Carisa Lee

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt

Do the lyrics, “This is my age, this is my sign, this where I live, and what I like, this where I’m from, and what I do, this what I love...How bout you” sound fa­mil­iar?

If it does or if you just sang those words, then you may be an avid Tik­Tok user and prob­a­bly used or saw videos with this trend­ing au­dio on your “For you Page” in the last year.

The name of the song is Zo­di­ac and it was writ­ten by Will Git­tens, a Trin­bag­on­ian singer and song­writer mak­ing mu­si­cal waves in­ter­na­tion­al­ly.

“Every­body wants to be heard, every­body wants to be un­der­stood, you giv­ing them an op­por­tu­ni­ty to say where they from, the things that they like and love the most...I didn’t think it was go­ing to be that big but it cre­at­ed a whole trend,” Git­tens told Guardian Me­dia.

But that’s not the on­ly time Git­tens’ mu­sic went vi­ral on­line. His acoustic and remixed ver­sions of Gram­my award singer Adele’s Easy on Me were al­so pop­u­lar on Tik­Tok and gained mil­lions of views on YouTube.

The remixed ver­sion cur­rent­ly has over two mil­lion streams on the au­dio stream­ing ser­vice Spo­ti­fy.

Will Gittens, a Trinbagonian singer and songwriter making musical waves internationally.

He told Guardian Me­dia that he knew that song would have been a hit so he jumped on the trend im­me­di­ate­ly. He was right.

Git­tens said this in­sight came be­cause he’s no stranger to so­cial me­dia or the mu­sic in­dus­try.

Be­fore Tik­Tok, he made videos on a sim­i­lar app called Vine and post­ed his cov­er to songs on YouTube.

Git­tens al­so be­came the face of the app Mu­si­cal.ly be­fore it was Tik­Tok.

“That’s what so­cial me­dia has done, it’s al­lowed mil­lions and even close to bil­lions of peo­ple to have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to know who you are and ac­cess your mu­sic and once I re­alised that was the new form of tech­nol­o­gy, I hit the ground run­ning with that,” he said.

The tal­ent, he said, is hered­i­tary. Git­tens is the son of Caribbean and in­ter­na­tion­al award-win­ning singer/song­writer Ster­ling Git­tens and he said his fa­ther’s in­flu­ence played a big role in his mu­si­cal ca­reer.

“I’m ver­sion two point five of my fa­ther...I went to Berkley Col­lege of Mu­sic so I stud­ied there from 2010 to 2014, that was when my mu­si­cal jour­ney start­ed,” he said.

But it wasn’t un­til some­thing trag­ic hap­pened to Git­tens and his fam­i­ly that it made him tru­ly be­lieve mu­sic is his call­ing.

“I lost my lil broth­er in 2009 and I re­mem­ber af­ter he passed, I just want­ed to sing some­thing in an as­sem­bly in my high school,” he said.

The song was I Will Fol­low You in­to the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie and Git­tens said af­ter his per­for­mance, he got a stand­ing ova­tion and peo­ple in the au­di­ence were cry­ing.

“I think it was a that mo­ment that I knew that my voice had an ef­fect on peo­ple,” he said.

And to many of his fol­low­ers, it still does.

“Your voice is so sooth­ing and an­gel­ic,” Chelsea Lopez com­ment­ed on so­cial me­dia.

“Broth­er, your mu­sic is a bless­ing to all of us, es­pe­cial­ly in these times,” T. Solomon al­so com­ment­ed.

Will Gittens, a Trinbagonian singer and songwriter making musical waves internationally.

While Git­tens has cov­ered songs by artistes such as Ush­er, Bri­an McK­night, Chris Brown and even Elvis Pres­ley, he al­so does duets with oth­er singers...most re­cent­ly he and Rome Fly­nn, an Amer­i­can ac­tor, cov­ered I Wan­na Know by R&B singer Joe. He al­so has a com­pi­la­tion of all his cov­ers for love songs com­ing out soon.

“I added one new song and it’s called falling for you, a song I did with my broth­er,” he said.

But even though most of his cov­ers are songs from R&B and pop singers, he al­so re­mains root­ed in his cul­ture and cov­ered so­ca songs such as Farmer Nap­py’s Hookin Meh.

Git­tens plans to come to T&T for Car­ni­val 2023 and hopes to per­form the new genre of mu­sic he and his broth­er are work­ing on called Afro Is­land, a mix of Caribbean and Afro Beats mu­sic.

“We’re try­ing to bridge the gap and hit all these dif­fer­ent African Di­as­po­ras all over the world... It’s a new breed of mu­sic,” he said.

If not with Afro Is­land, he hopes to come home and per­form for a lo­cal au­di­ence soon.

“I think that this is my time, I’ve been work­ing for over a decade,” he said.

Will Gittens, a Trinbagonian singer and songwriter making musical waves internationally.