Dallas Tamaira, frontman for Fat Freddy’s Drop for 20 years, is set to release a new single as a solo artist. He talks with Russell Brown about the many roads travelled to get to Leaning.
Dallas Tamaira doesn’t quite know where his voice – that handsome, pure tenor out the front of all those Fat Freddy’s Drop songs – came from. But he knows where he found it.
Tamaira grew up a small-town boy in Kaikōura and started messing about with music when his dad gave him a guitar. He was 14. But, he says, “after puberty things got really confusing. So it was little bit like I just lost interest in it.” After some time in Christchurch, he moved to Wellington and sang again in a covers band where he got to know the work of the singers he’s often compared to – Bill Withers and Donny Hathaway.
“Bill Withers is actually a massive influence on me now,” he says from his studio, downstairs in the family home in the capital. “He’s the singer I feel like I probably tried to be like the most at some stage.”
The other part of his Wellington musical education came via his flatmate Chris Faiumu, aka DJ Fitchie or, as he’s generally known now, Mu, who had “a wall of records” to learn from. They started jamming, then recording together and eventually it became Fat Freddy’s Drop, the Wellington musical collossus that has forged its own way for more than 20 years. Now, for the first time since the band began, Tamaira is making music in his own right. It’s all thanks to the 2020 Covid lockdown.
“I know lockdown was stressful for other people,” he explains. “But leading up to the pandemic, we were touring to Europe like twice a year and I was leaving my family for two months of the year while the kids are growing up and my partner’s trying to hold it down at home. And then there’s the actual tours, which can be quite hard sometimes, back-to-back shows. It had actually become quite stressful, leading up to the pandemic. I hate to say it, but when it actually hit, it was a real breath of fresh air.”
As soon as he and his partner could travel again, they headed for Kaikōura, where he and Devin Abrams, formerly of Shapeshifter, started recording the songs he’d come up with in his lockdown “man cave”. The first song they finished, No Flowers, went up on Bandcamp only a couple of months later and attracted the attention of Sony Music A&R man (and former bandmate of Joel Little) Jaden Parker, who flew down to Wellington to talk. There have been two more songs released independently and this week, his first release with Sony, ‘Leaning’, a soulful, synthy soundscape that doesn’t sound like anything he’s done before. Like No Flowers, it’s about a nurturing relationship.
It’s from a six-track EP recorded back in Wellington in familiar surroundings – Mu’s own Bays studio – with a full band, including jazz composer and drummer Cory Champion.
“I haven’t actually played with a drummer for a long time!” Tamaira laughs, because a live drummer is something Fat Freddy’s Drop famously doesn’t have. “Cory’s such a professional but also just such a diverse musician as well. He’s got his own techno projects and jazz instrumental projects, but he fits in perfectly with the soul stuff as well. And he’s such a professional. He comes in and practices and he’s been up all night listening to the songs, which is really awesome.”
The assembly of a band suggests they’ll play live and Tamaira says they will, but he’s in no hurry: “It’s not the main priority. The project is still creating songs in the studio. Now that I’ve had a little jam with the band in the studio, that traditional making a record from scratch, wow that’s really fun and something that I’d love to do again.”
Besides, his other band is about to go out into the world again, to play 18 European dates in 30 days. When I bump into Tamaira’s Fat Freddy’s bandmate Mark “Rhythm Slave” Williams at the supermarket before the interview, he says the tour preparation has been intense.
“It’s full-on,” Tamaira confirms. And it’s not just the music. On the day we speak, the older of his two sons has a 15th birthday party later and he’s coaching a basketball game in the afternoon. He’s just lost his bank card and had to call the bank for a new one “and I actually can’t remember where I put my passport”.
Williams says the band is “really happy” its singer is getting to do his solo project this way. There’s clearly a sense that Tamaira has had something to say outside the context of the band he’s fronted and written songs for across two decades. Exactly what he’s saying is evolving as much as the music itself is. Tamaira has mixed feelings about an interview he gave in 2021 around the release of the second song he made with Abrams, the darkly themed Spider. He bared his soul about anxiety, depression and getting lost in drugs and maybe wishes he hadn’t.
