“I chose soca. The music of my country. I couldn’t abandon my culture. That is what I was born to do.”
He said that to me in 2012 during an interview I conducted for the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian. At the time, he was reflecting on his early years, when other young performers were lip-syncing R&B and reggae at parties while he made a deliberate decision to stay rooted in soca. It sounded like conviction then. With twelve Road March titles to his name today, it reads like a blueprint.
When this year’s result was announced and Machel Montano secured his 12th Road March title with Encore, breaking the national record for the most wins in our history, the noise began immediately. Celebration. Debate. Bacchanal. In Trinidad and Tobago, Road March is never just a trophy. It is pride, memory, identity and cultural validation woven into one result.
But if you have watched his career closely, this milestone does not feel sudden.
I have analysed Encore through two editorials this Carnival season, examining the lyrical strategy and the business positioning behind the song, particularly what entrepreneurs can learn from the way it was executed. That lens matters because what we are witnessing is not luck meeting opportunity. It is long-term strategy meeting timing.
Years ago for that Guardian, I sat in a studio in San Fernando with Machel and his producer Kasey Phillips. I asked question after question, trying to understand the thinking behind the work. At one point he paused and said, almost surprised, “Wow, you ask a lot of questions.” It was not flippant. It was humble, almost as if he did not yet fully grasp the scale of what he was constructing. I was studying the discipline. He was already living it.
There is another layer here for me. Machel is from San Fernando and so am I. That shared south connection has always felt like an unspoken thread. Global success, international stages, world tours, yet the foundation remains local.
I also wrote a Guardian feature on his mother, Elizabeth Montano and the scale of her archiving everything Machel still astonishes me. She preserved everything. Newspaper clippings. Photographs. Costumes. Videos. Scrapbooks dating back to the early 1980s. More than 300 volumes documenting a journey she believed in long before the world recognised it. From the Too Young To Soca days onward, the career was being recorded with intention. That archive revealed something powerful. Before the accolades, there was infrastructure. Before the records, there was planning.
I remember another moment that never left me. I was leaving Trinidad to move to London in 2004, driving through Port of Spain just after the Lighthouse, music loud because that is how I process emotion. “Don’t Tell Me That You’re Sorry” by Machel was playing on my speakers and I was singing, feeling the weight of leaving home. Then Machel literally pulled up alongside me in a Renault Mégane convertible and started singing the song to me through the window. I do not know if he remembers it. But I do. In that moment, the distance between artist and audience disappeared.
Another Carnival season, another memory. I was at Maracas and saw him on the beach a distance away. I shouted, “Machel, Happy Carnival!” and he shouted back, “Happy Carnival!” Simple. Human. Unscripted.
He is woven into my own Carnival history. I have stood on top of a cooler at Pier 1 stamping to Footsteps while he performed. I have crossed the stage to several of his Road Marches. His catalogue is part of my personal timeline.
And when I lived in London, his music travelled with me. Through cold winters and homesick evenings, I would put on my headphones and dance alone in my living room, reconnecting with Trinidad and Tobago through rhythm and memory. His music does not only connect people to Carnival. It connects us to home.
The data also tells an important part of his story. On YouTube, Encore sits around 4.1 million views. Voice’s Cyah Behave is around 1.6 million. Bunji Garlin’s Roadman sits at roughly 649K on the Julian Promotions upload. These are significant numbers. They show engagement and audience choice. But digital views measure replay behaviour. And here Machel wins too.
Road March measures something different. Road March is about what dominates the road itself. What bands play. What trucks push through the streets. What the crowd responds to collectively in the heat and movement of Carnival. It is a physical metric, not an algorithmic one. Much of the debate comes from people comparing different experiences as if they are the same. A song can mash up a fete and still not win Road March. Another can dominate the road while also thriving online.
What is interesting this year is that Encore appears to be doing both. The road embraced it and audiences are choosing to replay it at home and in their cars. 4.1million! That signals something important about how Soca is consumed now. The road remains the ultimate judge but the algorithm has become a second stage.
From a brand strategist’s perspective, the pattern is clear. Consistency. Reinvention without losing identity. Understanding audience behaviour both in the street and online. From a journalist’s perspective, the archive and the early interviews tell the same story. This career has been treated as something to build deliberately over time.
This does not mean everyone must agree with the result. Debate is part of Carnival culture. Some judge by road energy. Others by fete vibes. Others by streaming popularity. These are different lenses.
But records do not happen by accident. Twelve Road March titles across eras and generations point to something deeper than one Carnival season. They point to someone who chose soca when it was not the obvious choice and stayed with it long enough for that choice to reshape the culture itself.
He chose Soca.
And that choice built a legacy.
Our legacy.
Congrats Machel! Thank you for all those jumps across the stage. All the tube rides you were in my ears in London and I missed home. Thank you cheering me up when nothing else would do but a bit of Soca. Just thank you!
