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| SNOW
TWO HANDS CLAPPING
Release Date: November 12, 2002
“I was in jail and I had a dream I was flying over all these houses, me and my mother. She was picking out houses. When I got out of jail, the first thing I bought was a car for me and a house for her.” - SNOW
A decade ago, Darrin O’Brien entered prison a troubled young thug and left an international recording star. It was the kind of story a Hollywood screenwriter could hardly have topped, a nigh impossible yet classic tale of uncanny timing and fortune. But it was all very real. And it was exactly the kind of cyclone experience that could have left a youthful talent like O’Brien, better known to the world as SNOW, chewed up in its wake. It didn’t.
SNOW admits he owes his sound to the streets of his troubled youth. He was continually in trouble with the law in his teens. There was the phony attempted murder rap for which he was acquitted and later chronicled in “Informer”. It was on a trip to New York City while on bail for an assault charge back home that SNOW was discovered by MC Shan. Shan was so impressed by the “white boy from Canada’s” freestyle skills he rushed him into a studio to make what would be the debut 12 INCHES OF SNOW. “I didn’t even think it was going to come out,” he says. “I thought it was just a joke.”
After shooting a video for “Informer”, he returned to Toronto for sentencing on the assault charge. He plead guilty and got a year. He didn’t hear the mixed version of his album. He first saw the “Informer” video in prison.
“Informer” held the #1 spot on the Billboard Singles Chart for seven weeks in 1993, entering up a Guinness Book Of World Records as the biggest selling reggae single and highest charting reggae single in history. “Informer” went on to sell 8 million units worldwide and 3.2 million units in the U.S.
Ten years later, SNOW is at the top of his creative game with TWO HANDS CLAPPING, his fifth and most ambitious musical statement yet. Sessions for the album were done in freewheeling style in New Jersey, Atlanta, and Miami. In New Jersey, Snow joined forces with producer Danny P (Robbie Williams, Canibus); Tricky and Laney Stewart oversaw the Atlanta sessions; and in Miami Snow worked with producers Tony Kelly (Shaggy, Beenie Man, Sean Paul) and Dave Kelly (Shaggy, Beenie Man, Foxy Brown).
He remains proud of what he considers the product of multi-cultural Toronto: Jamaican dancehall and American R&B filtered through an Irish kid who jokes that his only excuse for not “going country” is that he’s yet to find a pair of cowboy boots he doesn’t hate. |
Michael McCarty
