Through the wasteland and back into the light

Jan Hellriegel found everything fell into place when she decided to pick up her music career again. Photo / Supplied

Jan Hellriegel is back from years in hiding with the album she says was meant to be written.

Now in her 40s, Hellriegel is more serene than the angst-ridden young Otago student who belted out songs in the varsity quad in the 80s and locked herself in her room with her melancholy thoughts.

For a start, as a single mum of two boys aged 5 and 7, she has no time to entertain her internal dialogue - she barely even has time to listen to music.

"When you have kids you don't think about yourself as much. And I haven't thought about myself for quite a few years. I've never stopped being a musician but I did stop thinking I'd ever do it again."

Hellriegel has worked 10-hour days for the past four months to get her album All Grown Up - recorded to CD and vinyl - and collector's book to market. Media interviews are a welcome chance to sit down with coffee and reflect.

"Boy, the feeling of accomplishment, is just, words can't describe it," she says.

All Grown Up tells a story - in the shape of a bell-curve - of her journey, crawling from the depths of a "wasteland" to optimism.

After being named the most promising female vocalist at the New Zealand Music Awards in 1996, Hellriegel put music on hold when she hit her 30s and decided she didn't like the way her life was panning out.

"I did fairly well with my music but I was never very happy, you know?

"I used to get very melancholy, and it was all about me. I am very much a thinker - I think a lot, I read a lot and I write a lot. I would sit in my room and think."

Having served her apprenticeship in band Cassandra's Ears, Hellriegel released her first solo album and major label debut, It's My Sin, in 1993, which was followed by Tremble two years later. They generated great reviews but eventually Hellriegel realised the business of making music (not the art of it) no longer interested her.

It had turned into a glitz and glamour show, and she missed the passion and grit of the good old days.

"We would do photo shoots and there was no such thing as stylists. We didn't have PR people, we didn't have a glamorous function that we were invited to. It was nothing like that at all. The APRA awards was this tiny affair ... everything was a lot more grassroots when I started ... We toured the country, we made no money, we slept on people's floors, but you didn't care because it was about playing music. What's that saying? Kicking against the pricks - it was all about that, you know. None of us made any money. I think I lived on $15 a week for about 10 years."

When Hellriegel came on the rock scene in the late 1980s you could count the number of female singers on one hand, she says.

To support her music, she worked part-time jobs as diverse as packing records and delivering fish, and loved them all because "that was living".

"You can't create really innovative characters and cool stories if you're not actually immersed in living," says the songwriter, whose best known song remains Westy Gals, an ode to her West Auckland roots.

Dunedin-formed Cassandra's Ears wrote songs about politics and depression - but Hellriegel says she didn't truly understand that Private Wasteland she was singing about until much later. Derived from T. S. Eliot's poem, a wasteland is metaphor for a time in your life when you can't move, she says. "When life falls apart - you come out the other end and think, 'Oh, that's why it happened'."

That happened to Hellriegel about four years ago, and in the end prompted her to write All Grown Up.

Late one night, she was sitting at a table with her mother, lamenting about life and where she was heading in it. "[Mum] said, 'Well why don't you write some more music', and I said, 'Don't be silly mum, that part of my life's over and it's not going to happen'."

But after that conversation Hellriegel started gleaning inspiration from people who had overcome hurdles - not just musicians, anyone.

This time last year she invited three friends to her house for dinner and announced the occasion was to mark the start of her finishing the album she had been talking about for so long. Her former drummer Wayne Bell signed on as producer and All Grown Up was under way a week later.

Hellriegel had expected it to take years and was surprised when everything fell into place.

"It was almost like everything was conspiring for me," she says.

She found her distinctive, woozy voice had also improved. "My voice is amazing, my voice is the best it's ever been. It's like I woke up one day, walked into the studio and went, [gasp] what happened? I don't know, maybe it's life, maybe it's just living that has giving me all this emotion."

She can't wait to get on stage again "with a band! Do you know how long it's been?"

Hellriegel thinks the old-time fans will love it because they are all grown up now, too. But she also has a new web fanbase awaiting its release.

All Grown Up's 13 tracks move through love and loss to success and happiness. Hellriegel would like to think that underneath it all there's a bit of hope, "especially for people who are at their lowest ebb".

But that's all she will give away.

Hellriegel is not willing to compare her music to anyone else's. "What genre is it? I have no idea. It's a Jan Hellriegel album. It's not an acoustic singer-songwriter album, you just can't place it. And that's because this young girl here [she points to picture of herself as a blond, grumpy-looking 20-something on stage with a guitar] stayed true to form."

LOWDOWN

Who: Jan Hellriegel
What: All Grown Up, her first album since 1995, out Monday
Playing: Launch show at the Civic Wintergarden on Thursday October 22.
Info: www.blinddaterecords.co.nz