Watch: Marlon Williams performs live at RNZ
The singer-songwriter plays as part of a series of intimate acoustic concerts celebrating 20 years of RNZ's NZ Live music sessions.
To celebrate New Zealand Music Month, RNZ's Afternoons is hosting a series of intimate acoustic concerts as requested by listeners.
This week's top requested person is Marlon Williams. His fourth studio record Te Whare Tīwekaweka is his first album in te reo Māori.
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"In terms of why now, I guess I've always sung in Māori my whole life, I've gone in and out of being able to speak it to varying degrees but still very much at the beginning of that journey. I just love to sing in Māori and I was lucky enough to collaborate with someone who could help me compose songs.
"I've been living with it [the album] for so long that you forget that it's not actually been out."
The response has been a mixed bag, he says.
"I was just talking to a fan in Germany, and they don't even quite know what I'm saying [on the record], then you talk to Māori and some Māori are like 'it's gonna be a bit of a gnarly thing to do'. There's a million people, million opinions."
Marlon Williams performing live in the RNZ studio with some fans present.
RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Some songs came easier than others, he says.
"'Aua Atu Rā' – that was the first song that KOMMI and I wrote for the record. It was sort of sitting around for a few years before it burst into life in one main writing sitting but it was really the prow of the waka that cut through and let the rest of the record come out."
Williams has dedicated his album to one of his all-time favourite song writers Hirini Melbourne.
"There's something so pure about the way he wrote and approached sound and people. He just left us an absolute gift. His back catalogue should be as ubiquitous as – and in some way is as ubiquitous as Edmonds Cookbook."
Williams has also spent the past few years reconnecting with his whakapapa and his dad's marae in Tōrere, in the Ōpōtiki District of the Bay of Plenty. He also revisited his mother's marae in the South Island.
Williams said returning home to his Marae in Tōrere was how "people reconnect with where they are from. It’s all here. This is how it happens.”
Tim Flower
"It's hard to describe. It's an on-rushing of emotion in the seat of the stomach, but it all happens there, it all happens on the marae and it all rushes to the front when you get there."
In his Ngā Ao E Rua - Two Worlds documentary, he speaks about finding a new source of fuel.
"I'm a bit of a scribbly, anxious person at the best of times. For sure, I've had a very, very lucky and wonderful musical career in life. I've been able to do all these things and you're always super grateful and thankful for all the opportunities that come your way.
"But it's important to acknowledge that it's not a free enterprise and I think there was something that changed in me where I just started to see it as a whole picture of things and see life for what it is in terms of time, energy and attention. It was a lot of – I wouldn't say revelation – but recognition."
"An album will nourish you while you're making it up to a point and then you're doomed to have a falling out or a freezing-over, which I think is healthy. It's part of [moving onto] the next thing, but there are other points in which it nourished me in ways that will last longer than a normal record."
The album cover image is a charcoal drawing done by his mother, who is an artist, when she was pregnant with him.
The cover of Marlon Williams' new album features a sketch that his mum Jennifer Rendall drew when she was pregnant with him in 1990.
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"She drew this charcoal image of a slender man in a top hat, walking up a garden path to a big two-storey villa in the night, with a brief case full of pound sterling. I came across it again recently – I remember [seeing] it as a child, but I came across it again recently and I'd forgotten the context and I thought it was a drawing of me.
"It was a very eerie thing, but it felt right for the record."
