Between rock and a hard place

In this mostly curious life of ours, there can be few things as deeply odd as growing up, then aging in and out of, and at last settling into zones of comfort in Trinidad’s largely invisible rock and rock-adjacent music scene.

Any conversation with people who do not know that world starts out with, “Do you remember when…” and I get as far as one name before there’s a gentle pat on my knee, a kindly look, and then, “That’s you and five other people, Anu.”

You’d think I was talking about my time in prison. Except they probably know more people in prison.

If that feels like a sad story, there’s a funny exasperating story that stretches from the minute your interlocuter is not from Trinidad and gets more maddening depending on how often they’ve used a passport.

No one believes our little piece of broken rock could possibly produce, of all things, rock. Not soca-rock, chutney-rock, parang-rock. No. Metal. Death metal. Heavy metal. Indie-rock. Experimental rock. A rock foundation on which performers build their own sounds. You know, like in a place called rest-of-world.

It is an unimaginable world. I don’t know how the musicians who made it did it. How they had the temerity. The raw guts. The will. But they created a world in which to play their music. And the rest of us got to stand near them and see – live – a world we only knew on CDs (yes, those) and (hark!) the radio.

The story of my relationship with Gary Hector is brief. To wit: we don’t have one. It stretches back to a time when I was just a girl who was around his band a lot. My friends were people around him, but to me, Gary seemed unreachable. A hundred years later, I gather I must have been a little in awe.

And the years rolled on and I had a vague sense he knew who I was, so I took to offering the odd wave and he’d acknowledge. More years and now we can talk a bit. A kind of staccato conversation. Because in my heart, I’m still 17 and he’s still writing poetry and turning it into music. I can’t even listen to music and read poetry at the same time.

Oh, the tracks he’s cleared for us. Sometimes I wonder if he’s a bit like Shadow. Doing a thing no one else can quite pull off, but making us believe we can be anything we want to be. That our sounds are not anchored by the mainstream soundtrack.

These days, Gary’s gone country. And it’s for real, for real. Real country. Real country music in a Trini accent.

I think of all the things he’s done and what seems to be a sort of bloody-minded resolve to do things as he sees right and who vex loss. The only surprising thing about this new avatar of himself is that anyone could be surprised by it.

From the not-yet-released album Memphis Medicine, the single Waitin’ Around to Go Viral drops on April 3. This song: difficult to know if to laugh or cry or both. It’s got all the right twangs, stock characters, sense of nowhere-towns and a drifting man. But this drifter is not some random American for whom I care not at all. This man is a man from Trinidad singing about a sort of refusal to give in to despair.

The world says we must have some sort of fame, all five seconds of it, somehow. It’s Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle into that good night. A classic theme in that genre. But distinctly Trinidadian and Gary Hectorian.

In case this screed somehow misled you, I miss the old world. But because of that world, I know there is room to find magic in the new. A world in which Freetown Collective is royalty – they of the songs of heartbreak and freedom, reinventing everything from a party tune to a Baptist spiritual.

I have a burgeoning crush on SeaBath, who manage to sound like they are from everywhere and exactly here at the same time. They’ve ransacked the library of influences and come to something you think sounds familiar right up until it segues into a new place. Sometimes they sound like what I think afternoon sunshine sounds like.

Music has always had a place in healing – all kinds of healing. (Someone may have written a song about that.) Too often we use it only in the background. Bring it forward. A little more.

We have music. Don’t you remember wanting to pick up a guitar?

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.