Anna Coddington: Always changing

Singer-songwriter Anna Coddington took out two big awards last month. Soon after winning the top Silver Scroll award for her bilingual waiata “Kātuarehe”, she was named the best Māori female solo artist at the Waiata Māori Music Awards. Dale Husband caught up with the busy māmā and law student as she was preparing for exams.

 

Kia ora, Anna. I always start with names and I’d love to know a little bit about your whānau. Could you tell us about your names?

Pinenga is my Māori name. It’s a Te Arawa name, and a name that people have always mispronounced.

What’s the background? Do you know the story of that name?

It was my koro’s aunty, I think, but it goes back before her. One of my uncles said she was a princess of Te Arawa, but I don’t know how much there is in that.

How did you happen to grow up in Raglan? Tell us a bit about your mum and dad, and how you came to be a Raglan whānau.

My dad’s a surfer, and that’s the long story short.

We don’t whakapapa to Whāingaroa, we whakapapa to Ngāti Tūwharetoa and Te Arawa and Ngāti Whakaue. I was born in Hamilton, and my sister Claire was too. Then we moved to Raglan when I was about two or three. Mum and Dad just wanted to live out there near the surf. They liked the community.

It was really different then to how it is now. It was pretty remote. Very small town, not that many people, not that many shops. Certainly no cafes and fancy shops like there are these days.

My dad (Peter) was from Hamilton. My mum (Rangi) grew up in Tūrangi, near our marae on my koro and nan’s farm. But she went to Hamilton for teachers’ college, and that’s where she met my dad. They got married, started a family, sold their house in Hamilton and bought our first house in Raglan. And been there ever since.

Have you enjoyed the fabulous left-hand break that Raglan is famous for?

No, not myself. I like to say that I have a healthy respect for Tangaroa, aka “too scared”. I did surf for a little bit when I was in my last years of high school. I used to get out there in summer after school and stuff like that, but just mucking around in the whitewash, really. I never got properly into it.

I went down the music path instead, not that you can’t do both. But, yeah, I didn’t get the bug.

Your parents must have been very tolerant to allow you to have a set of drums as an 11-year-old.

They were my dad’s drums!

Were they musical?

Yeah, they were musical. Not professionally, but my mum, like most Māori, loves to sing along. Plays a bit of guitar, plays a bit of piano, and used to do that when I was growing up for the kapa haka at school.

My dad brought home this massive chrome pearl drum kit when I was about 11. I was instantly attracted to it and just obsessed. I think I played the drums every day after that. I did lessons all through high school, and picked up the guitar when I was about 14.

My dad played drums in a band called the Fabulons, a Raglan surfer band. They played surf music at parties, stuff like that. Nothing pro, but they were well respected in Raglan as a party band.

Do you still play the drums? Do you get a kick when you sit on a kick?

I still love to. I’m not any good because I don’t practise. It’s like anything, but I think it’s especially true for drumming. Really good drummers practise a lot. There’s just something about the feel of a really good drummer, and I definitely don’t have that. But I still enjoy it. I don’t have a set now. I had one in our old house before it flooded, but we lost that house in the floods and lost the drums with it.

That’s a bit of tragedy. Which flood? When?

That was the Auckland anniversary floods at the start of last year. We lost our house. It was very dramatic. It flooded through the first floor, and we were trapped on the second floor where the bedrooms were, in our kids’ bedroom, and our neighbours had to rescue us by kayak from our kids’ bedroom window. It was awful. The council bought us out and removed the house and a handful of other houses around us as well.

Bloody hell. Where were you?

Grey Lynn. There were lots of pockets all around Auckland. We were just in a particularly bad little pocket. There are quite a few areas like that around Auckland that should never have been built on.

Ka aroha ki a koe. A bit of a curveball there.

Oh, yes. I was glad to see the back of last year. I had a lot of headaches last year. Put it that way.

You’ve had a lot of acknowledgment and success this year to counteract it, so congratulations.

Let’s talk a bit more about Raglan. It’s a very creative town, isn’t it? Music, art, other endeavours. It seems that people are attracted to it because of the creative vibe going on. You and some like-minded kids in high school got together for the Smokefree Rockquest. I sort of recall your group.

Yeah, Handsome Geoffrey.

Wild old name. How did it come to be?

