Her voice is poignant as she sings, “dem ah try mek de little one come in last/they paid her no mind, tried to run past/all de judgement dem did wait to cast/try left her behind dem did ah tink dem too fast/she waited for the day and time/world as her stage gold on her mind/and in the moment that she had to shine/history and page she wrote di whole nine.”
Her name is Lady Stone, and her message is powerful in the song “Small Packages,” a Reggae tribute to Julien Alfred.
Lady Stone started writing for other artistes in 2017 before releasing her own album, “The Red Wedding.”
A scene in the popular TV Series, “Game of Thrones” inspired the album.
Lady Stone actually derived her stage name from a character depicted in the series: Lady StoneHeart.
After a recent hiatus from making music, Lady Stone has drawn inspiration from a ‘real-life superhero,’ Julien Alfred, for a comeback.
She describes the ode to Alfred as “the best song I have ever written, I’ve ever done.”
“This came from a place that we can all relate to as Saint Lucians. We were all watching the Olympics and we were all just into it because we knew that one of our own was there in representation of us,” the singer/songwriter explained.
“However I didn’t want it to be too much about the country, but about Julien Alfred and what she accomplished and that was the driving force for the song. When I looked back on the replays of the 100 meters finals, I did not see 180,000 Saint Lucians on the track. I just saw one called Julien Alfred and I really wanted to portray and to bring about this feeling that yes we are proud, but my girl you and you alone did this,” Lady Stone recalled.
Lady Stone told St. Lucia Times that she has been following Julien Alfred’s progress for the past five years, ever since she was a student at Texas University with the Longhorns.
She disclosed that some of what she knew from then went into the song, making “Small Packages” the easiest song she had ever written.
“It was as if I had been given an assignment by a professor and you know, he had asked me to read something and go summarize what I had just read. So I just pulled from what I had learned of her over these years and just taking that and removing myself completely out of the equation,” she revealed.
The “Small Packages” singer says that after she started writing the song, she initially scrapped it.
“What really prompted me to pick it up again, was seeing the back and forth between Saint Lucians and Jamaicans and other islanders with some saying she was Jamaican. That kinda lit a fire under me. And the use of the Jamaican patois in the song was deliberate, I used it to say that this about Julien Alfred from a small island called Saint Lucia, and to say just let us have that, just let us live,” she said.
Further, “I knew that there were going to be songs made and created in celebration of this momentous occasion. So I purposed within myself to set the song apart from any other thing that would be created, any other song or artistic contribution. I wanted my contribution to be top tier because that is who I was celebrating, we are celebrating.”
Lady Stone told St. Lucia Times that the song would not be complete if she did not include an actual voice excerpt from Julien Alfred herself.
Alfred’s voice is captured at the start of the song and in the end as Lady Stone sings, “and they’ll say/look how yuh name small/this game ain’t for you/that’s okay great things will come in small packages too!
