PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

So­ca artiste Umi Mar­cano has col­lab­o­rat­ed with pop­u­lar parang leg­end, Ir­win ‘Scrunter’ John­son to urge peo­ple to take nec­es­sary safe­ty pre­cau­tions against the COVID-19 virus.

The song, ‘We Parang­ing (Munchies Mon­ster)’, was al­most com­plete when Mar­cano’s man­ag­er sug­gest­ed an ad­di­tion­al touch.

“Scrunter was like the ic­ing on the cake. Ba­si­cal­ly at the end of whole run that’s when we put Scrunter on the track. My man­ag­er was think­ing, ‘what could we do to make this great’? So he reached out to Scrunter and they had a con­ver­sa­tion and we be­came friends and he came and he did it and we are at this point right now,” said Mar­cano.

Mar­cano said the stu­dio ses­sion with the San­gre Grande icon, was al­so full of ad­vice.

“He came down all the way from Grande to Diego Mar­tin and yeah, he did ac­tu­al­ly tell me some things...it was like it was like a young one meet­ing a leg­end and so from the time he come in the stu­dio here, he start to tell me dif­fer­ent things to make it sound...ad­vance it,” Mar­cano said.

Umi Marcano

Facebook: Umi Marcano

The two artistes hope to re­lease a mu­sic video to fur­ther push the mes­sage.

“That is one of our ideas - to work with the Min­istry of Health to, you know, when we shoot the video, we shoot the video in such a way where it cor­re­sponds to prop­er guide­lines for COVID so it would ac­tu­al­ly help peo­ple who want to check their fam­i­ly but scared, to do the right thing,” he said.

As for the can­cel­la­tion of Car­ni­val sea­son, Mar­cano said it was an op­por­tu­ni­ty for artistes to de­vel­op mu­sic with an in­ter­na­tion­al fo­cus, as well as de­vel­op­ing ex­po­sure on stream­ing plat­forms as they could no longer look to the live au­di­ence events of the fes­ti­val.

He said while the lock­down had tak­en away some of his free­dom it did al­low him to spend more time in his stu­dio at West Coast Beats, Dutch En­ter­tain­ment.