Much has happened in the 26 years since Bic Runga released her first hit, Drive. Photo / Babiche Martens
Bic Runga tells Greg Bruce why she hates talking about herself and how YouTube has changed the way she sees the world.
Bic Runga was a teenager when she walked into Sony Music holding a cassette containing five songs, including one called Drive, which she had written in 10 minutes while waiting to play a gig at an Auckland cafe. Sony A&R executive Paul Ellis, who listened to that cassette that day, later told the New Zealand Herald of his reaction: “I’ll never forget staring at that carpet, just speechless, thinking, ‘This is it. This is the song.’ It was a life-changing tune.”
He knew he had to sign her, and did, and in 1997, aged 21, she released her first album, named after that song, and it changed her life. The album was a massive hit, spawning seven singles, including Drive, and quickly became one of the biggest-selling New Zealand albums of all time. Barely an adult, she had become an instant star, nationally beloved, her image everywhere. She had entered her profession at the very top and as we all know, from there, the only way is down.
Except it wasn’t. She went away and worked even harder on her next album. It took her six years and was a massive success, its sales dwarfing even the enormous numbers done by Drive. It was also critically acclaimed (“The best songs here are her best songs yet,” said the Herald’s Russell Baillie). If there had been any doubt she would become one of the country’s most iconic and important modern musical figures, Beautiful Collision settled it.
That was 20 years ago. Since then, she has released three studio albums, but the last one to be made up entirely of original music was in 2011. She has devoted most of the intervening years of her life to her three children, who are now 15, 10 and 7, and her partner, fellow musician Kody Nielson, but she is about to embark on a new tour. Nominally, the tour is a celebration of the anniversary of Beautiful Collision, but listening to her talk, it feels more significant and important than that, like maybe it’s the first step in her re-emergence into the music scene she bestrode in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Runga has never enjoyed talking about herself and says she often feels “icky” afterwards. She believes it’s not healthy to do this over and over again. “It’s like it’s got a kind of psychic yuckiness,” she says. And yet here she was, sitting with a journalist in a cafe, as she’s done hundreds of times over the last quarter century, talking about the same songs, answering the same questions.
She drinks a coffee, which she blames for telling me about her YouTube viewing habits, about which she was quite embarrassed, which sometimes involve self-help.
Runga believes the meaning of life is to get over yourself: “You’re born quite self-involved and what you really want to get to is, when you’re really quite elderly, you’re almost like not even a person, you’re a frequency, so you can get to the other side. It’s a real de-selfing thing and I think that I’ve had to learn that through motherhood, and through fame in a tiny country.”
She describes watching an interview on YouTube with legendary jazz musician Wayne Shorter, who died last month. “He’s what I think of when I think of someone that got to the end of his life and became a frequency. That’s what I meant by that. It’s like Wayne Shorter is now everywhere.”
She says Shorter talked about music not as an industry but as “the taonga that it is”, and she says that’s something that’s easy to forget when you’re in the industry.
“You forget that by the way you have to deal with your own ego and strange treatment and all these things that take all that away. The Māori perspective of waiata is really quite a lot along the lines of what Wayne Shorter was saying. It’s kind of like the frequency – all of sound and all of music is just ordered frequencies…”
At this point, she starts laughing uncomfortably, presumably at the thought of how her comments might be perceived by a certain type of reader, and says, “Uh oh! It’s a slippery slope!”
Runga now has a manager, for the first time in 10 years, and things are starting to happen for her. Apart from the tour, she recently played support for Sting, and she has secured promoters here and in Australia. A few weeks ago, Sway went to number one in Australia after it was covered by Australian singer Amy Shark.
Asked if she’s going to make another album of original music, Runga says: “Oh hell yeah!”
“I have never really lost that sense of me as an artist, expecting that I’m just about to make an album. That’s the self-concept I still have, but I think it’s probably better to just be cool about it and let yourself off the hook.”
The reason it’s taken her so long, she says, is because she’s chosen to put her children first. They are in school this year after being homeschooled for the last couple of years and, as they age out of the high-dependency years, she’s finding the space to again make music open up in her life.
“When I think about my need to write songs and wanting to write songs again, I owe it to myself to kind of write again because it’s who I am. But, yeah, I think a lot of that was lost for a long time through motherhood and through having my balloon pop, and all those things kind of get lost.”
But while being a parent has affected her ability to make music, she says it’s also made her a better person.
“I think I was pretty annoying at the start.”
I ask if what she meant by “annoying” was that her ego got out of control.
“Yeah, I would say that. Just sort of lost the sense of myself. I felt a lot of the time like a balloon that was just drifting away. I mean, I guess they call it being inflated, and so, at some point, the balloon has to pop.”
When asked whether any of her songs still move her today like they did when she first played them, she names just one and she doesn’t hesitate: Drive.
“I think that song is like some sort of ghost or something. And I just remember, I remember writing it. The image of it is being dropped off home, like, quite young. I was quite young and not wanting to go home, not wanting to go home to my family. I would have been like, 18. But I can still feel that stretch of road and I can still feel that darkness in the night, and I can still remember going home to my dad, and then I think about my dad, and I just think all those things. That song is impregnated with all this stuff, so it’s like its own universe that I can always go back into.”
She wrote Drive in 10 minutes and her biggest hit, Sway, even faster than that – she calls it “a three-minute song that took about three minutes to write”. Those two songs launched her career so quickly that the rest of it has appeared agonisingly slow by comparison. For a musician forced to relive the music of that early career explosion on stage for the rest of their life, the feeling must be especially acute, and sometimes it has been. For a period about eight years ago, she says, she felt like she was in a Bic Runga covers band.
Still, she says, that’s all part of the process: “You can only learn your lessons at the rate you’re going to learn them. I couldn’t have sped any of that up.
“I’ve been through every peak and trough you could imagine and I’m definitely better for it.”
I asked if it felt like she was now entering a new phase.
“It does. It’s because my love of songwriting has come back, and realising that that’s what I really am in it for. I love songwriting. It’s the best job in the world.”
Asked what brought the love back, she says: “I don’t know. It’s just a series of epiphanies, and probably some of them happened on YouTube.”
The Beautiful Collision 20th anniversary tour, July 15-30, tickets from livenation.co.nz
Bic wears: Kate Sylvester blue Valencia dress, pink dress Bic’s own. Jewellery by Boh Runga.
The new free open-air saltwater pool is already proving popular.