Being able to make music is a "tupuna-sent gift," says award-winning musician Teremoana Rapley.
"When I make music, it's actually a divine gift, and it's not something that I'm actually in control of," she told TAHI presenter So'omālō Iteni Schwalger at the Pacific Music Awards in Auckland on Thursday night.
"And so for me, repressing it for such a long time and supporting all these other people for so many years, I felt my tupuna were kicking my butt and telling me to hurry up and get it out there."
Rapley, who is of Kiribati, Aitutaki, Rarotonga, Mangaia and Jamaican heritage, received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the awards.
While she started her music career as a teenager in the late '80s, performing with hip hop group Upper Hutt Posse, Rapley mostly took a supporting role, working with acts like Moana and The Moahunters, Dam Native, Mark de Clive Lowe, Che Fu and King Kapisi (her husband, Bill Urale).
She said she was grateful for being able to build a career in a fickle industry.
"Sometimes you don't make money from music, and so it's not something that I would ever rely on."
In April, shortly after being awarded the Independent Spirit Award at the Taite Music Awards, Rapley revealed that she was living with inoperable brain cancer.
She said receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award was "pretty crazy".
"It's like I got made redundant from my council job and then I started getting acknowledged in the music industry. So maybe that's what I needed to do.
While Rapley has been working on her own debut album for many years, she said "there's no plan" when it comes to making her own work.
"I just do what I do.
"When I'm working for other people, production and doing other people's albums, sorting it out for them, I'm very logical in how I do things. When it comes to myself, I do it how I feel, and if, if I don't feel like doing it one day, then I just don't do it.
"Now that I don't have a job, I'm like, 'oh, my job is now music, so I should probably do that every day'. And so for that, I'm very grateful to be able to do that right now.
"I don't do things for awards, and I don't do it for applause, and so for me, this [winning the award] is a bonus… it's like icing on the cake that I didn't know that I needed."
