: I pray for every one of us all the time.
1:37:14
SPEAKER_01: Because for me, I felt it and I went from I had to like not speak for a whole six weeks, like almost two months.
1:37:24
SPEAKER_01: I didn't speak, and I had to like type what I was saying, and then I went into this writing camp and I was hoping that I could have a bit more of my voice so that I could actually do the camp and record the songs, and um I basically had no voice, I couldn't hit any of the notes, and I went straight up to the mic and I went, I think.
1:37:45
SPEAKER_01: I literally, that's how it came out like that.
1:37:47
SPEAKER_01: If I had my regular voice, it wouldn't sound like that.
1:37:50
SPEAKER_01: Like it was just like a slither of my voice left, and I was so surprised that it sounded so beautifully.
1:37:57
SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh my god, really?
1:37:58
SPEAKER_01: Let's keep it like let's keep it, you know what I mean?
1:38:01
SPEAKER_01: And uh Anson and I would have finished writing the song.
1:38:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, because you know, we we put on a bridge and stuff, and you know, everything just came together, and it was it's a beautiful collaboration.
1:38:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it won't collaboration of the year, of course, of course, of course.
1:38:16
Corie: And it became one of those classics, like for this generation, in particular, as my Von will always say, you know, uh really is going to last forever, really forever for music.
1:38:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:38:26
SPEAKER_01: I actually heard it play so much on the stage this year, um, in Port of Spain, Savannah, and I was like, this song is three years old now.
1:38:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that will never be.
1:38:35
SPEAKER_01: And it was literally like so many bands, like I was right by Queen's Hall for a long period of time, and so many bands played across any stage, as well as you know, whatever would have won the road match.
1:38:46
SPEAKER_01: But I was like, wow, that's amazing.
1:38:47
Corie: Yeah, people love it.
1:38:48
Corie: He was paying attention to road match race and things.
1:38:50
Corie: He was looking for that.
1:38:50
Corie: I know you're on competition, what you're thinking.
1:38:54
SPEAKER_00: There, there.
1:38:55
Corie: So we had to talk about future plans before we before we get out of here.
1:38:58
Corie: What is it looking like with you going forward from 2026 kind of?
1:39:02
SPEAKER_01: Well, this year I am doing my very first with my band Soka Origins tour, and we're calling this tour the Bad Girl tour.
1:39:11
SPEAKER_01: Come on, because you know, naturally, um, we're going to a lot of cool places this year that I've never been before, like Croatia, Belgium, Sweden.
1:39:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing, we're kicking it off in Toronto.
1:39:25
SPEAKER_01: We're also doing Antigua, New York, UK.
1:39:29
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, other dates will be added as the requests come in.
1:39:33
SPEAKER_01: But I'm gonna be with my full band, full dancers, just like Soka Origins, but we're taking the show on the road.
1:39:39
Corie: Well, congrats on that.
1:39:40
Corie: I know the international market's important here, and we appreciate you for doing it too, because we want to see so in places like Croatia and them things.
1:39:47
Corie: You know what I mean?
1:39:47
Corie: So congrats on that.
1:39:48
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
1:39:48
Corie: Anthony staying safe, right?
1:39:50
Corie: Croatia in this place is song and I mean we're watching world politics.
1:39:53
Corie: We had a sticky.
1:39:56
Corie: All right, good, good, good.
1:39:57
Corie: But thank you very much, ma'am.
1:39:58
Corie: This was a pleasure.
1:39:59
Corie: It was a pleasure.
1:40:01
Corie: You can clap again, like over.