Anika Moa's Sonic Youthfulness
The world is full of fervent young musicians, itching to be the next big thing - 'Popstars' anyone? Many artists have an all-consuming belief in their talent and a thirst for fame. Music is their life, songs their language, and the outside world's reaction to their work the foundation on which they build their self-worth.
Anika Moa is not one of them.
Since she was plucked from the breeding ground of teenage ambition, the Smokefree Rockquest, in 1999 and signed to Warner Music NZ and to the Atlantic label in the United States, there have been whispers that Anika is going to be big. Bic big. Now, on the eve of the launch of her debut album 'Thinking Room', those whispers are growing louder.
One person not caught up in the hype and expectation is Anika herself. Funny and frank, punctuating the conversation with bursts of 'Choice!' and expletives, the 21-year-old is unruffled by the attention, as she has been throughout the entire journey to the album launch.
One of the first things you learn talking to Anika is that this is one girl who loves her mum. A musician herself, Bernadette Moa sings and performs with a Christchurch based group and is an obvious inspiration to her daughter.
"Just her strength, bringing up six kids, being a solo mum and being really strong in her appreciation for everything and her teachings. She's always got fair and strong ideals for all of us," says Anika.
Her father, Tia, is also a musician, currently studying guitar at jazz school in Wellington. Although he left when Anika was small, he passed on more than just musical genes.
"I notice that most of my characteristics are like my dad's as well, since I've got to know him, it's like wow, I do things like him. We both always have to move, we're always on the run and we get bored of cities or houses really quickly, so we move."
As a child Anika says she sang a lot, her mother fostering her talent, entering her in local talent quests in Christchurch, where Anika is from. "She used to dress me up in pink frilly dresses and kung-fu shoes - the bitch!" Anika laughs.
When she was 13 Anika began playing guitar and composed her first songs. Just as an accomplished author would no doubt shudder in horror at their 13-year-old diary entries, so too does Anika about her first self-conscious songwriting attempts: "They were really bad. Really stupid things and everything rhymed! It was like 'I walked to the door, to go down to the store'. I don't think I've gotten good at writing until the last 18 months."
While her early efforts may not have been Silver Scroll winners, she continued writing, joining a band with fellow Hornby High School students and entering the Smokefree Rockquest. She admits that her motivation was not strictly musical: "They were boy-hormone bands, I was only there because I was in love with one of them or something like that."
Crush-ridden she may have been but her talents did not go un-noticed. Barb Cuttance, then national organiser of the event, saw potential. She encouraged her to enter the 1999 competition as a solo performer. Anika took this advice, made the finals and won the Most Promising Female Musician award. Her prize was a scholarship to the Nelson School of Music so the 18-year-old Anika moved north, but her bohemian ambitions "to smoke dope all day and make music" did not go to plan. She missed her mum and her friends and moved back to Christchurch before completing the course.
Fate was not going to let a music career slip away so easily however. A compilation CD of Smokefree Rockquest finalists found its way on to the stereo of Warner NZ MD, James Southgate.
"It was about halfway through the CD and it was like a shining light," he recalls. "There were a lot of rock bands and guitar bands that I just plowed through and then this one song, Flowers For You, that was completely unique, completely different, just pure vocals and guitar."
The track went on 'repeat play' on Southgate's stereo and when a succession of people popped their heads around the door to ask who it was, he thought he had better find out. He phoned Cuttance and asked about Anika and then contacted her. Warners then paid for her to go into Tandem Studios in Christchurch to record a demo. Seven songs were recorded, Southgate's reaction to them: "Holy cow! That $500 recording was what secured the deal for her."
That deal was to sign to Warner Music NZ Ltd.
Southgate then took Anika's demo with him to the Warner Music world conference in Hong Kong. He pitched it to the GM and Executive Vice President of the Atlantic label Ron Shapiro with "... not the best opening line. I told him I'd found his new Jewel. He said 'That's the last thing I need to hear! Everyone's always got a new Jewel'."
