Stateside success
The Kiwi musician living the dream in the US.
It’s 2013 and a New Zealand musician has just arrived in New York, ears flapping, eager to listen and learn. He has moved here to broaden his sonic horizons, but rents are sky high, and money’s too tight to mention.
So, between band rehearsals, he takes whatever crappy part-time jobs he can get. He works as a barista, helps children build Lego sculptures in Union Square . . . but a man with his cheekbones is wasted on work like this.
And so, in due course, he and his drummer are employed to drive around New Jersey looking professionally handsome, dressed in tuxedoes, delivering promotional chocolates to travel agencies.
‘‘We would play The Sopranos’ theme as we drove past fogged-in golf courses and through all this weird scenery,’’ recalls Andrew Keoghan, who has recently swapped New York City for the sun-bleached boulevards of Los Angeles.
‘‘And then we’d walk into these travel agents’ offices carrying chocolates on silver platters. Unfortunately, they’d often assume we were strippers and start hollering at us to take our pants off.’’
The things we do. But Keoghan managed to keep his pants on most of the time, or so he says. He also managed to make a bunch of new music while he was over there, much of which is collected on his second album Every Orchid Offering, released this week.
The more percussive and synthheavy follow-up to his 2011 debut Arctic Tales Divide, it’s every bit as good as you might expect from a man who was trained to play classical music and sing opera, then developed a massive mancrush on pop.
I met Keoghan once, in 2010, at a dinner in Nelson. A former One News reporter who’d been making music since childhood, he was about to play a solo support gig for Auckland band Grand Rapids and we all sat around beforehand, eating takeaway Indian tucker.
Between mouthfuls of saag paneer, he talked about his obsession with David Bowie, gesticulating with handfuls of naan bread as the great man’s Sound And Vision fizzed and jittered its way from little bookshelf speakers in the corner.
Soft-spoken and articulate, Keoghan pulled the tune apart as it played, marvelling at its perfect blend of accessible melody, ambiguous lyric and uncompromising sonic strangeness.
An hour later, he was on stage, running his granddad’s 130-yearold violin through a loop pedal, plucking and tapping and bowing a succession of intricately interlocking rhythms and melodies out of the thing while he sang about heartbreak and longing in an airy tenor.
The music was simultaneously light and intense, and unfashionably romantic. Keoghan didn’t sound like anyone else I’d heard in these Shaky Isles, and it was clear he was going somewhere, making a sound like this. That somewhere, it transpired, was the juiced-up and wormy Big Apple.
‘‘I left New Zealand when I was 33, a lot older than most people do their OE. Friends were buying homes and having children and saying to me ‘What the hell are you doing?’. But it felt overdue, and it turned out to be perfect professional development. I went out to see live music most nights and it blew my mind. It’s a city where someone will ring you up and say ‘Roy Ayers in playing in a jazz club in Harlem’ and you can get on the subway and be there in 20 minutes.’’
The new album took shape slowly, with contributions from around 30 New Zealand and American musicians. Some songs were written in Brooklyn, others in Europe while touring with Lawrence Arabia, and the rest during a two-month spell at Piha.
‘‘I tend to write when I’m moving and in flux, rather than getting up each day and treating it like a day job. Pressure is good, I think. It’s helpful to feel the heat sometimes. I find it hard to write anything if I’m comfortable, and songs tend to come to me when I’m walking or driving somewhere, feeling a little vulnerable. I’ll suddenly think‘Ah, shit, what am I doing with myself?’ Some interesting sort of confusion will arise, and that’s when I’ll know I need to grab a pen.’’
In new single Queues at Dani Keys, that confusion seems to revolve around gender. The video finds Keoghan in a dodgy 80s nightclub, complete with feathery mullet, ancient brick cellphone and Miami Vice-style suit jacket with rolled sleeves.
He’s trying – unsuccessfully – to seduce a gorgeous woman in a spangly frock. She looks a lot like . . . hey, hang on. That’s just you in a dress! Oh, the symbolism. Freud would have a field day.
‘‘Well, I’m certainly comfortable dressing up in women’s clothing. We were overseas a lot as kids, in Antigua and Canada with dad’s work, then we lived in Mosgiel until I was about 11. Dad would take me to the local library, and I’d get dressed up in mum’s purple stockings and stilettos. I was an early cross-dresser, but that’s what children do!’’
Adults, too. Which is precisely his point. The song was, in part, his way of expressing admiration for ‘‘people who let go and be who they have to be’’.
