There is a difference between speaking to the girl off-stage and watching her during a performance.

Offstage she is a graceful girl with a childish giggle who eschews the nightlife, preferring instead to spend quiet time with her family. Onstage and in a competition, she is a woman who confidently commands the attention of her audience and boldly uses all tools at her disposal to win. Sit in the audience and look at her and you would see art in motion. From her facial expressions to her dress code and posture, her presence is flawless. Combine her alluring beauty with a powerful voice, add to that a compelling composition by Christophe Grant and you have an artiste who appears destined to return to winners' row at the National Calypso Monarch Competition tonight at Queen's Park Savannah. Onstage, Karene Asche does not ask, she captures your attention, and until she is through you have no choice but to remain glued to her sterling performance.

Tonight, she will be fighting to retain her crown after making history last year as the youngest calypsonian to win the Calypso Monarch title and the only calypsonian to win $2 million in a Dimanche Gras show to date. Win or lose, the latter is a title she will continue to hold on to this year as the winnings have been drastically reduced to TT$500,000.

"Oh gosh, but does the press have to print the amount of money you win at every competition?" Asche ducked her head and grinned as she spoke to Express Woman less than one week before her final performance. "They are putting your business in the street."

Though she did not appear perturbed by this fact, she jested that she could be pressured to share her earnings if too much is exposed. It was what she has had to do to survive in years gone by.

Much of what Asche has had to endure on her journey to success in captured in one of the calypsoes she is expected to perform in her bid to retain the crown.

The song, "Surety", more popularly known as "Against All Odds" was written by Christophe Grant and details the trials Asche endured growing up as a youth in the urban Laventille community. She describes the song as her testimony and insists that if she could have survived in the face of pressure and poverty, then others with equal grit and determination could do the same to improve their standard of living.

"More or less, I am saying in the song that if I could do it in the face of all the obstacles in my life growing up as a youth in the ghetto and facing peer pressure and other challenges, then anyone with the right motivation can do it too," she said. "To explain it, I must sing it to you."

And just like that she began to sing.

"When my father ups and leave

I coulda mope and grieve

But in my heart I believe

That with no father

I must try harder.

My mother turn and turn

The midnight oil she burn

Watching she I get to learn

Though it lonely

The pen only

On the simple gift that God bestowed

So I throw way big words like if and I drag meh load

Against all odds

Against all odds...

I heard the daily screams in the ghetto

But my dreams I never let go

Skin teeth friends tell me I can't make it

But my confidence they couldn't shake it

So though the place you born

Notorious for gun

And by the age of four

Look your father gone

Circumstances tough don't just sit and frown

Struggle on against all odds."

She stopped, but her voice still echoed and the picture painted by her lyrics of a young child struggling against her circumstances and determined to survive and succeed continued to caress the senses.

"This is my story, and this is what I want to tell the people of my community," Asche said. The siren gone, she was the simple little girl who punctuated her sentences with childish giggles once again.

Paired with the gifted Grant, Asche may have the talent to bring any song to life but her words are hauntingly true for any individual struggling to succeed who might have been raised in a depressed community, in a single parent home or under other challenging circumstances. It is certainly true for the young calypsonian who bagged several titles in addition to the Calypso Monarch crown in 2011. Last year, Asche also won the TUCO North Zone Calypso competition, the political commentary category of the Trinbago Unified Calypsonian Organisation's (TUCO) Kaisorama Competition and the King of Kings competition in St Kitts. It has been a dizzying year for the young performer, but at the end of it all she returned to her normal life in Laventille, the very community she was raised as a child.

Asked to comment on the lyrics of her song and its implications for her famous father, Errol Asche who had also built his career as a calypsonian, the younger Asche chose her words well.

"My mother was a single parent from when I was four years old," she said. "I don't want my father to feel bad. We had a good relationship after he left and we are very good now."

Pressed to share more, she continued reluctantly, "When my father left, my mother (Carol Redman) had four children. My mother worked at a programme like 10 days, and together with my grandmother who was still alive, she raised us. I went to Rosehill RC and started singing at the age of 11 and I went into the spotlight as soon as I started. I won 12 and Under and got the opportunity to go to Disney World in that year. It was my first trip ever. In that same year I entered the Junior Calypso Competition and placed second. Back then, when you placed high in a competition, you got the opportunity to go to different places and then you were paid. So from that point, my mom opened an account for me and I was literally paying myself. She set aside money for books and savings, she never spent a bad cent and I have to say hats off for that."

But as much as winning brought fame and glory, there was also the flip side and the young artiste learned that early.

Asked about the 'skin teeth friends' she sang about, Asche smiled grimly.

"I remember when I won my first competition," she said. "As soon as the news came out in the papers, the teachers were passing it around and there was one girl who I considered to be my girlfriend who got upset. She was saying so what if I won. I felt then that I was losing my friends and from that point people started to judge me. There were those who said I felt I was everything. At Morvant Laventille Secondary, it was the worst. I fought from the very first day."

Chuckling now as she reflected on that period, Asche said she was accosted by a fellow female student from the moment she entered the school.

"She started to point in my face and push me and I had to fight," she laughed. "It was embarrassing to my mother and friends of our family who struggled with me to get into the school."

It was difficult to imagine the svelte beauty who graced the stage during a performance locked in a physical battle with anyone, but according to Asche, when she attended Morvant Laventille Secondary School she fought every term.

"And not because of any major thing you know, they just thought I had too many things," she said. "I just had two other girlfriends who supported me and they started to gang up on them too. I prayed hard to finish school fast. Then when I was not dealing with that, I had to face the bad boys who wanted to tax Karene."

In 2008, Asche said she was robbed at gunpoint even as she held her baby son in her arms. Shaheem Stewart is now four years old.

At 27, Asche believes she has seen it all. In addition to the fights and the drugs and even exposure to violence, she has also lost classmates and friends to gang warfare.

"I have seen it all, I have lived it," she said.

Today, when she is not singing onstage, she is employed during the year at the Port of Spain City Corporation as a Vector Control Operator 1 and still, she holds on to her community as she is determined to show that there is a lot of success that can come out of Laventille if people would only try harder.

"There are a lot of very talented youths in Laventille who just might not have the right focus and motivation," she insisted. "I think I have given them a bit of hope and many people from my community are saying that I have to make it for them."

When she takes to the stage this year, Asche would be singing for those youths. And as for her competition, Asche appeared unperturbed.

"I have a good chance," she said with a casual shrug. "I mean anybody who is defending would believe they would win again. I just don't like to be the type to brag and boast," she said. "I just do my thing and if God sees that I should win again, then so be it. I can only say that I would be defending in a good way."

And until the final night, Asche intends to keep her second selection close to her chest.

"It may be Dougla Dad, which is a unity song I am singing to call on people to return Trinidad and Tobago to the rainbow country that it was without racism or I might sing a different political song as a surprise, I cannot say until the night," she smiled. "One thing is for certain, whichever song I choose, I am not focusing on picong this year. There are too many serious issues in Trinidad right now that needs to be heard."