By Danielle Swain
danielle@newsroom.gy
The thing about some stars is that when you finally meet them, you might not like them. There’s some ego, guardedness, and an aura of self-belief that has to calcify just to survive public life in Guyana. But Carlvin Burnett shows up without any of it.
Meeting him feels like a hug, because he likes to hug, and he will. You get the strange sense you’ve known him your entire life. Maybe it’s a Berbice thing.
We found him recently inside Selector André’s studio in Georgetown. The modest space hums like a living archive of Guyanese musical ambition. Angular, shocking-colour pop-art prints of Biggie, Pimp C, and Tupac hang at the entrance, their faces frozen at the height of their myth. All three made it out. None of them lived long enough to become elders. It’s a subtle irony baked into the room, a lineage of global icons who burned bright and vanished young. Deeper inside, closer to the recording booth, are photo portraits of Guyanese musicians Azariel, Eddy Grant, and Natural Black, arranged with the kind of reverence usually reserved for Presidents and cabinets. Together, the photos hint at a lineage Carlvin Burnett is actively trying to bridge. The walls already say what he will later put into words: this isn’t about one star; it’s about a movement.
Guyana’s shortcoming has never been that its greats died young; it’s that it lacks global scaffolding. Artists with world-class instincts flirted with regional and international attention before being folded back into a country without the infrastructure to keep them there.
Selector André, born André Sargeant, came up as a DJ. Now he runs his own entertainment company. He opened his studio for the interview without ceremony, another small, unremarked act of community. Carlvin moves the same way. He talks about collaboration the way some people talk about family.
“Having everybody together is good because you move the whole industry together,” he says. “If I put out a video tomorrow and it blows up to the entire world, they might be wondering who’s the dancer in this video… and from there every single body can have their own break.”
Burnett is from Stanleytown, Berbice. Guyanese old enough may remember his break from the GTT Jingle and Song Competition. When he’s told the interview was initially imagined for New Amsterdam, he lights up. He wants that too.
In a previous interview, he said he got his talent from his mother. There’s a video on his page of them singing gospel together in a car, raw, unguarded, devastatingly sincere. Another clip shows her sticking her birthday cake with his father, a fondant mic perched on the side, joking that it’s her day. The love is real. You can see exactly where Carlvin also inherited his warmth.
Family, he says, matters. You believe him.
He carries that same energy into his creative circle. He calls his team his backbone. Chenille Bowen, his manager, set up the interview almost instantly after being contacted. She also directed his latest video, Lunatic. Joel Browne (Joey 2kool) produced many of his tracks, including Handy Man, which won him Soca Monarch in 2024. André is a constant presence too.
“I want to leave a legacy,” Carlvin says. “So that whenever anybody looks back to say, oh well, this is how it started or this is where it stemmed from, your name can be mentioned right there.”
That ambition, to be a cornerstone, not just an internationally-recognised musician colours everything he does.
Jamaica’s Duane Stephenson noticed it long before their collaboration.
“I’ve watched his growth,” says the reggae icon. “The thing that surprised me the most about him was his consistency. And his humility through all his consistency.”
Stephenson first met Carlvin when he fronted Heat Wave Band.
“It wasn’t something usual in terms of his whole feel for the music,” Duane says. “Especially when he was singing them kind of reggae songs that the girls like.”
Their collaboration almost stayed digital, tracks sent back and forth, ideas shared online. Then tragedy intervened, the death of Father Wally, a mutual friend and collaborator. Duane came to Guyana to pay respects. The song happened in the same room instead.
That passing mention carries more weight than it seems. Walter “Father Wally” Fraser, the visionary founder of Vizion Sounds, died in December and was laid to rest in January. Born in Guyana and shaped by formative years in London and Jamaica, Fraser returned home in the 1990s determined to build what the country didn’t yet have – professional scaffolding for its music. Vizion Sounds became a sanctuary, a place where artists learned discipline, technical rigor, and most importantly, belief. Groups like First Born, Heatwave Band – Carlvin’s own early home, and artists like Natural Black and Mark Batson passed through his orbit. Fraser’s death lands softly inside this story like punctuation. He was one of the elders who built the ladder. Carlvin is climbing it.
Burnett talks about Jamaica with reverence but not inferiority.
“If you want the best, then you have to get it from the source,” he says. “These guys have a foundation.”
He calls himself a student.
“I never think that I know it all or I am the best,” he says. “I am a student. So, I’m willing to learn all the time.”
That mindset came from the hard-earned discipline that struggle provides. There was a moment, not long after he convinced his parents to let him do music full-time, when everything fell apart.
“I remember sitting in my room one night and staring up at the ceiling,” he says. “Zinc sheet. I ain’t even had money for the under ceiling.”
Nothing was happening. Months passed. It got worse.
“I ask myself, what did you do?” he says. “You should have just listened to your parents.”
But the music wouldn’t leave him.
“I could be broke and hungry in the house and I still singing,” he says. “My stomach joining in to same way.”
Now people see crowns; Soca Monarch, Dancehall Monarch, signing deals.
“They don’t see the struggle behind the doors,” he says. “They don’t see the tears.”
In 2024, he launched Overdue, his first solo concert. No sponsors. Everything out of pocket. He nearly cried on stage.
“I was like, you’re here. You’re finally here.”
The turnout blew up one of the ugliest myths in Guyanese music, that local artists can’t draw crowds.
“Throw them in the corner one time,” Carlvin says.
He thinks the real problem is cultural.
“We have a false mindset that if it is from outside, it is always better than what we have,” he says.
He tells a story about being in a barber shop in the U.S., listening to people mock a Guyanese song on the radio.
“The world is actually listening,” he says. “But what do we feed them?”
Duane agrees.
“We don’t need Guyana to be going through the same exact things that we went through,” he says. “With time comes wisdom.”
Near the end, Carlvin is asked what he’d tell a youth from New Amsterdam who thinks their dreams are too big.
“Pray. Be consistent. Love what you do,” he says. “Don’t do it for the hearts and the little emoji things on Facebook.”
Then he shrugs and says the line that sounds like a dare wrapped in advice.
“Leave New Amsterdam. Take on the rest of Guyana. Take on the rest of the world.”
Back in Selector Andre’s studio, Carlvin, Duane and Andre listen to a calypso song sung by a nine-year-old rehearsing for Children’s Mashramani. Duane asks what it’s about, Carlvin and Andre answer along the lines of keeping the culture alive – Kaiso.
Whatever Carlvin is building in rooms like this, it isn’t just songs and shows. It’s a way of being an artist in Guyana that doesn’t require leaving your humanity at the door.
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