Firstly, yes, Raglan was a great place to grow up playing music. It’s very creative and very tolerant, with some unique thinkers. That’s one benefit when you grow up in a place like Raglan. You’re not so much looking at what everyone else is doing as a guide to what you should be doing. There’s a bit more independent thinking in a town like that, where everyone’s kind of weird and different anyway.

So it’s a bit easier to find your own thing. In my band, the bass player, Janna, was from Raglan, too. Our drummer, Aidee, was from Hamilton. We were all at Hamilton Girls’ High, and we actually all started out as drummers and then had to migrate to other instruments to start the band.

We entered Rockquest and we had a hard time coming up with a name. I can’t remember how we came up with Handsome Geoffrey, but we did and we just went with it. We needed to put something on the form, and that’s what we came up with.

It’s a name that sticks, so good on you. What about your own musical influences as a younger person? Who were you listening to or thought was cool?

Probably one of the first bands that I realised I liked of my own accord, without someone else telling me: “This is a cool band that you should listen to.” I just heard it and was like: “Wow, I love this!” That was Weezer, the Blue Album. It was the ’90s, so that kind of music was really popular. It’s basically pop songs played in a rock style. I listened to Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, stuff like that. But also a lot of singer-songwriters. Bic Runga, obviously, was a big influence. Lisa Loeb.

We were fortunate to have a lot of incredible female musicians in bands in the ‘90s, because bands were big back then. So you saw women actually holding and playing instruments a lot, like Courtney Love and Hole, Juliana Hatfield. There was a lot of that, whereas I feel that nowadays most people end up presenting as singers. Even if they’re really good instrumentalists, you never see them playing an instrument. It’s a weird thing. I’m not sure if it’s only women who get presented like that, but I definitely think I see fewer women playing instruments.

A lot of songwriters are good in the studio but nervous on stage. Did you always have the confidence to perform live?

I don’t think I was confident. I did it because I loved the music, and I loved being in a band and I loved writing songs, and that was the only vehicle we had for the songs at that time.

We didn’t have access to studios or anything like that. It was just, write songs, rehearse songs as a band, and then perform them when we could. That was the only outlet we had for them. Performing was a necessity, because if you weren’t doing that, then what were you doing? Just writing songs and noodling away on your own?

I was performing for years before I was ever in a studio. Our first studio experience, properly, with a producer, was after we won the Rockquest. We’d already been playing for a couple of years by then. Our songs got played on student radio a little bit, but they were never released. Live gigs were all there was.

Do you think it’s harder for women in music to achieve success? Is it a harder road to travel?

Do I think it’s harder? I think it’s different. I think there are barriers. Yes, lots of them, of different kinds, and a lot of them are so covert that you don’t even recognise that they’re operating. Small things, like not getting your ideas listened to if you’re in the studio. Or if you’re at a live gig and you’re trying to say “I need the monitors to sound more like this,” or “I think we should do that.” As a woman, you don’t get listened to the same way that a man does, that’s for sure.

And then there’s broader things that are harder to pin down to gender, but are definitely noticeable patterns, such as the kinds of fees that artists command. If you think of all our top performing festival artists who are given the big fees, most of them are men. There are probably only a handful of exceptions, like Benee and Lorde. But they are major international artists, and we shouldn’t even be comparing them to local acts — and I feel there’s a gap there.

I reckon I could put a number on the biggest fee I could command for a gig as a female solo artist, and it wouldn’t be as much as some of the male artists get on festival bills.

Then there’s all the other stuff like safety, sexual harassment, and just real basic human rights issues that are barriers for women participating in the music industry, because those are things that men generally don’t have to deal with.

I want to acknowledge your success this year with the Waiata Māori Music Awards and winning best Māori female solo artist, as well as taking out the top award in the Silver Scrolls for your bilingual waiata “Kātuarehe”. It’s wonderful to see this injection of enthusiasm into our bilingual music scene here in Aotearoa.

But it hasn’t come easy. It’s the culmination of what feels like a 30 to 40-year journey. In years past, Māori music wouldn’t get the airtime. How did you feel about being acknowledged by our own people for the mahi you’ve been doing across the years?

It feels really good, because I agree with what you’re saying about bilingual music. The Māori music scene and the non-Māori music scene haven’t always been as close and as intermingled as they are now. There was a time when I felt like I was on the outside looking in longingly at the Māori music scene, wanting to be part of it but not feeling like I had the reo or the connections or whatever it was.

