From Teeks, and five intriguing New Zealand albums arriving this year
After a very big year, soul man Teeks is facing the challenge of a debut album.
As Te Karehana Gardiner-Toi walked off stage at the Silver Scroll awards in Auckland in October, he couldn’t shake the feeling he’d underperformed, let his nerves get the better of him, not quite hit the notes the way he wanted.
He’d walked off while the lights were still down, while pianist Nick Dow and the Ngā Tūmanako kapa haka group were still on the stage, while the last booming lines of Te Ahi Kai Pō resounded around Spark Arena.
So he missed the standing ovation he had earned for probably the most powerful Kiwi musical moment of 2018. The applause was both for his emotionally charged performance and for the song (co-written by Ria Hall, Te Ori Paki and Tiki Taane) about an 1864 battle in Tauranga in which more than 100 Māori died at the hands of British soldiers. Hall and her co-writers won the Maioha Award for best song in te reo Māori.
“I didn’t find out until after that people had stood up,” the soul singer better known as Teeks says. “I kind of missed the whole thing. And even though Ria was sitting quite close to me, all she said on the night was, ‘I can’t speak to you right now.’” Teeks deadpans her reaction as meaning, “I must have done an okay job”.
A few months later, Teeks remains almost bafflingly humble about a performance that had the same emotional punch as, say, Adele’s version of Someone Like You at the Brits in 2011. He says simply that he’d been terrified to sing in front of “a stadium full of songwriters”.
This promises to be an important year for the 25-year-old emerging talent. It has been 18 months since his Grapefruit Skies EP impressed with its rich, pure vocals and its intensely personal lyrics. Amazingly, he didn’t come to soul music until after high school, but he still had the connections to record at New York’s Bunker Room studios.
Teeks is promising his debut album will arrive this year. And he’s slowly learning what it is to be a full-time songwriter carving out the right material.
“I have friends who can write a song a day about anything, and I’d love to say I’ve written 50 songs and will just cut them down for an album – but I’m not like that,” he says. “As with the EP, it’s still the same. I find it easier to write a song
Of his Silver Scroll performance, he says that he was terrified to be singing in front of “a stadium full of songwriters”.
when I’m able to connect with it on a personal level. I feel like my strongest stuff will come when I’m on my own. I need that isolation, that bubble.”
There’s already evidence that, even for an artist who admits he sometimes struggles to fill an entire set with his own material, his writing is bearing fruit.
A new song, Without You, was roadtested at The Great Escape festival in the