But Shapiro did take the CD home to New York. About six weeks later Southgate received an email from him saying how much he liked Youthful and asking him to bring Anika to New York.
In the meantime Anika had secured herself a manager. Tim Groenendaal, who met with Anika at the suggestion of Cuttance.
"He took me to the movies! He brought me popcorn. We were sitting there and I said 'So are you my manager now?' and he said 'Yep'."
Groenendaal shares management duties with his business partner Tracy Magan.
Southgate, Groenendaal and Anika then flew to New York where she sat in Shapiro's office and played him three songs, securing the deal with Atlantic. Southgate describes it as a "co-signing". Warner NZ has the rights to distribute Anika for Australasia and Atlantic for the rest of the world.
Southgate says the American label is commited to releasing the album. He believes a first single is scheduled for after Christmas with the album expected to be launched in the new year, around April.
"I cannot reiterate enough how difficult it is get an American commitment for a first time release."
US listeners will have a preview of Anika whose song Falling In Love Again (co-written with the feelers' James Reid) features on the soundtrack to the Julia Roberts/John Cusack/Billy Crystal movie, 'America's Sweethearts'.
In April last year Anika and Groenendaal travelled to New York where they spent six months recording the album. Such jetsetting may sound tres glamorous but Anika was unfazed: "I hadn't even heard of New York. I was like, 'New York, where's that?'"
This would not sound plausible from most people, but when Anika says it she sounds too genuine to disbelieve. She has a similar response when asked about working with such recording luminaries as Victor Van Vugt, who produced the album, and Adam Peters who she co-wrote with and whose studio they recorded at. While she knew Van Vugt had worked with Beth Orton, PJ Harvey and Nick Cave and that Adam had played in Echo & The Bunnymen, it simply did not register on her awe-o-meter. In this respect she met them on an equal footing. She says recording was a "group hug" effort and she always had a firm hand in what was being generated.
A number of candidates with stellar credentials were selected by Groenendaal and the record companies for the producer's role but after talking to Van Vugt on the phone, Anika decided she had found a friend.
"The fact that he was Australian, that helped. That benefited me because he was funny and we'd have our Australia/New Zealand fights. He'd go 'Fush and chups' and I'd go 'Sex, sex', and we worked with each other well because we were really good at communicating, plus he looked after me. Instead of just being my producer he was a friend out of work as well, so it was all those things that helped us make beautiful music together. We made beautiful music!"
Musically, Van Vugt and Anika seemed to be on the same wavelength.
"We'd look at a song and he'd go 'Right, we need this instrument, this instrument and this instrument'. And I'd go 'Okay, this instrument, this instrument, this instrument' and then we'd narrow it down to a few instruments. He had a good sense of rhythm, he used to be a drummer and a keyboard player, and he knows good melodies, like, he could spot them a mile away. And he's really good on the computer."
Session musicians were used to record guitar, bass and drums, again guided by both: "We usually thought about it before-hand, and thought of a melody line or something for them to do, and then we'd ring them up when we had an idea. If we didn't have an idea for it they'd come up with something. It was basically the same three musicians we used so we got to know them a little bit better."
She may have been in one of the world's most glamorous cities, but that does not equate to plush surroundings. She describes Peters' basement studio - which was set up for her album - as "like in Silence of the Lambs, when she (Jodie Foster) has to walk down that hallway to visit Hannibal Lecter". While they worked, a row of squirrels would come and watch. Far from being cute in a Snow White kinda way, Anika's impression of them is more Evil Dead!
She describes the recording experience: "I would wake up at 10, have a shower, walk to the studio, get there at 11 and if it wasn't a busy day it would go to six or seven but if it was a busy day it would go to 11 at night. I basically slept the whole time! I got to the studio and fell asleep because there were other people doing other things and then when I was needed I'd wake up ... but I wasn't asleep all the time!"
