Bic Runga is back

Bic Runga. Photo / Supplied by Sony/BMG

Bic Runga pops in to say hello with a bit of a warm-up album, writes Scott Kara

It's been three years since Bic Runga's last album

Birds

and since then she's had a baby boy and, as she puts it, "gone right into the domestic world". But the singer/songwriter wanted to release something before her new studio album comes out sometime next year.

The result is

Try To Remember Everything

, a collection of rare and unreleased Runga tracks. It includes out-takes from her first two albums,

Drive

and

Beautiful Collision

, alongside live versions of songs like

Sway

and

Drive

, some covers, and a short and sweet new song.

"I spend so long between records that it's just like a, 'Hi, how's it going until the next time'," she says.

And this summer, as well as writing and recording for her fourth album, she's looking forward to her musical date with friend Neil Finn, and idols Johnny Marr, Radiohead and Wilco, at the Seven Worlds Collide series of gigs at Auckland's Powerstation during January.

Why a record like this now?

It's just a chance to reconnect with fans and because I've been away for so long, and I'm working on a new album, it's just about building up to that next record.

What did you have to search through to compile the album?

They were mostly in those packing boxes that you get, and mostly cassette tapes, DAT tapes, and lots of CDs. I didn't realise they [Sony/BMG, her record company] had been keeping it all. I was surprised how many songs I'd written. It was fairly confronting because 95 per cent of it was wretched. My influences were so apparent, like some of it just really sounded like I'd been listening to Pearl Jam, this sort of honking vocal style that I used to have when I was 19. Needless to say none of that made the record. But it was just funny to see that passage of fashion over 12 years.

Looking back do you think you were a bit harsh on some of these songs?

No [laughs]. No, no, these songs I am really happy to have saved because they're pretty good and especially the live performances on the radio - I feel like some of the vocals were better than on the studio albums because it would just take so long to sing them. Like even now I'm still trying to figure out how to sing

Sway

. There are so many words in it. It's so ... wordy. Someone was telling me it's really hard to sing on SingStar.

I've never tried but Ace Of Spades is pretty hard to sing at karaoke because you try and sing like Lemmy - but that's impossible.

Lemmy is awesome. I think the trick with that is he has his mic really high so he sings up to it so it's all just like gargling.

Any advice on how to sing Sway on Singstar then?

Just take a deep breath.

What makes a demo version so unique and special?

There's not the pressure of making a record. You know that it's not really going to be heard so there's a certain amount of abandon. And I feel like something like

Blue Blue Heart

[a demo version of the song from

Birds

] wasn't as lively as I wanted it to be on the record. But the demo version was one of the really early takes and the band had only just learnt it.

Tell us about the cover of Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart [which Runga played on Little Fish, a low budget Australian junkie movie starring Cate Blanchett]?

I love that song. It was one of the first songs I ever fell in love with when I was really small. When I was four, I remember falling asleep in my bedroom and my mother was playing it on vinyl in the lounge. It was one of those hot Christchurch nights where you can't sleep and there was this kind of creepy song coming in from the lounge.

The new song, Everyone Must Love, is that for the next record?

That's just me doing demos now for the next record. But really I'm just trying to find a new sound. And I think it was really good for me to look through what I'd done in the past to put it to rest because to have a continued career you really do have to kill yourself off every now and then and I think it was really good to take stock of what is good and what isn't good and how to move forward. And after making

Birds

I think what I need to do is go for the pop jugular because

Birds

was my death album, my father had just died, and now I'm a mother and you are never really the same after you've had a child.

And what can we expect from Seven Worlds Collide?

It's almost too good to be true what's happening over summer. I get this amazing chance to play with members of Radiohead, Wilco and Johnny Marr, because I mean the Smiths were my first favourite band when I was 11. I went and visited Neil and Sharon [Finn's wife] in Bath when they were recording and we were locking up the studio late at night and Sharon said, 'Why don't you go in Johnny's car?' We were driving through the English countryside in Johnny Marr's sports car and I was like, 'This is stupid. This is like

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

'. You know [she sings], 'If a double decker bus, crashes into us ...'. Too cool.

LOWDOWN

Who:

Bic Runga

What:

Try to Remember Everything - Rare and Unreleased

Where & when:

Seven Worlds Collide, with Neil Finn, Radiohead, Johnny Marr and Wilco, Powerstation, Auckland, January 5-7