Music Therapy

The ancient Romans thought of creativity as a divine spirit that would come to an artist from some distant and unknowable place. As a songwriter, Ngaiire knows all about this whimsical, mysterious force. “It's all kind of a little bit blurry. You don't know where these feelings are because you're just tapping into this whole different world,” she says of the songwriting process. “That's the amazingness of music and taking you to different places.”

When Ngaiire finally embarked on the songwriting for what would become her debut album – after years of singing with Blue King Brown, Monsieur Camembert and Paul Mac – she contacted jazz pianist-composer Aaron Choulai. “I just sent him an email and said, 'Hey, man, I just really love what you do. Can I come over to Japan and hang out with you a bit and write some music?'” Ngaiire laughs when she recounts Choulai freaked out a little bit, before stressing, “But I'm so glad that he agreed to take a leap of faith with me.” The pair then spent two weeks in Japan, writing by day and drowning in potato wine by night. “I always feel like when you're writing, a song will always tell you what it wants to be, especially if you're co-writing with somebody else,” Ngaiire shares. “It sounds a bit weird, but it was just like a nut that you had to crack and you just had to keep cracking and keep cracking until it burst open. And once you got there it was the best feeling. Nothing could really replace the feeling of having completed a song. It's a very exciting process, and it's a very spiritual process as well, and I'm just so privileged to be able to do this.”

Ngaiire's early musical experiences also suggest a spiritual bent. Growing up in Papua New Guinea with a pastor father, Ngaiire was always around, and often singing in, churches: “I've obviously wavered away from that a little bit now!” There was a lot of reggae and traditional music on the radio – and then there was Cliff Richard. “Any exposure that I had to western music was probably Cliff Richard, because my mum was madly in love with him!” The album's title, Lamentations, is a nod to Henry Purcell's Dido's Lament. But it also reflects some personal tragedies Ngaiire navigated during the album's creation. “I had two people in my family die at the beginning of the process, I was in a car accident, we were working our way through the album budget really quickly and I was starting to panic about where we were going to get the rest of the money [from]. I had to make sure that everyone was fine while I was in bed with a fractured spine. I guess I envisioned doing the first album as a smoother experience, but it was both a nightmare and very rewarding. I was just so into making this sound really good, and nothing else mattered.”