Everton Blender’s career is a reminder that talent can always find a way, even if you don’t succeed first time around. After releasing a number of records in the late 70s and early to mid 80s, a lack of commercial success had seen him leave the music business and go back to working as a house painter. But, his honeyed voice had caught the ear of Garnett Silk, and that led to Blender getting signed to Star Trail. He returned to recording and performing in the early 90s and Create a Sound would act as the starting track on his first album, Lift Up Your Head, which even made some British charts in 1994.
Create a Sound acknowledges that this a second chance for Blender, one that he’s surprised and relieved to have been given. He’s spent many days working through the slog of painting houses, and it sounds as though some of those jobs were in pretty rough neighbourhoods, so now he’s going to relish the chance to do what he most wants to do:
We just a come.
Long time a day under Jah Jah sun.
Box and relax.
A nice sit down.
Put on mi locks and I create a sound.
In the same way that we like to wish that MPs had experience of the world before going into politics, so Blender assures us that his working background and experience will inform the music he makes and keep him grounded if he becomes successful:
The longer you live, the more you learn.
The harder you work, I know you will earn.
The heights I reach, I will surely keep.
The Lord is the shepherd and I am the sheep.
I wish he had kept this narrative going, as the track eventually moves into standard reggae semi-religious homilies i.e. A happy father is the result of a wise son etc, but I suppose he worried that to keep singing about his new opportunity risked showing a lack of humility. There’s a likably amusing section in which Blender suggests that having avoided being harmed by the criminals in the neighbourhoods he worked in due to good fortune or pure front, that his music will now have the effect of turning them from crime, which seems a far bigger boast than any of those stated at the start of the track. Might it be worth playing some of his music in the Donbas?
Lyrics copyright of Everton Williams (Blender)
Video courtesy of Reggae Nineties (and early 2000s).
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