Snow Says He Got Respect In Dancehall After ‘Anything For You’

Snow, the Canadian Reggae fusion rapper from the early 90s, has shared that despite his initial success with the Billboard chart-topper Informer, he only came to be respected in Dancehall after the release of his feature-heavy 1995 hit song, Anything For You. 

“I had my mark in Dancehall with Informer, Lonely and all those songs, so it was like ‘Okay yeah, we like that’, but I didn’t really have that respect in Dancehall, not until Anything For You came out,” he recently told DJ Vlad of Vlad TV.

Snow (real name Darrin O’Brien), now 53 years old, revealed that the inspiration for the song was, comically, a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey.

As he shared with Vlad, he was a heavy drinker, so when producer Herby ‘Luv Bug’ Azor confiscated his freshly bought bottle on the condition that he would release it after he got back to making songs, Snow acquiesced. He set off for Bermuda, another of the conditions imposed by Herby. It was there that he improvised the freestyle that would form the blueprint of the now iconic tune.

According to Snow, after reaching Bermuda, he still sought to get his bottle of whiskey back from his producer.  “So, I’m following him around the house going ‘I will do any anything just for you, gimme back ma bottle don’t make me feel blue…” and he [Herby] goes ‘That’s it! That’s it!’ So yeah, it was written over a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey.”

“We then flew to Jamaica for the remix,” he added.

While the original featured just Snow and Nadine Sutherland, the Tony Kelly version added a star-studded cast of dancehall heavyweights, some of whom still hold sway today.

Snow explains: “Tony Kelly is amazing so we got the remix done by him and then Beenie (Man), Buju (Banton), Terror Fabulous, Kulture Knox, Louie Culture and Nadine Sutherland all came on and I was in awe like ‘Wow! All these guys doing this on a song I wrote?’”

Beyond the packed talent featured on the song, its true litmus test came, Snow revealed, when it was played at a party in Kingston. As soon as the selector played it, the crowd went ‘Ahhhh!”, and that’s when he knew the song was not only going to be a hit, but also earn him the respect he craved from Jamaica as a Dancehall artist back then.

The remixed track appeared on Snow’s second album Murder Love, which was released in 1995.

Anything For You became a club favorite in the United States and Canada, though it only peaked at 74 on the Canadian Singles Chart. In Jamaica, however, the song reached number one. It was also Jamaica’s top-selling single of 1995.

The remix’s music video, which was filmed at Penthouse Studios, was also wildly successful. According to journalist Mel Cooke, “… While the audio recording was, and still is, very popular, it was the video which put ‘Anything For You’ over the top.”