Joe McWilliams
Lakeside Leader
That tall fellow who works mornings at the Speedee Mart in Slave Lake? There’s more to him than meets the eye.
For one thing, he’s got a song video on YouTube with over 600,000 views. For another, he’s shooting a video for another song sometime this month, right here in Slave Lake. Then in the fall, he plans to release a four-song EP. “Each one has a different vibe,” says Princevinder Singh, whose stage name is ‘The Prince.’
Singh has been in Slave Lake for about a year-and-a-half, working for Khadim at the Husky. He moved here from Toronto, where he’d been studying and working for about four years after moving there from India.
Slave Lake is a long way from Toronto, and of course very different. Singh says he wanted to get out of that city, and when he found a job ad online, he applied and got it.
“It’s good here,” he says. “Peaceful.”
He says he always liked singing and was a fan of popular music in his home country growing up. But he never thought of it as something to do for a living.
“I thought it was a passion, not a profession,” he says.
But in Toronto he became acquainted with people who were involved in the professional music scene, and they encouraged him to do something with his songs. Since then he says he’s written “16 or 20,” and had four released. How it works, he says, is after figuring out the lyrics he’ll do a demo version of the song at home, and then send it to a producer back in India. That person works up a proper music track and sends it back for Singh to re-record his vocals over.
Singh describes the types of music he does as “hip hop, R&B and trap.”
Trap? It’s apparently a sub-genre of rap music that originated from Southern U.S., says the Masterclass website.
As for that upcoming video shoot, Singh says the song has “a town vibe,” so he’ll want to shoot it somewhere in Slave Lake, as opposed to outside of town.
“I just need a DOP (director of photography),” he says. Singh is also a competitive archer, having practiced it when he was growing up for about 11 years. He hasn’t done it for a while, but plans to get back into it. “Archery is my game,” he says.
