Recorded in Lisbon in October 2022, this episode of Rebel Passport is our latest collaboration with our friends at Rebel Up, the Brussels collective who since 2007 have devoted themselves to sounds from the global underground… and what a guest to share it with!

Drew Gonsalves is the Trinidad-born, Toronto-based songwriter and frontman of Kobo Town, the band named after the Port-of-Spain neighbourhood where calypso itself was born. For nearly twenty years he has carried that tradition forward, keeping calypso’s swing and its gift for sharp, topical commentary while pulling reggae, dub and ska into the mix until something entirely his own takes shape.

The occasion is Carnival of the Ghosts, the band’s fourth album. Where earlier records held Caribbean history close, this one turns outward, to the quirks, vices and small mercies of the human condition, and to the sense of impermanence that runs underneath it all. The title found Drew on a J’ouvert morning in Trinidad. J’ouvert opens Carnival in the dark before dawn, the old “dirty mas” of mud, oil and devil-masquerade that walks before the bright daytime parade, and on that morning Drew was caught between Carnival’s explosion of life and the silent graveyards it danced past: the dead who once paraded down that very road.

Over this conversation, Drew opens the album track by track: the meanings, the origins, the hidden stories left off the sleeve notes. Calypso as a living, mischievous, satirical form, and a reminder of how fast it all goes by…