The band for the 'Flow' project is Andrew Wetherall (left), Hamish Jellyman, Elizabeth de Vegt, Elise Goodge and Brad McMillan. Photo / Bevan Conley
The band for the 'Flow' project is Andrew Wetherall (left), Hamish Jellyman, Elizabeth de Vegt, Elise Goodge and Brad McMillan. Photo / Bevan Conley
The words of writer Airini Beautrais form the backbone for a live album recording at the Royal Whanganui Opera House this week.
Poems from her 2017 book Flow: Whanganui River Poems have been set to music written by Whanganui musician Elizabeth de Vegt, who will be joined on stage bya band of well-known locals.
The group will record behind closed doors on Monday and Tuesday, before performing a full concert, 'Flow: Beautrais+de Vegt', on Wednesday night.
That too will be recorded in full, before everything is sent for mixing and mastering at Creative Sounds - The Stomach in Palmerston North.
De Vegt said she wrote 15 songs for 15 poems about a year ago, and performed them for the first time during the La Fiesta festival in March 2021.
"Some have repeated refrains and others stay very true to the text.
"I wanted to serve the words. They come first and the music comes second."
Making up the group are Hamish Jellyman (bass, synth bass and vocals), Andrew Wetherall (guitar), Nina Goodge (taonga puoro and vocals) and Brad McMillan (drums).
"Right from the beginning, it felt bigger than what I can do myself. It's not about me anyway. This is about the stories and the river, and it's so cool to have all these people as a part of it."
Beautrais said the poems themselves drew on different stories, times and people.
"It's cool that Lizzie and her band are putting their own threads and interpretation into it.
"It doesn't just feel like an individual project, it feels like more of a collaborative, communal sort of thing. It's exciting."
She heard the songs for the first time at last year's La Fiesta festival, and will be in the audience again on Wednesday.
"Sometimes poetry feels like the poor cousin to music, because it's just the words.
'With a lot of the stuff she's using, I actually used old song forms like hymns and ballads as an experimental kind of thing.
"That means a lot of the songs have four beats in a line anyway. It fits pretty well around a musical track."
Beautrais had been incredibly supportive throughout the process, de Vegt said.
"I initially approached her in July 2020 about doing a song or two for La Fiesta and before I knew it, that had turned into 15 songs.
"There's something so magical about being able to write beautiful things in only a certain amount of words."
The capacity for Wednesday's show has already been reached, but an album release show will be held at St Peter's Anglican Church in Gonville on March 5.
