That’s a Rap!

His first eponymous album,which released in 2007 was a smash hit,with record sales of 400 million. One of the 13 tracks,Beautiful Girls,stayed on the number one spot in the Billboard Top 100 list in the US for three weeks. “It was an exciting moment. I had never expected to achieve that success,” he recalls.

Much of his music,says Kingston,is personal. While he wrote Beautiful Girls for a girl he had fallen for in high school,another track from the same album,Dry Your Eyes,came about when his mother and sister were sent to jail for tax fraud. “I react in a certain way. Most of my songs have a background to them so that people can relate to them better and they sound more convincing,” explains the Bob Marley fan. “I would regularly listen to Marley numbers at home because my mother was fond of them. Slowly I got hooked to the melody and the rhythm,” he continues.

It helped that his grandfather Lawrence Lindo produced most of Marley’s music,making it an impossibility to ever miss any record of the musician. “I could never meet grand-dad though,but the influence might have jumped a generation,” he laughs. Kingston is working on his third studio album now and is open to the idea of working with Indian musicians. Rumours are rife about his upcoming collaboration with composer Aadesh Srivastava,but Kingston refuses to divulge any details.