So many people have made the effort to build bridges between those two scenes that now it’s just seamless. It feels great to be part of that because I’ve been on my reo journey for quite a while as well. It feels like a coming together of two things that I love and I’m passionate about.

Can we talk for a moment about songwriting? How do the ideas come? Are you the sort of person who wanders around with a notebook in your pocket? Where does the inspiration come from? What time of the day does it normally arrive?

There’s no pattern to it. It’s different all the time. I do have a notebook in my pocket because I have my phone in my pocket all the time, like most people these days. I’ve written most of my songs on the Notes app in my iPhone over the last few years.

I love running. I can’t do it at the moment because I’ve got Long Covid, but I used to write a lot when I was running. Driving is the other thing. I’ve heard other people talk about this. Because the scene in front of your eyes is changing constantly, your brain’s taking in different stuff all the time. And apparently that stimulates different thoughts. I write a lot of songs when my brain is in that zone: driving, running, on a plane. I wrote some lyrics on an aeroplane on the way back from the Māori Music Awards, actually.

Other times, I’ll sit down in my studio and pull up some drums and then play some bass and then put some guitar on it and then work out a melody and then do the words last. So it’s different all the time.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? Some people write the lyrics and then find the melody to marry up with the lyrical thought. It seems to come both ways for you. What about these reo Māori song hubs?

When you’re co-writing like that, I find it usually starts with the music. You’ll chat together about making a song that’s something like this, something like that. It’s going to be fast or slow, happy or sad, whatever. And you get some chords going in a basic beat and then you start writing to that. And then you shape the track around what you write, and you go back and forth like that throughout the day.

Co-writing is a little bit different because you’ve got lots of people contributing ideas at the same time, and then, because it’s reo rua (bilingual) there will be a mātanga reo overseeing the reo. My songs that I did there, I was working with Ruth Smith, who’s incredible. I love her. She had great ideas. I’d say I want to talk about this or that feeling, and she had words on words on words to offer.

You’ve made a bit of an art of collaborating with people, Anna, haven’t you?

Yes, I love it.

Who stands out for you when you think back on the collaborative work you’ve done?

There are different types of collaboration. There’s collaborative writing, and Ruth would be a standout. My producer, Jol, is great to work with. And Noema, who co-wrote “Kātuarehe”, the song that won the Silver Scroll, he’s a great producer to write with as well, because he’s very fast and he doesn’t try to push me one way or another. You just let the song happen.

Honestly, the best thing about music to me is the friendships. I love music, but probably the thing I cherish the most is the friends I’ve made. Anything where I get to work with my friends is the best.

Not last year but the year before, me and my friends held this Christmas karaoke party. It was in a small venue and just a budget internet karaoke thing where we all chose songs and did karaoke and we sold tickets to raise money for the venue. And that was great. Not because the music was great, but because we were together and having a great time.

I like working with different people for different reasons, I suppose is what I’m saying.

Your video work’s been pretty innovative. You can provide the beautiful waiata, but sometimes it’s the image that helps to not only sell the song, but to give the viewer or the listener a bit more context and enjoyment. Who stands out there for you?

My latest videos have all been done by my drummer, Fen, who is amazing. Creatively, we’re on the same page, and we always have been, musically and otherwise. Our approach to creativity is very similar, very DIY, which you can see in the video. We shot it in his lounge on a green screen and then got some crazy stuff to put in the background.

The other person I would acknowledge for music videos is one of my best friends, Aidee Walker. She is a really talented director, and she directed quite a few of my older music videos, including Bird in Hand, Make You Mine and The Runner, off my third album Luck/Time.

I’ve made a couple of videos myself as well, just for content, not for video masterpieces or anything like that. Sometimes you just want a visual picture to give context to the song.

I know we’re somewhat limited for time because you’ve got hungry tamariki wrecking the joint while we’re speaking, but as a singer, as we age, our voice matures. How are you finding your voice abilities now, decades after you’ve started?

You’re really make a big thing about how many decades I’ve been doing music, aren’t you?

Well, you started when you were 14, and Wikipedia is listing you in your 40s, if it got it right . . .

I’m just joking!

Let me rephrase that — how are you finding your voice as you’ve matured as a fine red wine?

I’ve never been the biggest fan of my own voice. There are probably lots of singers who feel like that, but I’ve always thought I sound quite young, and it would be nice to sound a bit more sultry, or like a bigger voice or something. But my voice is what it is.

