Jamila Falak, a graduate of the Edna Manley School of the Visual and Performing Arts, is still on cloud nine after her cover of Meghan Trainor’s All About That Bass gained the attention of the international singer.

Falak was featured on Glamour Maga-zine’s You Sang My Song in March, and was given the shock of her life when she got to watch Trainor’s reaction to her performing the song.

In the video, Trainor heaped praises on Falak for her arrange-ment of the song, and went as far as to say that she liked the Jamaican’s version better than her own. In an interview with The Gleaner, Falak expressed sheer joy at the fact that her cover reached Trainor’s eyes and ears. She said that she did the song out of pure love for another cover version she had heard, and never expected her video to get any traction, yet alone get featured by Glamour Magazine and being recognized by Trainor.

“When I first did the cover, I was on my final-year show at Edna Manley in 2016. Having seen the reaction of the crowd and everything, it inspired me to do an actual cover and everything, and put it on YouTube. I asked a friend of mine, Jason Thomas, to record the visuals, Nicolas Groskopf to mix the audio, and O’Neil Dacres to play piano for me. I never really did it for recognition – that wasn’t the thought process,” Falak explained.

“I was surprised to see the reaction, and that it even went viral on Facebook and YouTube; and I kept getting all the likes and nice comments. I never expected her (Meghan Trainor) to see it. Out of all of the covers on YouTube, I was one of them that they reached out to for an interview. I was not expecting it. I was speechless and everything was literally a blessing – I felt very special and it is definitely a highlight of my year.”

Jamaican Flavor

Falak, who started playing the double bass approximately two years before the video was taken, said she wanted to add a Jamaican flavour to a ‘jazzy cover’ of the song by Postmodern Jukebox and Kate Davis. Falak was over the moon when she heard Trainor doting about her arrangement of the song. “I’m a big music fan, and a big lover of jazz and Jamaican music as well. I love how playful it sounds to fuse Jamaican music – mento, ska, rocksteady with jazz. All I did was fuse the Jamaican elements to the Postmodern Jukebox and Kate Davis version. So when she said she liked my version better than her song, I can just imagine how that made her feel.” She continued, “I was happy that my version evoked genuine joy in her, and that made me feel like I did her song some justice. The fact that she said that from her lips meant a lot.”

The budding musician says she always believed in the saying ‘anything is possible,’ but noted that her Glamour Magazine moment has cemented in her the drive to chase her dreams, no matter how big and out of reach they may seem. “I do believe in the notion of expecting the unexpected, and that anything is possible. Even the terminology ‘impossible’ says ‘I’m possible’. It (the feature) has pumped me up with so much enthusiasm and adrenaline, I am looking forward to the future, and what I have to offer the world. Get ready world because ‘I’m coming out’,” she sang.