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Go Asia Pacific
2 October, 2002

Bic Runga - In Focus

Bic Runga

Original article is at: Go Asia Pacific

Date: 2 October, 2002

By: Bruce Hill

Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat speaks with Chinese-Maori singer Bic Runga.

In this special interview, Bic talks about her first CD, ‘Beautiful Collison’, which has gone double platinium in New Zealand.

Currently touring Australia, Bic Runga is soon to return to the US, where ‘Beautiful Collision’ will be realeased.

Bic sings her hit song ‘Get Some Sleep’ during this talk with Pacific Beat’s Bruce Hill.

She starts by explaining how she came to write her song, ‘Election Night’.

RUNGA: I spent 3 years making this record, which is a little to long, really I could have made a movie or done something better with my time. But I was really devoted to it and I'd spent maybe a year-and-a-half writing the songs and then another year-and-a-half just putting it together.

HILL: Anything you're trying to get across with this album in particular?

RUNGA: I was just trying to learn, I was trying to learn how to produce a record cause I produced it myself, which is probably a bit more, I bit off more than I could chew really, so this is my learning process of how one goes about producing a record.

HILL: Now you actually did this in America?

RUNGA: I did most of it in LA and in New York and then I came home and did the vocals in my hometown of Auckland.

HILL: I couldn't help noticing a slight American accent creeping in there?

RUNGA: Yeah, I mean I guess a lot of the music I've grown up listening to has that kind of that accent so it's inevitable that you speak or you sing that way.

HILL: Speaking of growing up, you come from quite a musical family, don't you?

RUNGA: My mother was a professional singer, my dad plays the piano, my sister is a professional singer as well.

HILL: I read one article where you were described as a Chinese-Maori pop rock folkster? Care to often your own definition?

RUNGA: Yeah, I mean that'll do. I mean I suppose that'd do the trick. Pop rock folkster.

HILL: Your dad's Maori, did that have anything influence on your music at all?

RUNGA: Let's see. I don't know I guess the Maori are like they are just are musical and I guess there is a lot of love song writing in Maori music which I know I certainly I write a lot of love songs I guess, maybe that has something to do with it.

HILL: Of the two things that you do, singing and song writing, is there any one that you enjoy most or is it all part of the same creative process?

RUNGA: There both different - like the song writing is kind of more personal and the singing is more social. So like when you sing live your really speaking to people but with the song writing it comes from a more introverted place.

HILL: Well tell me, how did you get started in the music business in the first place?

RUNGA: I sang in high school just when I was going through high school I sang in bars and stuff in the evenings and then I started writing songs when I was about 14 and then I took a demo tape up to Sony Music when I was 19 and they signed me.

HILL: And now here you, are recording albums in LA and New York!

RUNGA: Yeah, yeah it's a good life.

HILL: You've actually got an interesting way of working with the music. You take it with you electronically?

RUNGA: I did the whole record on a computer really and with a protols recording system and it's just an industry standard format you can take your hard drive with you and plug it into someone else's setup and work anywhere really.

HILL: You got quite a good reception in America, quite a few quite famous people helped you out with the album?

RUNGA: Yeah, I guess so. Well I had Joey Woronka who is the drummer from REM and he was Beg Hanson's drummer for the last 6 years or so and also Neil Finn from New Zealand, from Crowded House. He plays and sings on my record.

HILL: You're going to actually sing us one of the songs from your album ‘Beautiful Collision’. Can you tell us a little bit about this song, ‘Get Some Sleep’?

RUNGA: The song ‘Get Some Sleep’ is about living in America and touring incessantly, getting really tired and not really knowing whether it was much fun or not and then yeah I just would just go back home to New York and it's about that.

HILL: It's really quite an upbeat sort of song really? You look like your having fun these days?

RUNGA: It's fun to sing that song, it's fun to sing with my band and being on the road’s good fun.

HILL: Most singer songwriters write terribly angst written songs about the loneliness and depression, and isolation and but you sound quite chirpy.

RUNGA: I'm quite chirpy, I got all that stuff out of my system I think when I was writing like as a teenager, so you grow out of that I think.

