Interview In conversation: The Beths’ Liz Stokes and comedian Bret McKenzie 

We don’t want to create the impression that all creative people in New Zealand are best friends and live in each other’s pockets, but it is true that you guys have been friends for a while?
Bret McKenzie: Recently, yeah. It is funny - I think New Zealanders, once they start touring internationally, get to know each other because often, you end up in the same place at some point.
Liz Stokes: Yeah, it’s a small town when you leave.
Bret: But actually, Liz is from Auckland and Auckland and Wellington are two quite different music scenes, there are some big gaps between them.
Liz: I agree that there’s kind of a divide. I know the Auckland music industry very well and that’s where the industry is based in New Zealand, even if it’s still quite small. It feels like its own beast that sometimes thinks it speaks for the rest of the country, but it doesn’t. I was curious about what the Wellington music and creative scene was like when you were starting all of your projects, and whether you still feel connected to it now in the same way?
Bret: There is zero music industry anywhere else in the country. There are no labels or anything. I remember in Auckland, there was Warners - I went there with one of my old bands, The Black Seeds. I remember they had an office and there were people whose job it was to be a music executive. That was not something that existed in Wellington, and it’s probably still the same.

What is your sense of the outside world’s perception of New Zealand as a place for creativity?
Bret: When I started off, I remember catching taxis for the first time in America; I’d say I was from New Zealand, and they would say ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘Once Were Warriors’. That was pretty much the only thing they knew. That was 20 years ago I guess, and I think in that time, things have cracked. Conchords kind of cracked out a bit, Taika [Waititi] cracked out with his films – he had characters within the Marvel movie [Thor: Ragnarok] that had a New Zealand accent. I think it’s pretty different now - there are a lot more connecting dots for Americans. The British… well, they were just very condescending and patronising to New Zealanders as just people that overstayed on your couch. That’s really how they saw New Zealanders when I was first touring the UK. I don’t know if that’s still the case. They were very tough on Kiwis; they still are little bit. I think they slightly look at New Zealanders as poorly spoken Brits.
Liz: From the colonies, you know.
Bret: But Americans think of us as exotic in a positive way.
Liz: I’ve noticed that when we tour America, just speaking in a New Zealand accent on stage is enough to
get a laugh. They’re like, ‘oh my gosh!’ And then we come home and if we want people to laugh, we have to actually be funny. By the time we started touring, it’s was about Flight of the Conchords. It was crazy to me as a young person seeing New Zealand culture being perceived by the world. If [Conchords] wasn’t there, then there’s no The Beths. We went through the same worm hole that got punched between New Zealand and America by you guys. Having something of New Zealand culture that people already knew about was huge.
Bret: There was a small hole in that metaphor you’re talking about which was made by the Dunedin bands like The Clean. They had a very niche but committed audience. It wasn’t like a taxi driver would say I love The Clean, but for music fans it was a pretty big deal.

Do those Dunedin Sound bands mean a lot to you?
Bret: It depends on your age. So, for me, they do, but [only] just. I’m a little bit too young by about five years. I’ve got friends who are a little bit older and for them, it’s their absolute teenage backdrop music. For me, it’s the kind of music that some friends’ older brothers and sisters were playing. I still know all the songs, because you just know them all - you know the sound of them, the guitar. I don’t know exactly what it is, the jangly, DIY songwriting sound, but it’s still a big part of New Zealand songwriting.
Liz: It’s still super influential globally. It wasn’t for me growing up, personally, because I wasn’t the right age group, but for a lot of my friends, our parents were really into it and they passed on to us.

Your new albums are coming out two weeks apart. Are you feeling the white heat of professional competition?
Liz: It’s 50 Cent versus Kanye right now.
Bret: Yeah, I guess we could have planned it better.
Liz: There are so many things about making music – the writing, recording, playing, planning an entire vision for it. Which sparks the most joy for you personally?
Bret: For me, I love the writing the songs part. Sitting at my piano, or with the guitar, and coming up with ideas: that’s the bit where I don’t feel time passing. When you’re in the song - when the chorus is new or the verse is new or you find that new chord - I love that experience, and I’ve done it enough to know to try to stay in that creative place for as long as possible. Because if you’ve got a verse, you might get a chorus, and if you keep going you might get a bridge! Fuck, I love that. But then if you’re interrupted, if you hit a bad rhyme or something that jars, or the door opens and the kids are trying to find their shoes, or the dogs start going crazy… So, it’s trying to stay in that moment. And then the other part that I love is in the studio, when you’ve got the song and then you find these new parts or pieces. It’s those moments when things are appearing out of thin air - that’s the magic for me. What about you?
Liz: I think I’m coming to realize that I really like the writing part. I’ve always loved the playing in a band part - the team sport element of it, of everybody being on stage and locking in and trying to do it good, especially when you’re touring and you can do it again and again. Every night, it’s like trying to play a perfect game. But yeah, the writing: I kind of wish I got to do it more. I really enjoyed it this time and I’m trying to get back there faster.

