Performing live on Sunday, December 31st at the New Year’s Eve White and Gold Masquerade Party to be held at the party capital, the Gold Club – Lamana Hotel, is Papua New Guinea’s very own - Justin Wellington (JW). “I’m very excited, I can’t wait. I’ve been so much looking forward to coming back to PNG.” “It’s been a while so when they asked me to come over, I was very excited to do so.” “It’s going to be a very good night, some other really cool things happening too in the program. People will really enjoy it.” In an interview with PNG HAUSBUNG, JW said he had been working on releasing a couple of new songs in the coming year [2024] and said that he had been busy spending most of his time performing at live events and has not had the time to sit down and write. “I tend to get busy most of the time with performing-that’s what I do most of the time, so I guess I do sacrifice quality time to write and record a lot of the times so sometimes it’s a bit slow.” “I know it’s very important so I’m pretty sure that in 2024, I’m going to be able to release at least a few new songs which I’m already working on.” “I’ve got several songs with various sort of stages of being completed, definitely 2024 there’s going to be some new stuff.” When asked about his collaboration with artists from across the globe, Wellington highlighted his experience with Ugandan Singer Papa Cidy who sings the song “Evalina” which stormed soundwaves in PNG a few years ago and also mentioned his recent collaboration with French Artist Karl Wine on his song “Bum Bum”, making it his second collaboration with an international Artist. “I really like that song-that’s his song [Karl Wine] and I think he already had an earlier version which was quite successful as it was getting a lot of traction on Tiktok.” “I ended up meeting him online through social media platforms-he showed me the song and I loved it right away, so I created my own little section and he really liked that so-yeah it turned out really good.” Justin further added that he had always loved to sing and started singing for talent shows in high school. He joined the school choir and that helped contribute to him working out that singing was something that he really wanted to do. “I like to sing. I didn’t think I was going to be a singer but whenever I sang, I would get a few comments from people and they would say, why don’t you start singing.” “Straight out of high school, I got into singing and performing live as a job and it became a fulltime job.” “I started experimenting with song writing and recording my own songs and stuff like that.” “It started back then and it’s just like anything that you would build and work on [until you succeeded].” He then began working as an R&B and reggae pop singer and has released several singles since 2002. Reminiscing, he mentioned that his first hit “Much Love” was the song that gave him his big break in 2002. “Good memories. After that song, I just started to record more songs and mix more.” Some of his hits include "I Wanna Give You Some Lovin'", "Better Off", "One Night With You", "Fire", "In Love with U", "Runaway", "Tell Me", "Reminiscing", "Rain of Morobe" and others and his music has seen him work with many Papua New Guinean artists such as AK-47, Tattz from NakaBlood, Jokema and O-Shen, Robbie T, Mekere Crew, Steven M, Gravity, DJ Travy and many others. Meanwhile JW stated that the Lamana New Year’s Eve White and Gold Masquerade had been planned for a while and that there were no booked performances for PNG yet but has assured fans that if anything popped up-he would definitely take it as he loved performing in front of the home crowd. “At this stage, nothing is booked or confirmed but I’m pretty sure something will come up and of course if anything comes up in PNG, I’m always going to agree to it because I always love a chance to come back home.” “Nothing confirmed but I wouldn’t be surprised-sometimes these things can develop kind of last minute – this one with Lamana was planned for a while but I’m pretty confident I’ll be back in 2024.” “That’s what I love the most for sure [performing in front of the home crowd in PNG].”