‘‘It was always something I found difficult to do as a teenager. I struggled to even hold my girlfriend’s hand in public. But I see what’s happening over here, with the LGBT community having such a strong and confident voice, and I get inspiration from their courage, especially given that there’s still so much insidious bigotry and racism here in America.’’
Another song, Stuck In Melodies, is a lovely floating duet with New Zealand singer, Claire Duncan (Dear Time’s Waste). Shot in Brooklyn by esteemed director Will Joines, the video is a surrealistic tableau of pastel backdrops, animated icecreams, fake eyeballs and slo-mo bullets.
It’s creepy as hell, but somehow calming, too. To watch it is to feel as if you’ve been injected with strong sedatives and wrapped in cotton wool, which is sometimes precisely the feeling you want from a pop song.
Keoghan’s creamy croon is reminiscent of the late Chet Baker here, if Baker had tried his hand at brainiac pop rather than cool west coast jazz.
‘‘That’s a lovely thing to say. I’ve always loved that airiness Chet Baker had. There was a real sense of space to it, like you get in Brazilian music where a lot of bossa nova singers almost sound like they’re whispering in your ear.’’
‘I find it hard to write anything if I’m comfortable, and songs tend to come to me when I’m walking or driving somewhere, feeling a little vulnerable.’ Andrew Keoghan
This and other songs on the album are strongly reminiscent of American chamber-pop acts such as Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projectors.
‘‘That’s true. There are a lot of electronic elements on this album, but I also wanted to orchestrate the songs with brass or strings, or synths playing lines I might otherwise play on the violin. That sort of harmonically complex sound is part and parcel of pop these days, which can add so much depth and nuance when it’s done well.’’ Besides Claire Duncan, Every
Orchid Offering features guest spots from Hollie Fullbrook (Tiny Ruins), Chelsea Nikkel (Princess Chelsea) and assorted members of the Ruby Suns, Phoenix Foundation, and Lawrence Arabia.
These people are all part of Keoghan’s wider musical community, a loose confederation of singers and players he has admired and played with for years.
‘‘On the first album, I played an awful lot of the instruments myself, alongside (producer) Wayne Bell. But this time, I decided to get in people who played very differently to me, and inject a new sense of energy into the songs that way.’’
Many of the new songs resemble very condensed short stories, with Keoghan plotting a fictional narrative around ideas he’s interested in then casting invented characters in key roles. One perfect example is No
Simple Doll, a duet featuring the intimate, husky tones of Tiny Ruins’ Hollie Fullbrook.
‘‘It’s about an actress in her early 30s. Her older sister’s settled down and married a broker who
works at Auckland viaduct, and she’s wondering if she can continue to follow this very challenging career path she’s chosen for herself, feeling all those new pressures you start to feel at that age. I should perhaps admit that it’s a touch autobiographical . . .’’
A similarly specific backstory informs They Don’t Want A
Boyfriend, in which we find Auckland ‘‘space-pop’’ royalty, Princess Chelsea, playing a student teacher.
‘‘That was inspired by two teenage girls I saw around Britomart one day, holding hands while they got onto the schoolbus. It just seemed really courageous that they would get on that bus with a bunch of whooping and hollering 14 year olds, holding hands.
‘‘So, I wrote this song where there’s a young student teacher called Mrs Beck who’s calming down a worried mother. She’s saying ‘Look, don’t worry about your daughter. I know you’d rather she was with a boy than a girl, but she’s a good student and everything’s gonna be OK. Really, she doesn’t need a boyfriend.’
‘‘And when I was thinking of someone with the appropriate air of student teacher-ness, Chelsea seemed perfect.’’
Every Orchid Offering was released two days ago, and Keoghan plays album release shows in New York this very weekend. After that, there’ll be five shows up the American west coast, with a tour of New Zealand likely around December.
In the meantime, he’s still settling into his new home in LA. ‘‘It’s only two months since I moved here, and I should have done it sooner. It’s really expensive to live in New York and the winters there are brutal. LA is slower, warmer, less exhausting. Also, my brother [Amazing Race host, Phil Keoghan] lives in LA, and my drummer Robbie’s moved here, too.’’
Better still, there’s a steady earn. Keoghan started composing TV and film scores a few years ago, and a lot of that work is in LA.
‘‘You might hear some of that music, actually; I did some work on my brother’s Tour De France cycling doco Le Ride, which is in the New Zealand film festival. But yeah, life’s pretty good now, with a new album out, a new city, and solid work. It feels good that I don’t have to drive around the wilds of New Jersey any more in a tux, with people shouting at me to take off my pants.’’