Generally I'll keep 95% of what I sing on that first scratch vocal take. Sometimes that idea will ferment for a long time, and sometimes I"ll be close enough to my studio and have enough time (kind of rare these days) to go and work on the idea. Not every song is super easy though.
St. LuciaOf course I had the parallel of having the early years of my life being spent during apartheid, and then having a lot of awful poverty going on around me while I lived in this bubble of middle-classness, but I was a child, and I only really started to (I hope) understand all of that fairly recently.
St. LuciaThere are literally endless options and possibilities, and often no clear or obvious path in how to make that choice, and nobody to tell you to go this way or that. But somehow, it works itself out if you trust in the process, which is often easier said than done.
St. LuciaI am home grown St. Lucian. Born in 1980 I have spent most of my life on this island. Apart from the few summers I spent in the United States I spent most of my time in my homeland.
St. LuciaThere were times when I would suddenly realize making music is a crazy pipe dream. I would see bands that did super well in South Africa still struggling to survive, or even people on the international level who are doing well but financially can't really support themselves.
St. LuciaI was extremely frustrated, almost at the point of giving up on coming up with a name for the project (because I'm awful at it), when I decided to play the 'put a pen somewhere on a map with your eyes closed' game with South Africa. About the 5th try was St. Lucia in South Africa, which coincidentally also happens to be an idyllic sub-tropical seaside resort town. The name seemed to fit with the mood of the music, and so after a while it just stuck.
St. Lucia