“I’ve moved on from there and the songs that I’ve been writing really have had nothing to do with any kind of drug abuse. They’re definitely always thoughtful, but that’s just my creative process, I think. The first two releases were a bit like, ‘Let’s see what happens when I throw these lyrics out.’ I was still in the experimental phase and that goes with the whole process of this project. Just kind of testing the waters and finding my own voice as a solo artist. And just trying to figure out what that means, me not being with the band, me being by myself.”
He’s also been learning the modern record business for himself, doing social media, posting lyric videos, licensing his music to Sony.
MC Slave, aka Mark Williams.
“Sony has been great. But I still feel like the values I learned with Freddy’s being a fiercely independent band, those lessons are just ingrained now, they’re just there. There’s stuff that you’ve just got to do for yourself, there’s stuff where you don’t want to be told what to do. The Freddy’s mentality has always been that when it comes to our backyard, we can we can do the work ourselves here. Everybody knows each other, everybody’s only a phone call away. So, you know, I definitely still feel like I have that mentality and will always have that mentality.”
He’s also had more space to think about where he’s from. In Kaikōura Calling, a 10-minute video released on YouTube earlier this year, he returns with his boys to the hometown where he had “some of the happiest times of my life”, playing touch in the park, hunting trips with his stepfather, surfing at the bay. He left as a teenager “to find some more creative opportunities” but it’s clear he finds a new resonance in the place he grew up.
He also attended APRA’s Māori Songhubs event in Auckland this year to collaborate with “some amazing artists and producers” and sing in te reo Māori for the first time since the 1990s.
“I haven’t released anything. But I’ve dabbled a little bit and I would love to do some more, probably quite a lot more,” he says. He’d also like to go to his marae in Little Waihi, on the shores of Lake Taupō in Tūwharetoa country, to make music in a place where the place itself is part of the kaupapa.
“Kind of a continuation of the Kaikōura thing. That’s a little bit of a dream of mine. But you know, one step at a time.”
For now, there’s the EP, set for release in September, with another single lined up before that.
“We got the same people who mastered the Freddy’s stuff to master it in Germany. When the masters came back and I had a little listen, there were a few tears. It’s been a long time coming. I always planned to get back here. But I am so grateful for the team that helped me put it together – Devin and Mu and Marty my manager and Sony. I feel like the support is real and everybody’s on board for the music for the right reasons.”
But before that, there’s the Fat Freddy’s Drop tour. Does he still sometimes feel like the small-town boy in the European capitals?
“Awwww yeah … " he drawls. " For me personally, touring was taxing at first, just being a fish out of water, feeling really kind of out of place. You don’t speak the language, there’s different cultures, different foods. So it really took me a long time. I mean, I love it now. I’m lucky because I’ve had over 18 years of being able to just travel to these places and actually become familiar with a lot of the places and towns that we go to now.
“I know my way around a lot of the places through Germany and Europe and even some places in Scandinavia now. I would say it probably took me a good eight years, you know, almost right up to the pandemic, for me to feel comfortable about touring. I spent a lot of time just doing the shows, and the shows were my love, you know, the music was what I was fully engaged in. Those shows were where the enjoyment was. Still is. But yeah … I’d spend a lot of time in my hotel room.”
On the verge of 50, Tamaira is a man who’s been able to pause for thought. To explore his voice in more than one sense of the word, and enjoy his family.
“You know, when I had kids, they were my motivation for touring and pushing through. As well as the music, it was the kids and knowing that I could come back and put food on the table for them. I was always thinking of them. It’s a bit better now, because obviously my boys, they’re both old enough to take care of themselves now so I’m a little less worried about things. My oldest, he’s about as tall as me now. He’s a good boy. He’s got a great moral compass. But when he’s at home he’s just a teenage lout!”
At one point, it all got so hard that he seriously thought about leaving the band. So it seems all the sweeter that he’s been able to explore something different with his old friend Mu alongside him.
“It’s really important for me to have Mu there. This is something that I’ve always wanted to do, but Freddy’s has been not only just work for me, it’s been a lifelong project. A thing that I’ve helped to build. There’s a family environment now there. In terms of the business, the involvement that I’ve had in recording those albums ... it’s just a lifelong project.”
