“Making and listening to music is therapy for me. It calms depression, anxiety, and the incurable affliction of being different.”
“When I was growing up, OK computer by Radiohead made me feel like someone understood me. I was raised in a pretty conservative all white suburb in Ontario and I would get under my headphones with a flashlight in my room and read the lyrics of “Fake Plastic Trees” under the covers. It helped me make sense of myself. “A green plastic watering can for a fake Chinese rubber plant In the fake plastic earth…”
I wasn’t the type of kid boys were into, so much so that the hottest guy in class actually asked me out as a joke. Instead of offing myself, I would listen to Jagged Little Pill and scream into my pillow over and over. “And it would knock me too the ground if I wasn’t there already. If only I could hunt the hunter…” All my aggression pain and sadness was sopped up by the sounds coming out of silver CDs. (world’s most emo alliteration).
Then came The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It helped me understand how to take that hurt and turn it into art and beauty and hope. “Now hear this mixture where hip hop meets scripture develop a negative into a positive picture,” she sang on “Everything is Everything.”
I’m as much an introvert as I am an extrovert, so as much as music helped my introspection, it was also the backdrop of dance, laughter, culture, and celebration. My family is Guyanese/ Indian and culturally Caribbean, so we would play Calypso and Soca music, or as my brother would call it “jump up music.”
We would bump the ghetto blaster and sing “Señora she’s a sensation/ The reason for aviation/ And fellas u gotta watch it when she wind up she bottom she go like a rocket!” from Harry Belafonte’s “Jump in the Line” while my mom would whip up some Metemgee, a savoury lime coconut stew made with dumplings and salt fish.
Songs like “Hot Hot Hot” by The Merrymen, “Brown Girl in the Ring” by Bony M, and “Dolla Wine” by Soca Boys would be blaring through the open screen door in the kitchen in the middle of a Canadian snowstorm.
Years later music is still helping me find a similar peace and release of mind through writing it, recording it, and creating it.”
—Anjulie
Having written songs for Kelly Clarkson, Nicki Minaj, Icona Pop, Fefe Dobson, and Kreesha Turner, among others, Anjulie’s single “Dancing With Girls” is in stores now.
