One of the key chroniclers of New Zealand life for the past 40 years, Don McGlashan has still got plenty to say.
The legendary frontman of Blam Blam Blam, Front Lawn and Mutton Birds, and APRA Silver Scroll Award winner, has released his much anticipated new album, Bright November Morning.
McGlashan spoke to Charlotte Ryan about the new album.
Don McGlashan Photo: Supplied
Bright November Morning is a collection of songs that spans McGlashan's career, from his early days gigging with the Mutton Birds to songs that deal with the military invasion of Parihaka in the 1880s.
McGlashan, 62, said it's hard for him to say where Bright November Morning fits in his long career.
"It'd be like looking at a whole photo album of the last few years and saying this is exactly where I am, these are all the things that sort of make up who I am and who I am right now.
"Because I've had a bit of time because of Covid, I've pushed myself to break habits. There's songs that just revolve around one set of chords and they never have a bridge and they never break out of that. There's songs that don't tell a linear story."
The inspiration for 'Lights Come On' date back to his Mutton Birds days, recalling when his band opened for the much bigger act Simple Minds.
"We were opening for a big band and we played our set and then we'd go and stand in these big crowds of Germans and Italians and Austrians."
"That made me start thinking about a song that was about that anticipation of the show and how ancient that is, and it must be the same feeling as standing in the village square waiting for some magician to come and do something crazy."
The song 'Nothing On The Windows' takes its spark from as mundane a moment as possible, McGlashan said.
"I really wanted to write a song that was just a note pinned to the fridge."
"I didn't really know where it was going to go and it ended up being a song about maybe, the person who's writing the note is unravelling and the note pinned to the fridge is some kind of longing for a sip of assurance or redemption or something, I don't know.
"I think it's good to start kind of hopefully and let the song lead you where it wants to go."
'Sunscreen' is an example of a song that changed as he wrote it, he said.
"I really just wanted to squeeze all of the sights and sounds and smells of an Aotearoa summer into a song. I didn't have any other agenda, really."
As he wrote it the line "kids on lilos out beyond the waves, almost gone," struck him, he said, and the song also became about parenthood.
"When you have kids you are always letting them go."
"My kids are big now. When they were little I was thinking about them being big and imagining all the things that they were going to encounter as they grew up and I wrote songs about that.
"Now they're big, I imagine them being small again, so I'm always out of step.
"'Sunscreen' is an example of a song where I started in one place and I ended up in a completely different place that I couldn't have foreseen."
A key song, 'John Bryce,' looks at a pivotal era for New Zealand's race relations.
John Bryce was the controversial Minister of Native Affairs in Victorian New Zealand and ordered the government to march on the Māori village of Parihaka on 5 November, 1881.
Bryce personally led 1600 armed police and volunteers to arrest the village leader and evict many who'd come to live in the village, which at the time was the largest Māori settlement in the country.
"He was a very belligerent man," McGlashan said.
McGlashan said he didn't intend to just write an attack song on Bryce, but wanted to bring an important moment in Aotearoa history to life through imagery.
"A line of troops with fixed bayonets standing there with children dancing in front of them. That's the sort of principal image of the Parihaka invasion, as important an image in our history as the student standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square is."
"… I just wanted to ask the question why didn't we learn about this in school, and I wanted to say why don't we commemorate that event on November 5 instead of some piece of obscure English history that everybody's forgotten?"
He said writing protest songs is very different than a more personal tune.
"Protest songs, I suppose, are more like signposts than they are sculptures. … They've got to do a job, they've got to point at something."
McGlashan said he "didn't want to presume to tell a Māori story because I'm pakeha."
"I wanted maybe a kid in Taranaki, a white kid, to listen to the radio and thinking, I like that beat, what's that song about, and maybe go and look up who John Bryce is and look up a bit of history."
"I wanted all of those things, and who knows where it will go?"
McGlashan hopes to reschedule his postponed tour for October or November of this year, pandemic willing.
"Every album means a huge amount to me and I guess I feel - it sounds pompous, but I feel I've been put here to write songs and I've got to write everything that's in me.
"And, I'm not slowing down any time soon."