As for changes, it’s hard to be objective about that kind of thing because change happens slowly. I’m not sure that my voice sounds that different. Maybe deeper or something like that.

In terms of subject matter, yes, definitely. Always changing. I mean, my last album was all about motherhood, and most of the songs were about that transition. I’m always influenced by what’s going on around me. Like having kids and getting older and whatever. It all finds its way in there.

Is there a line in a song that you’re particularly proud of? Some particular truth?

I think there are probably a lot of those. Most songwriters speaking honestly would say that, because that’s what songs are, right? They’re like the purest distillation of your experience. I feel I can’t single one out. Because if I did, I’d probably hang up the phone, and be like: “Oh, I should have said this other one.” Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense?

It does. And it’s fine — how can you go back to all the songs you’ve written and then pick out one line?

Exactly. We’re five albums in, Dale, we’re five albums in. And a couple of EPs and whatever else.

Yeah, it’s quite a catalogue. You must be proud when you look back on it.

You know, it’s funny because, again, probably similar to most songwriters, I went through a phase where I hated my first album. But then you get distant enough from it that you can see it a little more objectively, see it for what it is. It might not be the best thing ever in the world, but it’s got its qualities.

I’m proud that I’ve been able to do it this long as a job. I feel very privileged to be able to say that. It’s been good, and I feel lucky to have been able to do it on my own terms in my own way without anyone telling me what to do or how to look or anything like that. I’ve managed to make it work. So that’s what I’m proud of. I’ve done it on my own terms.

I’ve been a broadcaster for a long time, and I don’t know if it’s naïve or just hopeful, but I still think that my best work is still to come, because of all the experience I’ve built up over 30 or 40 years. In my situation, you think, well, these are all the tools that are helping to make what you do tomorrow a little bit better than what you’ve done before. Do you think that there’s still some magic ahead for you?

I agree with what you just said. The risk for creative things is if you lose the passion for it and you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. But yeah, for sure, I have a lot more tools at my disposal now for writing songs — or even singing. I know a lot more about singing now than I did 10 years ago.

The question for me is not whether I can do it but whether I want to. I’m not sure I’ll make another album, and if I don’t, it will be because I choose not to, not because I don’t think I can still make good music.

The industry’s changed a lot, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s required these days that I’m not sure I necessarily want to be doing — social media, mostly. That’s such a big part of it, unfortunately. It’s great for some people. It’s free promotion or whatever, but I’m just not interested in being a social media influencer. That’s one thing that puts me off a bit.

But I’m at law school, anyway.

Are you? Amazing!

Yeah. I’ve got exams next week. I’m in my third year. So I’ve only got one year to go, which is why I say I’m not sure I’ll make another album, because I’m doing this other thing now that is very interesting, and I’m enjoying it.

What area of law intrigues you? Which area have you gone to?

I’m not sure yet. I find it all interesting, and that’s a problem at this stage because I do need to figure that out. I quite like public law.

Good stuff. I still see you as a soldier for the cause, though, Anna. It’s a pretty heady time for music because we’ve got all these rangatahi who are super confident with their reo. I’m constantly amazed at the stuff that plays on our station. I have to keep asking: “Who’s this?”

For sure. And you know, as a parent with kids in rumaki Māori medium education, it’s incredible, because when I grew up, we had Moana and the Moa Hunters and Poi Ē, and that was about it. Just a handful of stuff.

I think we need to speak the name Hinewehi Mohi — Dame Hinewehi Mohi. She’s been a massive driving force with the Waiata Anthems kaupapa and the reo Māori song hubs kaupapa. She’s at APRA now, and she’s driving that as well.

I always like to give a big mihi to the people who’ve been doing it for ages, long before these changes that we’re talking about now. Like Maisey Rika and Ria Hall and Rob Ruha and whoever else — our reo Māori music champions.

Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are now. You hear Māori songs on the radio when it’s not even Māori language week. It’s amazing.

It’s been a wonderful kōrero. Thank you, Anna. I’m sad to hear about the Long Covid, though.

Yeah, it’s been a real nightmare. But it’s heaps better than it was. Except I can’t run. That’s the biggest part of it for me. I love running, and I can’t do that. But it’s certainly a lot better than for some other people who have it pretty bad, so I don’t like to complain about it because mine’s been pretty mild by comparison.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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