Everchanging

Amanda Choo Quan talks to Gillian Moor about the T&T musician’s long-awaited album

“I’m honoured,” Gillian Moor responds. I’ve just thanked her for the interview — one in which, in her soft but precise way, she has guided me through her new album (“It’s the best thing I ever made,” she states). In truth, I should have said it first. Moor’s career started in 1992 as part of Homefront, a trio making a name when rapso could sell out stadiums in Trinidad and Tobago, and the Caribbean Sound Basin studio was used to record music by the Notorious B.I.G. and General Grant (instead of for, well, who knows?).

Despite the waxing and waning of T&T’s mainstream interest in local, non-soca music, Moor has written and performed on her own for a quarter of a century. She has served as both griot and gatherer, turning venues into confessionals with her raw kaiso-rock — and launching the careers of others through Songshine, an open-mic series she started in 2004 and paused in 2019 due to COVID. Musician and actor Nickolai Salcedo has described it as his “first start.”

Documented sparingly, Moor’s songs have mainly been the domain of the stage — ranging from sparkling numbers performed acoustically at festivals (the folksy “Hold on Tight”, for instance), to gritty, vulnerable feminist anthems best heard at a club under cover of darkness (“Half a Heart”).

Everchanging, Moor’s new full-length album, is therefore both retrospective and debut. “I have been in the space so long, and yet . . .” she says. In the end, the album — the summation of her career — was made possible partly by a grant from the state-owned enterprise MusicTT, and partly through extensive fundraising.

Finally released in July 2020, Everchanging is at once intimate and political, truth-telling about the enduring pain felt by society’s silenced (particularly by women and the underclass). It’s also musically deft, steered by Moor’s piercing vocals — rich and reminiscent of Lilith Fair — and dipping into blues, funk, calypso, and hard rock. This is all the work of Moor and her team, which includes the producer Ravi Maharaj, a.k.a. a_phake, and musicians Joanna Hussein and Jon Otway.

“When we crafted the order of songs, we wanted to take people on a journey that would have a couple of unexpected twists,” Moor explains. “Go dark at some point, come back from that, show heartbreak, show anger, show despair. But it always comes back to hope.” A standout is “Big Snake (War on Crime)”, a rollicking protest anthem that borrows melodically from extempo — replete with sly saxophone — giving way to a harder, trickier rock rhythm over which Moor wryly sings “We gonna lock up all them smokers / Kidnap and murder stop / And give the police endless power / Trust those cops.”

“Big Snake,” written long before Black Lives Matter, is testament to the sticking power of astute songwriting. It feels, as does the album, as though recorded live, bringing to mind Moor lit up on stage, baring soul and teeth in a time before. Let Everchanging tell us why it should not take a pandemic to remember Trinidad’s surfeit of talent.

For more information about Everchanging, visit www.gillianmoor.com

© Copyright 2020 Splice Studios/Abigail Hadeed, courtesy Gillian Moor