MUSIC INTERVIEW: BROOKE FRASER

New Zealand’s Tall Poppy Stands Proud, Waves Her ‘Flags’

By: Team Buzzine

May 6, 2011

Brooke Fraser is a superstar. A multi-platinum, recognized-in-the-street musical sensation. In New Zealand. Ever since she was a teenager, for the past decade, she has been one of New Zealand’s most successful artists. But in recent years, her stardom has begun to spread: first to Australia, then to Europe, and now, finally here in the US. Brooke’s latest album, Flags, entered the Billboard charts at #59, has been up in the iTunes Top 5, and has led to a string of sold-out concert dates from sea to shining sea. Buzzine travelled to Austin, TX to meet Ms. Fraser and talk about her music, her global journey, and the rewards of running into roadblocks…

Brooke Fraser: I am originally from New Zealand – from Wellington, the capital city, but I’ve been living in Australia for seven-ish years now. I began playing music when I was just a tot, and started writing songs when I was 12 and had planned to go to university and do a journalism degree, but that all changed when I was signed to Sony just out of high school when I was 18. I’m 27 now, so for nine years I’ve had the privilege of making records and touring and getting to go to lots of fun places, and more recently those fun places have been in America, so I feel very blessed indeed.

SG: What do you think are the biggest differences between the Brooke Fraser sitting here today and the one that first got signed to Sony nine years ago?

BF: I think there’s some big differences… particularly that when I signed, I was 18 years old, so really young, and I had never really played that much before. I’d been doing little gigs…as much as you can when you’re underage and you’re not even allowed into bars [laughs] – just hiding your ID away and not showing anyone. But yes, I was kind of all-new and very overnight-ish. But I feel like I’ve earned my stripes, as it were, touring really hard for the past at least eight years…

Outside of Australia and New Zealand, I’m an indie artist, so it’s a really small team working really, really hard, and getting in the van and heading to exciting places like Lawrence, Kansas…anything from that to New York City and everywhere in between, and I still am amazed when I turn up and other people show up to hear my music. There are a lot of amazing artists out there, and if I can be just one of those many artists on someone’s iPod, then I’m happy about it.

BF: Albertine was the name of my second record, and Albertine is the name of a girl I met in Rwanda in Africa the first time I went there in 2005. She was an orphan, a survivor of the genocide in 1994, I was really deeply impacted by what happened to her and the other people I met there, and that was the experience that informed a lot of the writing on Albertine. So it wasn’t exactly a light fluffy pop record. It was pretty intense. And “Albertine” as a song as well…that song is about…I’ve seen people in trauma and people in great need: What am I gonna do about it? So singing that material night after night and going back to that place of almost heart-wrenching, life-changing stuff, it was pretty difficult, let alone doing it night after night for three years.

So at the end of that, I was really spent … It cost me a lot personally to play those songs, but that pales in comparison to what the people in the story went through. And through that record, we were able to raise a whole lot of money and get a whole lot of children in Rwanda sponsored, so that was a good thing. But in terms of artistically, I really needed to come up for air, and it took me a little while to figure out how to do that. I felt like I was floundering for a bit because it’s like after you’ve put some pretty powerful ideas out there…not just to other people but to yourself, where do you go from there? What do you say? I knew that, to make touring survivable for me in the future, I needed to write material that could balance the older stuff and that would give me something back if I was giving it out, so that was my ambition – to write a record that was really fun. [Laughs]

SG: Part of that fun aspect was that you took a couple of trips specifically to devote yourself to songwriting. What was it that you discovered, on those trips, about yourself as an artist?

BF: Another thing that changed for me, or was a big change in my life for the second record, was that I also got married…so all of a sudden there’s this wonderful, amazing person there all the time. So as well as figuring out ‘what do I write from here?’ it was ‘how do I write? Because I just want to hang out with this cool guy all the time.’ [Laughs] So that was another reason that I did some songwriting excursions, because the way I write best is in solitude and after a lot of internal processing.

So I did some really crucial trips to North Carolina up into the mountains to a cabin up there, which was amazing. And then we/I went to the Sonoma coast in California as well. So I did North Carolina in the summer, and then the rugged California coastline in the winter. I find it easier to think when I’m by myself, and in these beautiful places I’m able to process a lot of stuff which is going on internally, which hopefully then, from that, I’m able to articulate something of that into songs. So that’s where it all started.

And on those trips as well, for me, there was some clarification that occurred there, and I realized that I just want to tell stories. And through telling people stories – real and imagined – I’m also telling my own, and I didn’t think I wanted anyone else’s sound on those stories. I just wanted to produce them simply and without lots of tricks. And because I had never produced before and had no idea what I was doing, that almost seemed like the best approach to take, because the songs could just emerge really organically and without any outside interference, and just a bunch of musicians sitting in a circle, translating these songs and making music and capturing that live. So I’m really pleased that we did it that way.

SG: Tell me about those days recording the music which would become your latest album, Flags…

BF: We had eight days at East West Studios, which is an amazing historic studio in Hollywood with so much history, and which seemed almost perfectly aligned with the songs and where I was pulling the songs from – landscapes that I’d traversed, and imagining the people that had lived in the rural hinterland of California and in the mountains of North Carolina, and imagining their stories and their histories. And being able to bring that and record them in a place with such history was really special. So that whole period of eight days at East West was really special… and quite terrifying, because I really had no idea what I was doing most of the time.

