Noelle McCarthy: Music leads pursuit of happiness

Naked and Famous : Jesse Wood, Alisa Xayalith, Tom Powers, David Beadle and Aaron Short. Photo / Herald on Sunday

Some people have a talent for happiness. It comes to them easily, bubbling up like a spring out of the ground.

They're the ones who live joyfully, who always walk on the bright side of the road. Blessings flock to them as they practise gratitude daily and luxuriate in a constant state of goodwill. Such people are happy more or less all the time.

My own limitations confound me, and I don't understand how it's possible to be happy without a great job or a lovely partner, or the perfect flat. How you can still be contented if you have no money or a bitch of a boss? People, places and things affect me - my happiness is contingent on all three.

What little I know about the Buddhist ideal of detachment indicates I should be striving daily to free myself of the need for external gratification. But the quickest road to contentment that I know still comes wrapped up in tissue paper after I've given the eftpos card a good hiding on Ponsonby Rd.

A purchase, a compliment, a hair-cut, these are the things I use to feel good. And they work, mostly. What's more, they're freely available, legal and affordable - more or less.

Happy people, though, the ones with a talent for it, they don't need that stuff. For a Happiness Ninja, externals are immaterial.

Whatever is inside them burns on regardless, an internal Aga that warms the cockles for real. Thankfully, such people are the exception rather than the rule.

I say "thankfully" because, precious as they are, for those of us who lumber after happiness with far less grace and skill it's dispiriting to have too many of them around.

"May you be ordinary," wished the poet Philip Larkin of his friends' daughter. "If that is what skilled, vigilant, flexible, unemphasised, enthralled catching of happiness is called." Catching happiness is both a habit and a skill and, like any skill, it requires discipline and practice to master. The good news is that the more you practise, the better you get.

I was thinking about this on my way home from the Silver Scrolls this week. They are the awards for the best songs of the year and this week's show was one of the best I've been to in a long time.

Really, it is a tremendous night. All of the nominated songs are performed on stage, not by the artists who released them but by their fellow musicians, for one night only.

That's how you get to see a country and western interpretation of a love song by Julia Deans or a contemporary classical music composition reconfigured by a guy who looks like the Wizard of Christchurch.

The Fourmyula - New Zealand's answer to the Beatles - was inducted into the Apra Hall of Fame. They shambled on stage and mumbled their thanks adorably and humbly. Then we got a version of Nature from The Situations, a bunch of 20-somethings from Pakuranga who weren't even born when it came out.

Jordan Luck, Don McGlashan and Chris Knox were there. The mood was celebratory but still laid back and the performances had about them a sense of joyfulness and spontaneity that was so infectious you couldn't help but clap your hands.

Apart from the ukeleles, which were horribly twee.

Anyway, the best song won. Auckland band Naked and Famous released Young Blood a few months ago and it has been a big part of my catching of happiness since then.

Songs are good for catching happiness and this one is up there in the feel-good stakes with I Feel Pretty and Dreams.

Seriously, have a listen. I defy anyone to hear that opening synth line and not feel better about life. It's a ray of sunshine, a party popper, a citrus zing. A romance, a story, an escape. Last night it was performed by Three Houses Down, a band I've never heard of, from South Auckland.

There appeared to be 20 people in the band, including an enthusiastic horn section and a beatifically smiling singer.

The best performances came from the bands who were from a totally different genre than the original performer but who nonetheless captured the spirit of the song.

The song, written by Naked and Famous, is a delicate and joyful skein of electro-pop.

Three Houses Down turned it into a Pacific hootenanny. All the youthful hopefulness of the original was there, reconfigured into the bright sound of trumpets and an infectious neighbourhood swing. A completely unexpected performance of a wonderful song.

Some people have a talent for happiness but all of us, thankfully, have the capacity to be surprised by joy.