Posts with the: allenbury tag.

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Snow on New Year`s Eve (2003)

Source: www.chroniclejournal.com

There was just one thing that could have pulled Snow away from recording his latest album: New Year’s Eve in Thunder Bay.

‘It should be fun,’ the Canadian pop-reggae-rap artist said from Toronto recently. ‘Just me up there singing old songs, new songs, making songs up, you know? Just doing what I gotta do. Just having fun, that’s the main thing.’

It’s Roxy’s he’s playing New Years Eve, by the way. Then it’s back to the busy recording artist life.

‘I’m making my own record label and stuff, my own entertainment company,’ Snow — whose real name is Darrin O’Brien — said of his latest ventures. ‘I’m buying a studio . . . start doing it myself.’

It’s been quite a while since Snow’s last release, Mind on the Moon, which hit shelves in 2000. That was the follow-up to 1995’s Murder Love.

And who can forget 1993’s 12 Inches of Snow and it’s hit track Informer, which sat at number one on the Billboard singles chart — and made the Guinness Book of Records as the best-selling reggae single in U.S. history — even though nobody knew what the hell Snow was saying.

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Allenbury To Jamaica

Source: Interview by Harris Rosen, Photos by James Barr and Harris Rosen, www.peacemagazine.com

Peace magazine photoshootSomehow it all seems to suggest things are more complex than they seem. Racial profiling, a season of street violence in Toronto, and the usual innuendoes that Jamaicans brandish the most weapons all become slightly more confusing for those seeking easy explanations. How? Just add Snow.

Born Darrin O’Brien in 1969, Snow grew up in North York’s Allenbury Projects, a place where the dreams of recent immigrants and old school Canadians square off against the often harsh realities of the city’s subsidized housing scene. It’s a place that, according to Snow, has changed dramatically over the past twenty years.

‘When I was growing up I didn’t know people who would break into people’s houses and steal their wedding bands,’ he says. ‘My neighborhood was a place where you’d see a lady come walking by with her purse and her groceries in her hand and somebody run up to her, grab the groceries and help her across the street and bring it to her house.’

Regardless of geography, this is but one tale from a city that’s currently embroiled in a rush of reminiscence about the good old days. From Allenbury to Cabbagetown to Eglinton West, people across Toronto can be heard talking about the 1970s like it was some kind of golden age. Listen to anyone over thirty and pay attention to that far away look in their eyes as they talk with this myth-like reverence about life before the sweep of crime, poverty, and social suffering.

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Nuff Respect To The Man Called Snow

Source: Gavin Power, Rosco Magazine

He’s been called a lot of things over the years: a murderer, a drunk, an abuser, but nothing hurts Darrin O’Brien, a.k.a. Snow, more than a comparison to Vanilla Ice. Ouch.

Both had hits around the same time. Vanilla with his Ice Ice Baby, and Snow with Informer. Both are white and both were singing black. But that’s where the comparison ends. Over a coffee on Front street, Snow, who’s made a comeback with his new album Mind on the Moon, explains why Vanilla Ice has always been whack.

‘There was a lot of talk about that guy and I always felt a little sorry for him because they (the people around him) made him into that guy. And then he shot his mouth off saying that he grew up hard and all that. It was just lies.’

Darrin did grow up hard. He was raised in a housing project at Don Mills and Sheppard where everybody was getting drunk and fighting all the time. ‘My world was kind of small back then,’ he says as he fidgets with the black toque that he’s pulled down over his ears. ‘That was kind of all that I knew.’

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Snow Gives Sobering Message And Performance At Shark Tank Pub

Source: Amanda Newman

Snow performing at Shark Tank PubSnow performed for Belleville and a near capacity crowd at the Shark Tank Pub on Thursday night. Darrin O’Brien, known as Snow, who was raised in the Allenbury social housing projects in North York and is the voice behind the 1993 hit single Informer.

He performed that song along with material from his album Mind On The Moon released in October 2000. ‘The show was excellent. It was a more intimate show than we’ve had in the past. I think he enjoyed Belleville. This show had a lot of energy,’ said Fred Pollitt, director of student life at Loyalist College.

Snow was accompanied on stage by two dancers and fellow male performer Candy, while fans surrounded the area around the stage. Snow dropped out of school in Grade 8 and began drinking at age 13 hanging out with a bad crowd. ‘I might go back to school and learn some shit because my daughter is getting smarter than I am,’ he said on stage. When an audience member suggested he have a drink, Snow had this comment for the crowd:

‘I don’t drink alcohol, it’s good for you, but I wound up in prison,’ he told the crowd.

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Evil Spirits

Source: Access All Areas and Primetime

Evil Spirits photoshootDarrin O’Brien has never worked a day in his life — kind of. The Toronto-bred singer whose rapid-fire Jamaican patois helped lodge the song ‘Informer’ on top of the Billboard Singles chart for seven weeks back in 1993 admits to having never held employment outside the music business. ‘The first job I ever had was music,’ he says, ‘and it’s a hard job.

Wrapped in cigarette smoke, O’Brien, better known to the world as Snow, is sitting in a cafe kitty-corner to MuchMusic’s Toronto studios. It’s Thanksgiving, a holiday Monday, and the streets are suitably quiet. It’s also the day before Snow’s comeback record, Mind On The Moon, arrives in stores so he’s working hard to sell me — and the rest of Canada — on his continued relevance.

So far, the odds seem to be in his favour. ‘Everybody Wants To Be Like You’, Mind On The Moon’s first single, sits at Number 2 on Soundscan’s Singles chart as of this writing, and while critics have been less than enthusiastic about Snow’s return (Matt Galloway of Toronto weekly NOW refers to Moon as a ‘scrubbed-down teen-pop nightmare’), MuchMusic and mainstream radio have embraced their prodigal son.

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