HILL: Did you like being in America? Is there an attraction about America?

RUNGA: There's kind of a mystery about America, cause we grow up watching American television and it doesn't seem real when your there, because you sort of feel like your on TV the whole time and everyone talks funny so yeah.

HILL: Well places like Union Station they sort of seem mythological.

RUNGA: Absolutely, yeah totally.

HILL: Feel tempted to leave New Zealand on the long term basis and go somewhere else?

RUNGA: I might, but I think my home will always be New Zealand, yeah I might just for a maybe a five-year period or something and make a go of sort of immigrating but I'll always have to come home to New Zealand.

HILL: Why is that?

RUNGA: You know I don't know. It's such a nice place to live. You sort of grow up in paradise and you think that the whole world's like that, but it's not at all and so you realise how lucky you are living in New Zealand where the beach is always only ever like an hour or so away.

HILL: Have you ever thought going up to the Pacific perhaps and there doing another tour?

RUNGA: Yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to go and have a holiday and it seems ridiculous that I haven't been before to any of the Pacific Islands when it's so close to home.

HILL: Tell us a bit about your career? I mean you started out and you went to Sony Music and it sort of it took off in New Zealand and now it's taking off in other places as well?

RUNGA: It's just beginning and I think if I can just like just being on the road can be tiring and if you just keep your health and just stay onto it, then you can get the job done, but it's a lot of work, it'll be a lot of work for the next little while.

HILL: Can you tell us more specifically about some of the more famous people that helped you out of the album? Drop some names here?

RUNGA: Well there's a New Zealand singer-songwriter called Dave Dobbin who I think is one of the greatest living songwriters.

HILL: Oh ‘The Dudes’?

RUNGA: Yeah ‘The Dudes’. He's an amazing writer and he played a lot of guitar. Lots of local bands in New Zealand were involved in the recorder band called ‘Pluto’ and a band called ‘Golden Horse’.

HILL: Where do you see your career going from here? What's next for Bic Runga?

RUNGA: Well I've got resident shows in LA for the next five weeks. I'm playing LA, Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver over a five week period, just touring with my band and playing.

HILL: What's it like being here in Australia as a New Zealander?

RUNGA: It's cool, you know it's cool to get out and of New Zealand as much as it's like a beautiful place to live, you get quite isolated and cut off from the world and it's nice to just get a fix by going into other cities in the world and Australia's just so close you know but it just feels like a great big, much bigger place to so much scope here you know more people.

HILL: Is it exactly the same as New Zealand, or in what ways is it different?

RUNGA: I think New Zealanders might be a bit more sort of shy. I mean Australians seem kind of more present, whereas in New Zealand you sort of feel like everyone's a little bit more introverted. I don't know, that might be just me, but yeah it seems like a different, people are a little bit different.

HILL: Now but tell me about your career? Do you want to become an international Brittany Spears style mega star, with limosines and an entourage and big Samoan bodyguards?

RUNGA: No, I don't particularly want to be huge, I don't want to lose my private live or anything. I don't want to be in tabloid magazines or anything like that, but I want to make records and in order to make records and stay on your record label you have to sell records and but then that's a nice thing. I like the idea that people will get to hear the music that I've put so much time into.

HILL: Do you measure success by record sales or just by personal satisfaction? If you could put out a little CD with a few tracks that sold a couple of hundred copies of real groovy records, you'd be happy?

RUNGA: If the music was really amazing and if it was like a really true expression, if I was making it for myself and it was kind of bold and totally honest, then you know if no-one understood it then that would be fine, the return would be already you know there.

HILL: Can young people with a bit of talent, with a bit of songwriting talent, that are musical, that really want to make it in the business from this part of the world, from Australia, from New Zealand, from the Pacific Islands perhaps, can the in fact make it? Can they go to America and if they've got talent will they be picked up or will they just be overlooked?

RUNGA: Oh no, no, no now it's making music's a really viable industry you know. It doesn't matter where you live, you could live in the middle of nowhere, but you know it helps to have a telephone and maybe a computer so your kind of connected and that's all you need you know you just need to be communicating in the world and just make music the way you want to make it.