Hands up everyone who originally wanted to be a pop star. Yep, me too. The world is full of us. But unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases it isn’t meant to be, and so we reluctantly drift into some other area and the guitar stays in its case under the bed for years on end while we get on with making a living.
However, it doesn’t have to be just one or the other: some people make a success of both.
Take Don Clayton, for instance. A well-known figure in business circles in St. Maarten, Don is a former owner of The Atrium Resort in Simpson Bay and still owns a penthouse apartment there. But he is also a musician whose passion is for writing songs, and he has enjoyed considerable success over the years, without becoming a household name.
So, does he consider himself a businessman or a musician?
“In my heart I’m 100% a musician,” he says as we sit in his eyrie, with the blue umbrellas of Kim Sha beach lined up like an orderly flower bed down below and the Caribbean stretching into the distance. “But I also have to be a businessman to support the habit.”
The “habit” he refers to is his music.
Always a pragmatic person, Don told himself in his idealistic twenties that if he hadn’t made it big as a singer and songwriter by the time he was 30, he would make his fortune some other way.
He duly began to find his feet in the world of resorts, timeshares etc, in the US and the Caribbean and simultaneously graduated from writing advertising jingles to producing albums of his own songs.
Born in Florida although he has spent more time in North Carolina, Don says his family is very much from the Deep South. As a young child, he began playing harmonica before taking piano lessons, but he preferred, and still prefers, to play by ear and, having long since switched to guitar, that’s how does it. However, being a member of a marching band, he studied music at university and gained a degree in Music Education with the aim of being a band’s Music Director – although that never actually happened. Instead he found himself writing the aforementioned advertising jingles, the sheer variety of which is a discipline in itself.
As for influences, Don is vague and detailed at the same time, mentioning the southern rock of his youth (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers) along with Hank Williams, Led Zeppelin and Johan Sebastian Bach. He doesn’t even subscribe to the view that his music should be called country, although to these ears there is an unmistakable element of that.
As we speak, Don is about to release his latest project, a music video called Smooth Sailing, which was filmed here just before Irma in 2017. The song is aimed at the sailing crowd as they settle down for their “sundowner” cocktails as the day cools a little and everyone relaxes.
He is also bubbling about the success of Pray Me Over, winner of Best International Music Video at the London International Short Film Festival.
And then there’s It’s Like Valentine’s Day, which has been played extensively on the radio in St Maarten, particularly Island 92, where DJ Dr Soc has been prevailed upon to give it an airing, even though, Don says, “He’s not a Valentine’s kind of guy.”
Don Clayton, though, is not just a Valentine’s kind of guy, devoted to wife Alexandra, he’s a multi-faceted guy who has achieved success in some very different spheres. But the word he seems to value most refers to his songwriting: he’s a storyteller.
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