Marlon Williams Finds a Voice in the Mess

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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.

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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.

And make no mistake, Williams will go. A quality that stuck with me long after the house lights came up was Williams’ creative versatility. One minute, he’s some strange Sinatra/Orbison hybrid or lovechild, crooning behind a piano, playfully milking every difficult note. Next, he’s a lonesome cowboy—a man and a guitar, pockets stuffed with songs of love and loss. Then, he’s the world’s strangest popstar, AutoTuned voice and janky limbs curling to a beat ripped straight from a ‘70s disco LP. This musical fluidity is as apparent in Williams’ discography as it is in concert. To him, the stage is not a place to show the world who he is, it’s an opportunity to shapeshift and evade. “I’m really not interested in any ideas of an authentic Marlon,” he says. “That doesn’t mean anything to me. I just want to keep pushing out in as many different directions. It’s very freeing having so many colors to paint with.”

Te Whare Tīwekaweka represents another color, if not entirely new palette for Williams to paint with. At National Sawdust, Williams switched between Te Reo and English, choosing carefully when to offer the crowd a translation, a small glimpse of “meaning.” Williams knows we have no choice but to trust him, and it works. Each song from Te Whare Tīwekaweka he performed became a secret shared—an act of faith. “There’s some quote about translation as a form of poetry in of itself,” he elaborates. “I think there’s something to it, in terms of how that plays out in my shows and how I choose to translate or represent my songs. It’s fun being mischievous and tricksy with the meaning of a song, it’s an extra level to play with.”

While this album is one of innovation and evasion, it still owes so much to what came before it. Williams has spoken at great length, both in concert and in interviews, about being inspired by the work of Hirini Melbourne, the creator of “traditional Māori waiata” (songs) that most Kiwis learn in school. While it would have been easy for Williams to slip into that same musical persona and deliver something similar and modernized, Te Whare Tīwekaweka does the opposite. To a certain extent, it’s an album that resists easy categorization and interpretation: traditional guitar strumming nestles comfortably alongside AutoTune and synth. It is an album that feels earnest without becoming saccharine, honoring the history of waiata without feeling beholden to it, a rock dropped heavily into the well of silence.

That’s not to say Te Whare Tīwekaweka shies away from silence. The oldest waiata on the album—and the lead single—“Aua Atu Rā” (co-written by Williams and KOMMI) is an inversion of a now somewhat-overused whakataukī (proverb) “he waka eke noa,” which translates to “we’re all in the same boat.” “Aua Atu Rā” dares to challenge this notion, reiterating the inherent solitude that permeates so much of personal and creative lives, and it’s been a regular feature in Williams’ setlists for ages. Always one of the concert’s quieter moments, Williams will sit on stage and offer the audience something between a complete translation and a digression through his very interior. “I am alone / In this boat / On the ocean / There’s not a trace of wind / No, none at all / I am alone / In this boat / On the ocean / Fuck its cold / There’s not a trace of wind / No, none at all / I am alone/ In this boat.”

Solitude, and the inevitable space it leaves for angst and dread, is a concept Williams has wrestled with in his music for more than a decade now. But, through Te Whare Tīwekaweka, he imposes a new lens upon these existential fears, gently placing them within a broader cultural context. “The spectre [of death] is always lurking in the background of my records and, yeah, this one has it too,” Williams says. “But I think part of the joy of going into Te Reo Māori is a slight reframing of death and the import of it—and the nearness, the nearness of the dead.”

In speaking with Williams and witnessing him trot this album out on stage for the first time, it’s clear exactly where the titular messy house resides. The older I get, the more I try and fail to get my spiritual affairs in order. As a man of a similar age and background to Williams, I see that same agitation in him. But through Te Whare Tīwekaweka, he seems to have stumbled upon a place of comfort, if not a place of answers—one that has been waiting inside him all along. “I feel it more now,” he admits. “Through writing and singing in Māori, it does make me feel in Māori a lot more too. And I can really find my way to quieting some of that anxiety. Just having the dead around me, in some cosmic way. Me sitting with the dead and the dead sitting with me, between the quiet and music.”

While taking Te Whare Tīwekaweka around the world is one thing, touring the album throughout Aotearoa, the home of Te Reo Māori and Te Ao Māori, is another. “I’m feeling more comfortable with [the album] standing on its own legs out in the world,” Williams says. “Personally, I’m just looking forward to being home, being in a room with these songs and with people, presenting the songs in a live setting and watching them change again.” And if there’s a constant state where Williams feels most at home, it’s as an artist—it’s in the midst of change. Te Reo Māori has and always will be a part of Marlon Williams as an artist and a person and, if he has taught us one thing over the years, it’s that he has an innate ability to take the self and turn it inside out to create the unexpected. I am eager to know the countless unknown evolutions of Marlon Williams to come. For now, we can all sit in the silence and strangeness of our messy houses and listen.

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.