Vocals were left until last and she recorded them over seven days, the eagerness to go home comng through. Not 100% happy with the result, she returned to New York to re-do them. Since then the album has gone through a lengthy mixing and mastering process, the end result a bit spooky for Anika who, as we spoke, was experiencing the first days of her first single Youthful being played on the radio: "It just sounds so big and so lively and commercial and stuff. It's amazing but, wow, it's freaky. The process of it is all so daunting."
The album was mixed by Chris Lord Alge, whose many credits include Stevie Nicks, Buffalo Tom, Duran Duran, Eric Clapton and Joe Cocker.
When not working in the studio, Anika worked nights in an Irish bar which helped to stop her from getting too studio stir-crazy. For a home-loving girl like Anika, moving halfway around the world and being thrown into the process of recording her first album was, at times, overwhelming, as the lyrics to several songs on 'Thinking Room' attest. She says it was the new friends she met there that pulled her through.
"It felt surreal but I met heaps of people that reminded me of people back home, like it was basically the people there that made me feel good about it, and the musicians I worked with. Plus my producer and the English guy we worked with as well. It was just amazing. It was fuckin' like another world, but still my world. The people had the same characteristics as people I would meet anywhere else in the world, but we were in New York."
Still, homesickness did set in: "I wrote a couple of songs while I was over there that were about homesickness. I was so homesick! I went to the studio every day thinking, 'Right, this is another day that I'm closer to going home'. I'm just a pussy bitch really, I'm always homesick, but I'm slowly growing out of it."
Anika says all her songs are autobiographical but told through different characters, giving varying points of view on situations. She said she wanted her album to have a cohesive feel and so the 10 songs chosen for the album are linked thematically, the theme here being family.
"It's about experiences in my family, growing up in my family because that's all I know really and that's what I write about. They're about my brother, being homesick, my mother. There are a lot of songs about my mum, like how much I love her."
The foundation of Anika's songs are the words, augmented by her melodies and waiata-influenced vocal style, Youthful's chorus an example.
Anika (Te Aupouri, Ngapuhi) says learning Maori as a teenager has influenced her music. Just as the 'Maori strum' has influenced Neil Finn's guitar sound, the lingering vocal styles of waiata - particularly the mournful karakia - come through in Anika's songs. "I think it does, especially the rhythm and the sadness of the Maori music, you know, like the really scary sad music. I think that comes out in my music as well."
This is also due in part to the way she performs: "When I sing a sad song, I feel it - I feel sad when I'm singing it. When I sing a song about being homesick, I can feel it."
Anika's songs hint at an emotional depth that belies her youth. There is something about Anika that makes you think she has navigated some deep emotional waters, projected in the alluring blend of fragility and strength in her songs.
"I experienced more in New York than in 10 years of my life. I matured a lot and plus writing with a 35-year-old man (Peters) with more experience than me is always a good thing."
Connecting with her Maoritanga also plays a major part in her life.
"It's given me a respect for culture, respect for people, respect for places, historic events, writing Maori music, - there's not really many Maori songwriters in this world."
Along with her mother, her Hornby High Maori teacher, Mandy Karahu, is a predominant influence in Anika's life.
"The fact that she kicked our ass a lot and she always spoke to us like we were adults and we respected her as well as she respected us. So she didn't take on the teacher role, she took on the teacher/friend roles as well and she also had so much going on in her life but she still had time for us. Outside of school we were friends as well ... and cos she played rugby! I used to play rugby against her and she used to kick my ass! She was just like a friend teaching you."
The role model influence is substantial, and Anika's ambition is to be the same to others. She plans to go to teachers' college and be a Maori teacher. But what about fame and fortune as an musician? While she is committed to her music career, and plans to spend a year or so in the US touring to support 'Thinking Room', Anika says it is not the be all and end all in her life.
"There are so many things I want to do and be. Music is just a part of that. I need to do other things, I have a really small attention span."
You get the impression that a life without challenges does not appeal to Anika Moa and if her music is a glimpse at what other talents she possesses, I for one can't wait to see what else she has to offer.
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