The Best New Zealand Music Drives Me Home

Friday is fun because it's music. And playlists! Kiwi music today for the end of NZ Music Month.

It’s New Zealand Music Week, it’s the final week of New Zealand Music Month. I have wondered, for the longest time if this means anything – still, or ever? And over the years I have written posts about it, been abused for doing so, commented on radio – been abused on Twitter for doing so…

But I also wrote lovingly about New Zealand music. During New Zealand Music Month. And any other month for that matter.

More than once, when writing a daily music blog for Stuff, I dedicated the entire month of May to posts about New Zealand music. Roughly 20 separate posts about various New Zealand artists or albums – deep cuts, forever-favourites. Dead air though eh. It was all boring or pointless or didn’t mean anything unless I was bagging something. Then there was the pile-on.

So, this year, having for some time not written about New Zealand music during New Zealand Music Month (at least, not on purpose) it was a real treat to be asked to write something. And for the New Zealand Herald no less. The brief was simple – 800 words. Try to encapsulate what New Zealand music meant to me, name some of my favourite artists or songs and try to say why.

Also not so simple.

I handed in the assignment. And I passed. In the sense that it was published.

I thought – since it wasn’t posted online and was just for the print edition – I’d bookend the month by sharing the writing here. So you might have seen this in a slightly different shape already. Then again, you might not. In it, I talk near the end about how I’d like to one day make the great playlist that is NZ Music – which is to say the playlist of all the great songs to drive around the country to. Everyone has their own version of this of course.

So, you’ll see at the bottom – or you can click right here (if you want to hit play on it while you read) – I have compiled a playlist of every song named or a song by every artist mentioned. I went ahead and filled in a few more. I stopped at 50. It’s about three and a half hours. I reckon, in New Zealand, you’re usually no more than three hours from a place you have at least once called home. So here is the playlist that takes me home. But first the article that I wrote – which The Herald titled: The Blessing, The Curse and The Craving of Local Music (and that’s fine, writers don’t usually get to choose the title when submitting work to any editor), but I imagined it as the title you see today. This is (about) the Best New Zealand music and the way it drives (me) home.

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Drive along any coast of this country and listen to Pink Frost by The Chills or Anything Could Happen by The Clean or Hanging In The Wire by Dave Dobbyn or Clockhouse Shuffle by Waves, or, well, I’m obviously just naming songs. New Zealand songs. New Zealand artists. Some well-known, some less obvious, but from the youngest age I’ve felt this country come alive when I hear the soundtrack to the movie as its happening. Cows and sheep and paddocks blurring, Tip Top dairies, and roadside fruit stands, with Jordan Luck or Phil Judd or Chris Knox telling me not at all how I should feel, but absolutely how they feel.

The New Zealand music I crave doesn’t so much tell me anything about myself – doesn’t necessarily make me feel I belong, instead it is by outsiders reminding themselves and whoever is listening that they don’t really belong, that they’re just hanging on, and that, really, we’re all just hanging on. And through that, I’ve learned about myself.

I drive into Hawke’s Bay, hills golden gleaming like one of Freeman White’s paintings and the songs of The Front Lawn could only be the soundtrack. Jan Hellriegel singing the word ‘quagmire’, where else in the world would you get that? Once I had the biggest lump in my throat as I drove home, taillights nearly dragging on the ground and I had to explain myself, but what really set it all off was Paul Ubana Jones singing Lust For Life. His lines about how he had changed, about how he was so fragile, about the titular lust that drove him on, leading and misleading. I had yet to get my story straight, but no other song could ever guide me.

For many years, I wrote about music every day. It was a gruelling and thankless task. It limited my career opportunities, but people said that I was lucky because, hey, free tickets to gigs. I kissed so many frogs, and in the end, I finally got to see Prince! (Had to pay my own way).

Bands would release bland albums and publicists would trot out the same lines and be disappointed that I didn’t do so too. And, yes, yes, music is subjective – so the band I didn’t like might be the band you love, but how could I feel anything about the latest copycat when I had heard such powerful truths. The woozy swagger of Split Enz’ Late Last Night, the deep social heart and desperate plea of Emma Paki’s System Virtue, the frankly, skull-melting times getting as close to whatever it is that bands like Jakob and Bailterspace conjure and twist.

A reggae rewrite means nothing in comparison. The latest graduate of a music course using the same three chords in boring old ways, or a cynical cash-grab to brag that a Kiwi band made it into an American movie. I couldn’t lie. I could not say I loved any of this. It was impossible. And maybe I shouldn’t have smashed quite as many walnuts with such a giant sledgehammer. But I did. And I did it because the song in my head, driving me around this country, was The Mutton Birds’ A Thing Well Made. Or it was French Letter by Herbs. Or it was Drive.

Bic Runga, The Subliminals, The Swingers, Vorn, Tall Dwarfs, David Kilgour, Hello Sailor, Dianne Swann…

There’s no record store anywhere else in the world, no library, no radio station that would place them together. We’re lucky we can do that. And we’re cursed by this also. Because music isn’t a competition. But the very best music I ever hear is the song – or the theme – that tells me more about the writer than it could ever tell me about myself. With the best New Zealand music, my guess is we all have some clue of what it might have taken, how it could have formed, what it is hoping to say.

But if I get any sense of my identity through someone else’s work it’s an insight, but also a bonus. It’s not what drags me to the dance. Yet it might be enough to get me back home.

And that’s it in the end. Home.

Sharon O’Neill singing Smash Palace, Chris Knox in his jandals rewriting Velvet Underground songs, Eddie Rayner’s piano glissando – and the worlds he can slot inside each and every note – these are the doorways that lead me home.

Sir Dave Dobbyn with his skeleton key.

There’s another 800 words to follow where I just name songs and bands. It’s the best playlist I’ll ever make. Until I create another. It’s every imaginary movie I’ve cooked up, every road-trip I’ll ever take, my best and worst moments – the memories I hold deep and ones I cannot shake. And it’s the best music from New Zealand. Some of the best music I’ve heard, and got to hold, from anywhere in this world.

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So, that’s the article. And here’s the playlist:

And, as always on a Friday, I’ve got another playlist – this one is Volume 66 in our ongoing series: A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good! I must say this one is rather random. But I like that about it. And maybe you will too.

Happy weekend.

What’s your favourite Kiwi song or album or artist for driving “home”?