We particularly like the title ‘Straight Line Was a Lie’; we’re sold the idea that there’s a straight path to clarity and peace and contentment, and it’s not true. Instead, life is about finding meaning in the chaos and just getting through the day. Where did the impetus for that concept come from?
Liz: I wrote it quite quickly when the album was starting to take shape. When you’re writing about your own life, you look back and go, ‘ok, this is a rough picture of what my life has been like. What is that a picture of? Is there a theme?’ And I felt like I could see this journey of being in a deep hole, trying to get out of it, and then thinking, ‘cool, everything’s going to be good from now on, I’m just going to be better’. And then it turned out that life is more complicated than that; it’s just riding the wave of up and down - it doesn’t just keep going up.
Bret: That’s so cool. So the idea of that song came out of listening to your own songs?
Liz: Yeah, is that gross? Is it like getting high on your own supply?
Bret: No, that’s cool! So that’s how you give your album a sense of cohesion, that’s a good trick!
Liz: I was late in the writing process and felt like the album needed something. I’ve had that happen before with an album, and I was like ‘I don’t know if I can trust the universe on this’, but I trusted the universe, and it worked.
Bret: That’s so cool, because my record is a collection of songs from a period of time, and then I just picked the ones I liked and I put them together. It didn’t cross my mind to then review them! You do that in film script writing a lot, where you get the story out and then a theme emerges and you’re like, ‘oh well, let’s make it so that it’s clear’.
Liz: Totally. Time makes it easier; the hardest thing is to do is to try and do that when you’re so close to it that you just can’t really see it. I wonder if you can see it for your previous album, ‘Songs Without Jokes’ - do you feel like there’s something that you can see about it now that you couldn’t see at the time?
Bret: Yes, there’s a despondency. I’m gonna do this for the next album!

Bret, obviously you’ve made a lot of different music in your life in a lot of different styles and voices. When it comes to recording under your own name, how do you focus on what you want it to be? 
Bret: At first, I was trying to write songs that weren’t comedy songs to see what came out. I did that for the last album. And then this time, I wasn’t so obsessively trying to be not funny, do you know what I mean? I didn’t mind what I was writing about so much. I was like, ‘if I find it funny, that’s fine’, or if there’s a funny line, I was happy to put it in, whereas before I might have not used it. But I know what you mean: I could do a hip-hop album, theoretically; I could do a lot of random styles and it wouldn’t be that big a jump from what I’ve done. On the last album, there’s a song called ‘Little Tune’ that I felt was really strong, and it’s a song that you play live and it just plays itself, and something about that gave me a bit of a clue [for ‘Freak Out City’]. Also, because of the band I work with, they are more jazz than rock, so I feel like the chords are thick with extra notes.
Liz: I can feel more organicness in [the new album]. But I guess when anything is at your disposal, it’s a bit paralysing, right? You have to choose the sonic world that you’re going to live in.
Bret: I guess I wanted it to feel live. My band are kind of like the Wellington Wrecking Crew - they’re all amazing musicians, so I wanted to write songs that allowed them to be able to go for it a bit.

Liz, the writing on ‘Straight Line Is A Lie’ is quite introspective, it feels like there’s a bit of self-analysis going on. You’ve said there were mental and physical health concerns during the making of it - do you feel you’ve put yourself into this music?
Stokes: Yeah, there have been some ups and downs in the last few years. That spiked my anxiety and depression, so it’s just been about managing a lot of stuff, and then starting to go to therapy and trying to do all these things to sort myself out. I think there’s a lot of introspection involved in that, and I’m already an overthinking kind of person, so maybe it’s par for the course that the way I write music is not just about the thing - it’s me processing the thing, and then me reacting to my own reaction to the thing. It’s been quite cathartic, and I’m quite a verbose person; I have trouble being succinct. When I try to explain something, I explain it in a big cloud of words. And writing a song is the best chance I have to try to condense that into something that explains what I’m feeling in a smaller way… even though my songs are not succinct. I try to be succinct, and fail. 
Bret: Liz and I played this show in Los Angeles in April, and I was listening to that song ‘Mother, Pray For Me’. I remember hearing it, and I was like, ‘what the fuck?! This is unbelievable!’. The song is so good live, and then the recording is magic. I had the same feeling listening to the recording that I felt when I heard it live - it’s a really special song. Have you played the song to your mum?
Liz: Yeah, I did!
Bret: How did that go?
Liz: Honestly, this is so me. For a year and a half after writing the song, I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to play this song to my mum, oh my gosh, it’s gonna be so stressful, I honestly have no idea how she’ll take it’. And then on the drive over, I was like, ‘okay, I’m gonna do it today’. And there’s a language barrier, so I thought, ‘what will probably happen is I’ll play it to her, and she won’t really hear the lyrics, because some people just don’t hear lyrics anyway, let alone with the language barrier. I can have them on screen, but even reading a whole wall of lyrics is quite a lot to absorb, so she might just not really absorb much of the meaning of the song’. And she listened to it, and more than anything, she was touched that I’d written a song for her. She just said: ‘thank you’.

The Beths’ ‘Straight Line Was A Lie’ is out now via ANTI-, and Bret McKenzie’s ‘Freak Out City’ is out now via Sub Pop.

The Beths are touring the UK from 20th-27th September; find out more and get tickets here. 

Tags: Features, Interviews, The Beths