Musician MĀ merges rap and her biodiversity day job on new album

A track called ‘Mahi’ on Blame It On The Weather, the second album from rapper, singer, and producer MĀ, features the line “call me the bush maintainer”.

She’s being literal. MĀ works as a biodiversity ranger, dealing with pest and predator control as part of her role. While some musicians make sure to separate their job from their art, she’s done the opposite, creating songs themed around things she sees daily.

“I really wanted to find a way to balance my day job with my night job,” she says.

“I thought it made sense to do an album about the observations I’m seeing while I work in the ngahere [forest], and try to weave in ways to realise and execute my responsibilities as tangata whenua here in Aotearoa.”

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It’s a carefully crafted and sequenced series of songs, with environmental ideas throughout.

“‘Hoki Atu Mate’ is a song about pest plants, and pest control. Weeds and stuff,” she explains.

“‘Traps Jam’ is about predator control. My team and I do a lot of trapping throughout the ngahere. There’s a song about water [because] we also cover fish passage in our work programme.

“I really wanted to showcase how much mahi we do, and the variety of it, to influence people to look outside and think: what’s your thing that you want to keep an eye on, or monitor, or observe?

“I wanted people to understand that the taiao [environment] is everywhere, and we need to start observing and being more present with it”.

The title track ‘BIOTW’ begins with news clips from 2023, with reporters speaking about environmental disasters.

“It’s a waiata I wrote to tuku mihi [acknowledge], the smaller communities who were affected by Cyclone Gabrielle, especially those who didn’t get a lot, or any support, from the government or their councils," she says.

“I was inspired by how quickly and efficiently those small communities got together to help put the roads back together, to help clean up the awa that got flooded, to help the whānau that had to leave their homes.

“I don’t want that stuff to be forgotten.”

Despite some heavy subject matter, Blame It On The Weather is mostly musically upbeat. There’s a sense of fun throughout, and the album ends on an uplifting note with the track ‘Kia ū’, which translates literally to ‘be resolute’.

“Saying ‘hold on, keep going, stay resilient’ was the last whakaaro [thought] I wanted to leave on the album” says MĀ.

Earlier there’s ‘Pūhā me te Porohewa’, a track that emerged from Waiata Anthems 2024.

“It’s the second song on the album. I put it there mostly to get the anger out,” says MĀ.

"I wanted a place where that emotion can be expressed, four minutes to have a rant, to be hōhā with our world leaders."

“You have to acknowledge it, but I’m not going to spend an entire album talking about how these people are annoying, and how they’re making things really hard. Instead I’d rather talk about how we can move forward, how we can evolve, how we can work together better.”