I did it, sent it to her, she said she liked it and she messaged and said she going to record it but I was sceptical.

“I asked if she would sing a song I wrote and she said if she liked it she would do it. They met on Synergy TV and exchanged BB pins. Roberts was the first big artist he worked with. To avoid being overlooked I decided to work with people who won’t be overlooked,” he said. Each time a door is closed I am gonna keep banging till it opens or sneak through a crack so I decided to do my own projects. It wasn’t easy at first to convince popular producers and big artists to work with him as he was still a relative unknown but he is a man who does not take no for an answer and isn’t willing to sit and wait for others to give him a chance. Problem started writing for other artists a year or two before he penned Patrice Roberts’ ‘A Little Wine’.

Two years later, in 2007 I got ‘Party Animal and I was forced to learn the business,” he said, noting that he has never had a song written for him by someone else. “First time I did it, it did well so I just kept doing it and I got a booking in Toronto in my second year and I was surprised, cause I didn’t realise these guys would fly you out, pay for accommodation and pay you to perform. “I decided to do what I could do but on a soca beat,” he told Loop during an early visit ahead of the Carnival season. He said it wasn’t until he migrated to the United States that he gravitated to soca when he realised how difficult it was to break into the music market as a Hip Hop and Dancehall artist. Stating that he has been singing since he knew himself, Problem Child was into Hip Hop and dancehall though his mother listened to soca and calypso on the radio. Like many soca artists, he wasn’t drawn to soca initially. Problem Child has been the genius pen behind songs such as Roberts ‘Like it like that’ with Kees Dieffenthaller, her ‘Old and Grey’ song, Shal’s ‘Splinters’ and all the other songs on the 2 AM riddim, to name a few.īorn in St Vincent, Problem Child currently lives in New York where he has ambitions of breaking into the mainstream music industry and writing for superstars such as Rihanna. Though many know Problem Child through his songs ‘Party Animal’, ‘Middle of Something’ and ‘Life of the Party’ and one of his 2019 releases ‘Good Up GoodUp’, he has steadily been making his name as a songwriter contributing to the success of Patrice Roberts, Shal Marshall and many more. Increasingly, there are more producers and songwriters from around the region who are contributing heavily to the sound of soca’s top singers.Īmong them is Vincentian songwriter and singer Johnny Fontainne, known in the soca world as Problem Child. If ever you needed proof that soca is the music of the Caribbean, you need to look no further than the people behind the scenes shaping the genre.

Problem child songs