Karoline Tamati, aka Ladi6, comes from talented stock and has been performing most of her life. Even so, it's only now with the release of her debut album that she reckons she's really come into her own. She talks to SCOTT KARA
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If Karoline Tamati reckons she's the sixth-best singer in her family then the others must have some impressive vocal cords.
"And if you count the boys, I'd be like the twelfth best or something," hoots the hip-hop soul diva, better known as Ladi6 (or Ladi for short).
"My older sister Sara, she was the star of our family. I was the one they wouldn't let in the group. Like, 'Ah, you always go flat'. But now I say, 'I've got an out of tune style'."
And now, she's also got a debut album, Time Is Not Much, to gloat about.
"Ha ha. I've got an album and you don't," she laughs.
We're at Ponsonby Rd record shop and cafe Conch on the day she gets the finished copy of her album back and she's beaming. She's a friendly person, and the kind of character who taps you on the knee when she agrees with something you say. "Damn straight" is one of her common sayings.
It's her "out of tune style", sung in a soothing nasal lilt, and her often odd phrasing, that makes Ladi's smooth soulful sound distinct. She first broke on to the local music scene in all-girl hip-hop crew Sheelahroc with the song If I Gave You the Mic in the early 2000s, then formed Verse 2, and is now solo.
But surprisingly, it's only in the last six or seven months, when she and Brent Park (better known as Parks, Ladi's partner in both life and music making), were putting the final touches to the album that she found her true voice and started feeling comfortable with it.
"I didn't know how to record myself without cringing and without kicking everyone out of the room except for me and the engineer."
Over the years, from growing up in Christchurch to collaborating with bands like Fat Freddy's Drop and Shapeshifter, she says she's suppressed her voice because she was surrounded by too many talented people.
Not only are her immediate family gifted, her first cousins include playwright, Naked Samoan, and TV personality Oscar Kightley, fellow diva Tyra Hammond, and hip-hop star Scribe (real name Malo Luafutu).
And the Tamairas, as in singer Dallas Tamaira from Fat Freddy's Drop, are also good friends of the Tamatis. She remembers all the kids from these families getting together at "after-school programmes" organised by her parents to sing, dance and perform plays written by Kightley and Scribe. In some of these plays Ladi and Scribe played love interests but, as an added twist, she was lesbian. This theatrical grounding comes through in her music and performance today. "Look at Malo [Scribe] and I, it's second nature to get up there and put on a performance. We've known how to do that for a really long time."
But finding her voice was a different story. "I wanted to be Dallas, I didn't sound like Dallas. I wanted to be Scribe, I didn't sound like him, so I was always in this total conflict of wanting to sound like something but not sounding like that. I was kinda hating on myself and not realising what I had was actually unique and beautiful all on its own."
Time Is Not Much is a family affair, with Scribe and Hammond both singing on it. And on a more touching note the name of the album is taken from a poem Ladi's 10-year-old cousin Shaquille (better known as Boogie) wrote earlier this year. Sadly, the day after it was written she died following a stroke which caused a blood clot in her brain.
"We were all sitting around at home crying and her coffin was in the lounge so we could spend time with her and her mum said, 'Shall I go and get her books that she has been writing in forever'.
"She had written how she wanted to be a singer, she wanted to go to London, and to live in Egypt, and all these amazing out of it poems. And one of them was that one. We all read them out at the funeral and we cried. But she wrote that poem the day before she went into hospital. She didn't know she was sick or anything. So the title track is just me saying her poem."
There's also a lot of sadness and reflection elsewhere on the album.
"It's a hopeful sadness isn't it?" she says cheekily, "but yeah, definitely been through a bit of a struggle and now it's out there for all to see. Don't judge me."
The album, recorded with Mu from Fat Freddy's Drop at his Wellington studio The Drop, with Parks as co-producer, is a mix of stylish and laid-back hip-hop and soul with hints of reggae. It's taken a long time - not that Ladi or Parks are counting.
"It was quite a long process, about three or four years," says Parks. "That actually sounds like a lot more than it was, because for most of it we were living in Auckland and the studio was in Wellington."
They've done it in their own time, while bringing up their young son Philli, and Ladi feels like "the stars have aligned" and it's turned out perfectly.
"Motherhood was a defining moment for me in realising who I am and what I stand for and not being afraid to really express that because back in the If I Gave You the Mic days I was all about hip-hop. I was a hip-hop girl and stuff singing because you do hip-hop. I was a rapper. I was a MC. But now I've realised I love all sorts of music."
Because the pair are a couple it also made for some interesting arguments in the recording studio.
"Ladi has a really unique style of writing," says Parks, before he takes off to pick up a copy of the album. "In a way she lets the songs write themselves and what happens naturally for her over a beat or an instrumental is usually how the song is going to be in the end. Whereas I'm a bit more niggly and a bit more of a perfectionist, but she always inspires me in how naturally everything comes to her."
"It's hard to take criticism," continues Ladi. "To sit there and for Parks to go, 'I think you should try this?' And it's like, 'Well I think you should take out the rubbish'. So we were having that kind of personal conflict and it took ages to separate the studio from the home. A lot of it was just power play: 'It's my album. It's my name'. 'Oh well it's my beat and you can't do it without me'. So a lot of it was just natural things that happen when you're working closely together, and raising a child together. But now we're unstoppable," she laughs.
For something that's been a long time in the making it sounds effortless. There's the static beauty of Down & Out (an old Verse 2 song); the soulful skank of Walk Right Up (which she released on a limited edition seven inch earlier this year); Believe Me is a fuzzed-out, bass-heavy party starter; newer songs like Dark Brown and More Than Faith have a slinky, late-night mood to them ("So the second album is definitely going to be more of a defined style for us, which is more for the clubs"), and then there's the confrontational and imposing Jack Knife, which is directed at all the "haters" she's had over the years. She has a smile on her face when she says the H word, but you know who you are.
What is noticeable about the album is the lack of guests. It's long been a habit on hip-hop, R&B and soul albums, both here and overseas, to seemingly get as many of your mates as you can to contribute, which often leads to a loss of uniqueness. Despite the presence of Parks and Mu as producers, a top-notch band including drummer Riki Gooch, and Hammond and Scribe on vocals, she has made Time Is Not Much her own.
"For the first one I did want it to be mine. To put a stamp out there and say, 'This is Ladi6'. Because over the last 10 years I've always had, 'Oh you're that girl in Scribe's song'. Or, 'Aren't you in Fat Freddys?'. And, at my own gigs, people screaming, 'Do When I Return [by Shapeshifter]'. So I just want to put out there that this is me, this is my style of music, and love these songs."
Near the end of the interview Parks arrives back with a copy of the album. He puts it down on the table among the debris of cups, cigarette packets, fliers and phones. Ladi is so engrossed in talking about their recent trip to Europe that she doesn't even notice.
"I realised," she says of her experience overseas, "that we're not at the bottom of the world and we're not so far away from them that they won't understand what we're doing, which is a little bit what I thought. So I realised, dream big, they loved it, they were eating it up. We were doing two encores a night. Travel is on the cards."
Then she spots the album. She grabs it, grits her teeth and holds it out in front of her.
"It's beautiful."
LOWDOWN
Who: Ladi6, real name Karoline Tamati
What: Hip-hop soul diva
Debut album: Time Is Not Much, out now
Playing: The Turnaround, Bacco Room, 53 Nelson St, tomorrow.
Trivia: The name Ladi came about when wee Karoline was being born and her father was sitting outside the delivery suite staring at a "Lady In Waiting" sign. She's been Ladi ever since and the "6" was added later on for no real reason.
