On her new album, Bic Runga gives up trying to be ‘Bic Runga’. Instead, for the first time, she tries being herself, writes Chris Schulz.
She brushed her hair behind her ears. She gazed at the rain falling outside. She sat in a long overcoat and sipped her coffee. She called herself “a little old lady” and said, scarcely believably, “I’m 50 now”. She shrugged her shoulders, and said: “Everything is exactly as it should be.”
Bic Runga is back, but not as you remember her. She is older and wiser, with far fewer fucks to give. Ask her about nerves, or pressure, or expectations, and she’ll reply: “I don’t care about that anymore.” Question her about where she’s been and she’ll respond with a joke: “Loading the dishwasher.”
Next week, Runga releases her sixth album, Red Sunset. It’s her first collection of all-new material in 15 years. This, she says, is a hard reset, a chance to reboot and reintroduce herself with an album full of the kind of music she wants to make, the tunes she would never have been allowed to release before.
That means soft and subtle experiments, and wistful, shimmery, carefree jams haunted by Runga’s whispered vocals. Her partner, the famous-in-his-own-right Kody Nielson, handles production, which is minimal. The title is a reference to “yearning and unrequited love,” says Runga. “It’s like, ‘Don’t you want to watch this sunset with me?’”
Will her fans like it? There’s another shrug. Runga doesn’t mind if they don’t. “It’s going to do what it’s going to do. It doesn’t matter what it does,” she says. “Some people will need it and want to hear it, and for other people, it won’t come on their radar at all. You can’t do anything about it.”
It’s worth remembering the history of the person doing all this shrugging. Runga is one of the most accomplished songwriters this country has produced. With 20 Tuis, she is the Aotearoa Music Awards’ most awarded artist. A Silver Scroll trophy sits on her mantlepiece. She has a permanent place in the NZ Music Hall of Fame.
Her three-album run of Drive, Beautiful Collision and Birds between 1997 and 2005 may be the best any local artist has ever had. When I asked industry experts where Runga sits in our pantheon of songwriting greats, only Neil Finn, Dave Dobbyn and Don McGlashan were mentioned as competitors. “She remains one of Aotearoa’s most significant modern songwriters and performers,” one replied.
So Runga’s new carefree attitude hasn’t come easily. She admits the weight of being “Bic Runga” got to her over those years away. “I probably overthought things,” she nods. “I could have tried to stay ‘in’ the whole time, but … trying to chip away at it constantly and stay on top of that game would have exhausted me.”
Working through that is one reason for her lengthy absence. The other is her family. She and Nielson have three children together, and while Runga’s continued touring over the years, and released the covers album Close Your Eyes in 2016, music was often placed on the back burner, replaced by family life, and that dishwasher.
Did she stop writing? “Kind of,” she says. “It takes a lot of uninterrupted concentration.” She tells a story that will be familiar to any parent. “If there’s a song in the air and you can’t quite grasp it, and then someone says, ‘Mum, where are my socks?’ it’s lost into the ether.”
But family is also the reason behind Runga’s return. Things have changed over the past year. Runga’s eldest is preparing to leave home. The impending vacuum terrifies her. “If I don’t do something with myself again, I’m just going to be mourning the loss of my children,” is how she describes her thought process.
So, songs started haunting her, fragments and snippets that had stayed with her, some dating back 20 years. Runga began waking in the night, jotting down ideas, just like she used to. “Half of the job is just getting up in the night to grab it,” she says. She and Nielson began working them up, figuring them out, often in their home studio.
Next week, we get to hear the results. Fans are in for a shock. Runga knows Red Sunset may be a reach for some who want her to rinse and repeat the rawness and emotional intensity of ‘Sway’ or ‘Drive’. This, though, is where she’s at now. “I’ve always got some bee in my bonnet about something, and now it’s about being middle-aged,” she says. “I want to know what a little old lady has to say, now that I am one.”
This is the first time Runga has made an album that’s just for her. If anyone else wants to hear it, great. If not, Runga says that’s cool too. “There’s always this imaginary, ‘I should be here, I should do better,’” she says. “That’s all fictitious, because the way things are is exactly the way they are [supposed to be].”
It sounds like wisdom. It looks like maturity. It feels like contentment. How did Runga find her happy place? There’s no pause, no staring at the rain this time. Instead, there’s another shrug, delivered with a big, wide smile. “I’m old. It just comes with age.”
Red Sunset is out on February 13. For tour dates visit bicrunga.com
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