Forget for a moment about her prolific songwriting, masterful stage presence and three Road March titles. Fay-Ann Lyons’ most outstanding trait is her candour. She’s an unflinching, brass tacks sort.
“I’d rather people called me a bitch then a hypocrite,” she says, dryly, by the interview’s end. “A hypocrite is not a good person.” She’s given lots of thought to personhood and that manifests in many ways through her music, her career and what she shares with her audience. For a solid decade Soca Monarch has been a medium for presenting her artistic vision, building her brand. Still, she says the decision not to compete in this year’s competition was easy.
“We decided to take a break from competing on that magnitude and just focus on the music,” she says, simply. “For me, at the end of the day, it is business. As much as I understand the opportunities that Soca Monarch offers, I don’t enter for free. I have to go through the mill, pick music, and fight with other artistes who are just as worthy. You’re not getting anything on a platter… you have to work for it just like everybody else and this time around we decided to put that energy elsewhere.”
Asked to reflect on the 2011 edition of the competition—rife as it was with insults lobbing between competitors, the taunting promise of a $2 million purse and the resented presence of Machel Montano—Lyons is noncommittal.
“I don’t go back and reflect on Soca Monarch or any past performance. I perform; it’s done; next. I don’t look at the tapes and say I should have done this or said that. If you win, congratulations. If you lose,” she says, “oh well.”
Yet reviews of Soca Monarchs past offer a vivid record of her evolution. At first she tried the sexy-soca-diva formula. In those days she was solid, but not stellar. Over time she found her stride—from the experimental lyrics and arrangements, always teasingly, daringly trying a thing, to the no-nonsense delivery, climbing heights, surfing over a sea of bodies. Now, in her early 30s, Lyons regards the emphasis on female artistes’ sex appeal as a trap—one that she’s deftly going to side-step.
“The day I have to dress sexy for people to look into my music is the day I stop singing. If my dress code is the only how I can get people to pay attention to me onstage I am not good as an artiste: I suck. I refuse to con- form to people who want to place emphasis on that and say that everybody should be a size zero or everybody should wear revealing clothes. They dress the same and perform the same. Please don’t hold your breath for me to do that because you not going to last too long. I dress how I feel and I dress to reflect my personality. I am not selling clothes,” she stresses. “I am selling music”.
During select performances this Carnival she’s been paying tribute to her mother-in-law, Harriet Alvarez.
“That woman put her life on hold for an entire year to travel with our newborn baby to make sure the child was okay while we worked. If I have to go out she will find her way by us to cook, clean and help out. That is a mother and that is what I hope to be to my child. I hope to have that relationship with my daughter 20 years down the line… for her to say ‘my mother is a mother’ and not ‘my mother made me’,” Lyons insists.
It’s all very loaded. Family feuds featuring her mother, calypsonian Lady Gypsy, have been published in the weeklies. It remains a sore spot for Lyons: “If Ian and his mother have a disagreement she calls her son on the phone, they have a meeting and they sit and discuss. The public will not know. My mother will run in the papers, make a scene, blow things out of proportion and have people commenting. If you talk to the world before you talk to your child how can you expect to have a proper relationship?”
The business of family has even seeped into her songs. Her 2012 hit with the improbable punch line of “drop on the ground and roll” was inspired by her daughter’s debut tantrum.
“I always hear about the terrible twos but nobody really explain the depths to me and what it consists of. I was in the airport when this child decide to give me the first taste. I am looking at her like ‘Are you serious? And we in America so I can’t spank you’,” she chuckles. Once before she’d tested the hypothesis that feters might be willing to hit the ground in the name of a good time. It was a Vincentian crowd and a muddy day. Lyons approached the song with a distinct sense of let’s-see-what-people-would-do. And some, for the record, have obliged. Does the ability to make people do farfetched things make her feel powerful? Lyons offers a resolute denial.
“It doesn’t make me feel powerful. Then I would be getting ahead of myself just as it have people who think they are talented but don’t realise the talent comes from God. At no point in time would I want to feel like I am so powerful because it would mean that everyone else is helpless and I would lose myself and my respect for people,” she reflects.
Through the years Lyons has been honing the art of turning one germ of an idea into musical magic. Years ago she approached her father, hoping he’d write her break-out song.
“He burst that bubble one time. He said ‘I could write for you but that is how it would be for the rest of your life. Learn to write. It will take you a while but you will get it’. Slowly but surely I started. It is still a work in progress but writing is very important to me. I don’t wait on anybody to give me a song. I don’t have to interpret anybody’s ideas or concepts. I don’t have to settle because I can’t do better for myself. I can express me at any point in time and I’m able to do that through writing music, melody and lyrics. I not knocking anybody that cannot or does not write. This is what it means to me,” she says.
Her father has taught her other lessons. Describing as “fabulous” SuperBlue’s return to the stage, she says it is testimony that true talent endures.
“I feel the same when I see Sparrow in NAPA or Lord Nelson mashing up a show with a cane in his hand in Tobago or Singing Francine performing for people in my age group and tearing down the place. Real talent is timeless. That is what I hope to achieve in the coming years. It is amazing to see SuperBlue perform and have that effect with stuff he penned, ideas he thought up years ago,” she reflects.
Blue’s drug-induced rock bottom had also been powerfully, painfully instructive.
“One of the main lessons I learned from that is that when you down and out, there are few people you can count on. If you want to see how much people have it out for you, do like you on your last. A lot of people quicker raise their legs to kick you when you’re down that raise their hand to help you up. You always have to be on guard. Besides that,” she says with a sigh “at the end of the day we are all human. You never know where we are going to be tomorrow. A little mistake can cost you a lifetime of pain. Ten years later you might still be paying for the most insignificant thing you do now. You need to keep God close. As much as you might think you have friends, you do have enemies waiting in the wings to push.”