Cherisse Moe

At age three so­ca artiste Na­dia Bat­son was al­ready read­ing the news­pa­pers. By four, the star in the mak­ing sur­prised her moth­er-a writer and ac­tress-as well as every­one else in her fam­i­ly, by com­pos­ing short sto­ries and po­ems. "There's this sto­ry my mom gives all the time. She said when I was four, my grand­fa­ther want­ed to buy me a bike and she told him that if I could read an ar­ti­cle in the news­pa­pers, he would have to buy it." Well, Na­dia got her bike and has been rid­ing a wave of suc­cess ever since.

Mu­sic has al­ways been Na­dia's first love and it has tak­en her around the globe, in­clud­ing Shang­hai, Chi­na, in 2010, where she wowed the for­eign crowd, in spite of the lan­guage bar­ri­er. "I was think­ing the peo­ple would be like, 'What is she do­ing?' But girl, I had them jump­ing, wav­ing, run­ning, danc­ing, all kin­da ting! That's the pow­er of mu­sic and so­ca. We re­al­ly don't know what we have here," she said. When the T&T Guardian caught up with Na­dia on Wednes­day, she was at her San­ta Rosa home re­lax­ing on the couch. She con­fess­es to not get­ting the time to ded­i­cate to her usu­al gym rou­tine but get­ting ad­e­quate rest dur­ing the day and tak­ing her vi­t­a­mins are pri­or­i­ties as she read­ies her­self to take over the In­ter­na­tion­al So­ca Monarch stage on Car­ni­val Fri­day.

Singing pro­fes­sion­al­ly since the age of 17, the en­ter­tain­er, who al­so did bal­let at the Caribbean School of Dance in her younger years, will go up against the creme de la creme of so­ca in both the Groovy and Pow­er cat­e­gories, with the pop­u­lar tracks, No Pres­sure and Mak­ing Up, re­spec­tive­ly. Na­dia isn't wor­ried. It's a feat she ac­com­plished back in 2007 when she was a fi­nal­ist in the two cat­e­gories with her in­fec­tious tracks Caribbean Girl and My Land. "My ap­proach to So­ca Monarch dif­fers from many artistes be­cause I look at the stage as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to present my song in the best pos­si­ble way," stat­ed Na­dia, who was al­so in high praise of Caribbean Pres­tige Foun­da­tion for "com­ing up with new ways to im­prove the show."

The cre­ator and lead singer of the Caribbean's first all-fe­male so­ca band, SASS, Nadee, as she's af­fec­tion­ate­ly called, is hav­ing her best year yet as she con­tin­ues to break bound­aries in the world of so­ca. "I formed the band in Ju­ly last year, it was a risk but I'm a risk-tak­er. It's one of the best moves I've made in my ca­reer. We've been booked every week­end since Car­ni­val," she stat­ed. "I think it's a kind of shock val­ue too be­cause peo­ple didn't ex­pect this lev­el of mu­si­cian­ship from women. It's beau­ti­ful to see...Peo­ple still come up to me singing, "Nadee how yuh go do meh dat" like if that's the name of the song!"