Anika Moa "Stolen Hill" 2005

...Moa started entering the Rockquest Songwriting lyrics competition, and won every year she entered. In 1998, she entered as a solo act, winning the Most Promising Female Musician award and a scholarship to Nelson School of Music for her song ‘Flowers for You’. This (along with ‘Youthful’) was included in a compilation album of the finalists, and sent to managing directors of local branches of major international labels...
...As fate would have it, the boss of Warner NZ heard it, loved it, and arranged for Moa to record a demo, which found its way into the hands of the head of Atlantic Records. Moa (now based in Auckland) travelled to New York and performed her songs for him, barefoot in his office (as the legend goes). She was signed on the spot, and returned in April 2000 for six months to record her debut album, Thinking Room, with producer Victor Van Vugt, who had worked with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, and The Fall, among others.
Anika Moa’s career started with a big bang, when Thinking Room was released in August 2001, and went to No.1 locally, a double-platinum release in New Zealand. The album yielded four huge singles, including ‘Youthful’, and ‘Falling in Love Again’, which was featured on the soundtrack of the Julia Roberts film America’s Sweethearts. Moa is a bit embarrassed by the song, which she says was written “half-heartedly”.
Thinking Room didn’t really take off in the US, and Moa was homesick, and increasingly unimpressed with her Warner contract: she had little say in the way things were progressing, and found the portrayal of her to be superficial. Scott Kara, writing in Rip It Up in 2002: “America … wants the Barbie doll Anika …[she] doesn’t exist.”
“It’s that whole game of when you sign with an American record label. They just own you, you will not have a brain anymore, and nah, that’s not me,” Moa states. “I didn’t know what I was getting into … but I appreciated that they put so much money and effort into me. I wouldn’t do what they wanted me to do: they constantly told me [to] lose weight … what’s that got to do with my songwriting? I’m… not fooled by anyone, so I was like, fuck ya’s, frankly.”
Instead of remaining in America to support Thinking Room, she turned her back on the US promotional treadmill and returned to New Zealand in 2002. To document her time in the US recording the album, and her subsequent return home, the documentary Three Chords and the Truth: the Anika Moa Story, showed what happened with Moa and her Warner deal.
“I got a lot of shit from a lot of people, mostly my [then] manager, he just wanted me to be … successful. I did too, but I wanted to do it my way,” Moa admits. “I don’t think anyone should own anyone … the whole creative process of songwriting is hard enough without people putting other ideas in.”
Thinking Room still holds a special place for Moa. “I still love it, and I still admire it for what it was. I remember coming home to NZ and being really proud knowing that it was going to be successful because I’d worked hard at it.”
On Moa’s return to New Zealand, she went on her first national tour, supporting Tim Finn.
Moa followed Thinking Room with a more stripped back second album, Stolen Hill, released in August, 2005. Sonically sparser, and confessional, Stolen Hill was preceded by the delicate and heartbreaking single, ‘In The Morning’, and recorded with producer Ed Cake in a barn at Bethells Beach (Te Henga), West Auckland. The album delves deep in Moa’s personal history, and is imbued with a sense of the political and cultural, looking at tangata whenua, nationhood, environment, and the state of Māoridom.
Moa’s musical influences were broadening too. “I was getting into quite a lot of blues music, and jazz, so my inspiration grew from that,” she says...to be continued... - Amanda Mills and AudioCulture
trax:
01 Ka Whakahuia Ano 02 In the Morning 03 Lies in this Land 04 Picture Me in the 70's 05 Stolen Hill 06 Broken Man 07 Loving You 08 Annie Goes To Sleep 09 Wrestled with your Angels 10 Society 11 Papercuts 12 Kotahitanga
…served by Gaius…