In the Reggae world, groups knocked out their albums fast. We were no exception. The Quiñones family had an incredible work ethic, and I continued learning a lot from Angelo. We could put together an album in a month or less, and that included writing the songs out of thin air as well as arranging, producing, and recording them.
There are very simple ways to play Reggae music, but we were continuing to incorporate new sounds. I was a good enough guitar player that I could play broken chords, sustained notes, and a lot of different rhythms. Even though we were playing within a certain genre, I was like Angelo, in the sense that I wanted to think outside the box and do something different.
Basically, anytime we were ready to make an album, we'd book the studio for a week and record the whole album at once. In the weeks leading up to that, we spent time perfecting the songs in Angelo's bedroom studio. At the studio, instrumental and vocal tracks had to be recorded separately and from beginning to end before they could be mixed. If you messed one of those up, you had to go back in and start over.
During my first year with The Delegation, we had released an album comprised of Adonis's old songs because Capitol EMI had bought them from the previous label and they wanted them rerecorded. For that album, we recorded the songs exactly as they had been written originally. I simply played the same guitar part that had already been done before. I wasn't the kind of person who was going to try to take over; I was being as true as I could be to the guitar sounds they'd had on those songs originally, to the point that most people probably didn't even realize it was a different guitar player, much less a girl playing.
But, in creating Entre a Mi Mundo in 1992, we broke out of that mold and came up with truly innovative sounds. The album shot to the top of the charts and went gold fast. My favorite song on the album, "Is This Love," was written by Adonis and Angelo while we were on Big Bertha touring in late 1991. The song's simple, plaintive melody and sweet lyrics tell the story of a man who is slowly falling in love with this girl, and begins making plans of their life together, but first wants to know if it is actually true love before those plans come to fruition. It's safe to say that-yes-that song was about me.
"Is This Love" was the first solo song of Adonis's to really take off, especially in Jamaica. The song became a fan favorite and one of Adonis's signature songs. Adonis really loved to sing all of the songs we did, but "Is This Love" was probably his favorite. As it gained popularity, we began either opening or closing our sets with that particular song, with fans singing along to the chorus, "Is this love! Is this love! Is this love! Is this love that I'm feeling?" The bigger that song got, the greater our connection was with the crowd.
