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Courier
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2 August, 2002
Beautiful Collision
Original content copyright 2002 to Courier Mail, Australia
If you are what you eat, then Bic Runga's musical appetite should make her a gourmet, says Noel Mengel.
Original article is at: http://www.couriermail.news.com.au
Date: 2 August, 2002
By: Noel Mengel
SHE likes Neil Young. David Bowie. Ella Fitzgerald. The Mamas and the Papas. Yoko Ono. Oliver Sacks. Milan Kundera. Billie Holiday. Marianne Faithfull's biography. Picasso. J.D. Salinger. The Smiths. Toast.
Bic Runga could make the worst kind of racket since dumbed-down kiddy metal and you would still have to admire her on principle.
Of course, Runga doesn't make anything of the sort.
Her four-years-in-the-baking second album, Beautiful Collision, is the literate pop-rock you might expect from someone with such good taste in listening and reading material.
Get Some Sleep is the kind of pop tune frequently found in the Neil Finn songbook, but that's not the only string to the bow.
Her vocals soar high and free over the jazzy pulse of Election Night and the title tune; The Be All And End All is a slow-mo waltz (with Mr Finn at the piano); Listening For The Weather is a magic folk-pop tune with echoes of the Beach Boys and Lennon-McCartney.
"Most of the musicians who really blow me away are either dead or over 50," Runga admits on her website, and there is something traditional about a song like Honest Goodbyes, a piano ballad which might just as easily have been written in the '40s as in this century.
"I love the way a song can conjure up nostalgia, a feeling that you can't quite place or you don't quite know where you've heard it," Runga says.
"Different eras use different types of phrasing. I grew up listening to '60s and '70s music, and the music from the '30s and '40s was something that I discovered more recently."
Not that there is anything old hat about Beautiful Collision, an album with the sort of timeless songcraft that will have appeal to fans of Aimee Mann, Natalie Merchant and Beth Orton.
"I had two completely disparate ideas in my head when I began on this," Runga says. "One was to make a really innovative hip-hop record, and the other was to make a more nostalgic kind of record.
"I love hip-hop because it has so much attitude but I'm no hip-hop programmer, so what came out was born of my limitations."
Some limits. The album was recorded in eight different studios and five different cities with 12 different engineers, with players including drummer Joey Waronker and bassist Sebastian Steinberg (who played on Finn's 7 Worlds Collide live album last year).
Expectations were high after the success of her 1997 Drive debut, which became the biggest-selling album by a New Zealand artist, some feat in a country which has bred Split Enz and the former Shihad.
But Runga was determined to retain control – like Drive, Beautiful Collision is self-produced – and wouldn't be rushed.
"I was trying to learn my craft, to figure out how to produce records," Runga says.
"Until now my collaborations have been me trying to protect myself, protect my songs, or at least not to expose the fact that I didn't know what I was doing! But now I feel ready to let go a bit more, to leave my ego at the door and work with other people."
Not that everything about the music world has been to her liking.
"Sometimes when you're sitting on an aeroplane and someone's talking to you about business, you just want to get out of there. That's not what you had in your mind when you got into music.
"But lately I've been in L.A. and meeting other musicians and it's really inspired me. It reminded me of the reasons why I started making music in the first place."
Runga has been through a hard school in the past five years, learning to get what she wants in the face of the pressures created by success.
"When you're 21 and you've just made a debut record you don't have any history really.
"Some people say getting older is a drag but I don't agree. I'm 26 now and enjoying it much more than when you're young and stupid. I wouldn't go back!"
• Beautiful Collision is out now through Sony.
Original content copyright 2002 to Courier Mail, Australia
