Marlon Williams Finds a Voice in the Mess
The Aotearoa musician spoke with Paste about innovation’s role in survival, embracing Te Reo Māori, and the reimagined histories on his new album, Te Whare Tīwekaweka.
Photo by Ian Laidlaw
Every night in New York consists of countless unions and reunions; first dates, old friends, PTA meetings, Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. The night Marlon Williams (Kāi Tahu, Ngāi Tai) rode into town on one of the few remaining Boeings to debut his new album Te Whare Tīwekaweka (translation: “The Messy House”) was no different. But as various New Zealand expats (me included) and American converts gathered in Williamsburg’s National Sawdust to see Williams take the stage, it became clear to all of us that we were witnessing something akin to an evolution; an artist who has used many histories to reimagine not only his future but the future of Aotearoa music back home and abroad.
On the precipice of his 2022 release My Boy, a lively, soft-pop departure from the heartbreak and darkness that endeared him to international audiences in the 2010s, amidst accolades and praise from The New Yorker to The Guardian, Williams was back home, experiencing writer’s block in the small but creatively robust town of Lyttleton. Sometimes, the only way out is through, and for Williams, the way through meant diving deeper into Te Reo Māori, the first and official language of Aotearoa. While not a fluent Te Reo speaker, Williams, with the help of collaborators such as rapper and poet KOMMI (Kāi Tahu, Te-Āti-Awa), Williams’ longtime band The Yarra Benders, and a little-known, up-and-coming NZ singer named Lorde, finds a new voice within Te Whare Tīwekaweka and delivers an album of internal clarity—a shelter from the nearing storm, solid ground upon which to stand.
While it would be easy to call Te Whare Tīwekaweka Williams’ “most personal album yet” or a “reconnection” with his own ancestry, it’s so much more than that. It’s an album of risk. Beyond the obvious commercial fears of an album devoid of the western world’s lingua franca not resonating with international audiences outside the antipodes, releasing an album of original songs in the language of your ancestors—a language constantly under threat by the ongoing reverberations of colonization—is a vulnerable, potentially painful process. However, Marlon Williams has never been a musician afraid of what’s difficult, and it should come as no surprise to those who have followed him over the years that the risk has well and truly paid off.
Coincidentally released within an atmosphere of national political turmoil and a conservative government trying to erase indigenous rights, culture, and livelihood, Te Whare Tīwekaweka quickly became the first-ever original Te Reo Māori album to reach #1 in New Zealand. But it would be doing Williams a disservice to tie the immediate success of the album to the current NZ political climate. It’s clear, from listening to the album repeatedly and seeing it performed live, that Williams continues to be the future of NZ music globally. When speaking to him during the North American leg of his recent tour, he reflected on the intrinsic balancing act required to create an album like this: “The whole project has been a dance between preservation and innovation. You have to innovate, to survive. But you’ve also got to have a solid signal of what the culture is at the same time. It’s tricky. I’m just trying to keep a vote for innovation going somewhere in the midst of it all. Language can be a protective or creative measure, it’s a truism of marginalized cultures, an ongoing internal battle.”
To Williams, survival has always been aligned with innovation. Having seen him in concert more times than I care to admit over the last 15 or so years, there are a few undeniable, enduring features of his performances. The first is his voice; the second is his stage presence. Williams the artist is so acutely aware and at ease with who he is on stage, and that ease quickly moves through any audience, emitting a collective malleability and a readiness to follow him wherever he goes.