But at the same time, it was so rewarding to run into a roadblock and go, “Okay, this isn’t working quite the way that I want it to. What do we do now?” And then finding ways around that, and discovering the route that the song was supposed to take was really exciting. And I love it because Flags is not a perfect record by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a really honest one. I know you hear that a lot – “It’s really honest…” but it really was. No smoke and mirrors – just very simple and real, and that is the best reflection of me and who I am and the way that I approach life generally, so that worked for us this time.

SG: You took something new that scared you, and you then made it as difficult and daunting as it could be, by going into a world famous studio with pictures all around you of people that had already been there before and done great work. So you basically like to scare the crap out of yourself?

BF: Yeah, pretty much.

SG: Good job.

BF: Thank you.

SG: Was that why, after getting your start as a very successful major label artist in your home market (New Zealand and Australia), you went it alone and have taken on the rest of the world as an indie? What is the Brooke Fraser playbook for breaking yourself as a musician in America?

BF: Basically, the way that we’ve approached touring and hopefully making some kind of living as an artist outside of Australia and New Zealand – those markets where I am a major label artist or whatever – is that it’s been really organic, and we have a really small team. We’re really, really dedicated and just work really hard.

I started in 2007 – I played my first show in New York at The Living Room to about 35 people, and then I went back about six months later and played to 60 people. Then I went back about six months after that and played to 200, and then I just kept going back… and it feels really authentic, what’s happening. I’m really enjoying the way that we’re doing it because it feels really – here’s that word again – honest. It’s not driven by hype or spin, but people have obviously come to the show and enjoyed it, and told two friends about it and then brought them back next time, and then those friends have told other people about it, and it really does feel like a grassroots thing that is growing and growing.

Even still, there’s no major airplay, I haven’t had any huge sync’s, there’s not a big machine driving what I do, and that’s why it does feel really exciting, because when we can go and sell out shows of 1,000 or whatever that means it’s really reaching people and connecting with people, which is all you can hope for really. So I’m not sure what happens from here, but there’s a lot to be said for just hard work and consistency. And a bit of luck and grace as well, thrown in there.

SG: You’re here in Austin, Texas to play a bunch of shows and connect with more people. What is it that you hope will happen?

BF: This week, at SXSW… I’ve never been here before, so this is a baptism of fire for me, and I’ve definitely been forewarned aplenty that…there’s 2,000 bands here, so what sets me apart from any of them? I don’t know, but I know that I have just got to do what I do the very best that I can. The music I make is not for everyone, but it’s for a lot of people, and people will find something that they enjoy. As well, I’m hoping that people go away perhaps wanting to know more or wanting to hear more. But I have hope and resignation both in equal parts about this week. I hope it will go very well, and I will work my ass off to that end, but at the same time, I know I can only do what I can do, and that’s all I can do.

SG: Of course the connector between hope and resignation is often beer. And there’s plenty of that around.

BF: Beer. That is always helpful.

SG: It’s there to celebrate and to commiserate and for everything in between.

BF: I just got off a winery tour, actually, so I’ll have to make the switch.

SG: If this latest record is an attempt to find your sound, can you describe what it is at this point?

BF: It’s interesting because I don’t think I completely 100% got there with Flags. I got part way there, but I’m aware as well that each album has to evolve, and the end thing that I want to get to, I can’t go there straight away because people will freak out, so it’s just evolving in edible increments… palatable increments. But it’s funny because I’ve always thought it’s really weird that the music I make sounds not much like the music I love and listen to.

I’m a huge Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon fan, and in terms of modern people, obviously Mumford & Sons and Fleet Foxes, and artists like that. But I remember waking up one morning, going to East West to record, and reminding myself that I can’t make a record that sounds like people I like. I’ve got to make a record that’s true to the sound in my belly – true to the sound that is me. I can’t try to be anyone else because people will see through that immediately and I will feel disgusting about myself. [Laughs] So it’s important to do things with integrity and enjoy the journey and enjoy the growth of each step and not put too much pressure on myself.

SG: We appreciate humble, and we appreciate artistry, but let’s be honest – we hope there is some glitz as well. Eight times platinum in your home country has got to feel fairly nice, so my final question is this: What has been the best rock goddess moment in your career so far?

BF: That probably happened, actually, only about a week and a half ago. This is a bit therapeutic but cathartic here… for a long time, I felt like I needed to apologize for what I did, partly maybe because of the culture I grew up in. In New Zealand there’s a thing called “Tall Poppy Syndrome”, so we love the hardworking underdog, but success isn’t celebrated like it is, say, in America. “Success, achievement = America!” Which is great, but it’s not the culture I come from, so I always felt a little bit embarrassed, a bit “Don’t think you’re too good. Don’t try to get too big for your boots,” that whole thing. And to be honest, this year, 2011, is the first year that I’ve gone: “Screw it. This is an amazing opportunity, and I’m young and I can do this, and there are people coming to my shows and it’s amazing.”

And about a week and a half ago, in Auckland, we played the final show of a 19-show run in my home country of New Zealand, and there were 6,500 people outdoors at a winery in the pouring rain, and I played the best show of my life. And I felt that, for the first time in my life, I had stopped apologizing and that I was fully owning that this is who I am and this is what I do.

So in many ways, I feel that I am just beginning. I’ve been doing it for a little while, but I feel like I’m at the beginning, and that’s really exciting.

Brooke Fraser’s latest album, ‘Flags,’ is out now on her own Wood & Bone Records.