The eighth stop on Troy Kingi’s ten album odyssey: Californian desert rock

Today is New Album Day for Troy Kingi (Te Arawa, Ngāpuhi, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui). Leatherman and the Mojave Desert is the eighth instalment in his 10-10-10 project - a race to release 10 albums in 10 genres in 10 years. Leatherman is a rock album, desert rock to be precise, preceded by two blazingly fun singles. The release tour is coming soon, including Hamilton’s Last Place on September 20. 

A couple of weeks ago Max caught up with Troy, a guy who has literally made an art form, and a career, out of unpredictable swerves. It’s not only that none of his albums sound anything like each other, but that the process changes each time, too. In the case of Leatherman and the Mojave Desert, recording doubled as a get-lost-and-find-yourself trip overseas. It also led to a documentary series, an invitation to join a star-studded show in Las Vegas next year, and a live setlist that will feature Troy Kingi playing covers of…Troy Kingi songs.

Into the desert

Start with Troy Kingi’s Desert Hīkoi, on TVNZ+. It follows Kingi and his band to LA, through the dusty nowhere of the Californian desert, arriving at Joshua Tree’s famous and storied recording studio, Rancho de la Luna. The four episodes, each around a quarter of an hour long, are gone too fast. It’s a beautifully assembled series. It had to be, because Kingi arrived in the US dealing with a years-long creative block. He took time - and some distinctive measures - to address this problem while director Tom Hern filmed as much as he was allowed to (psychoactive substances yes, sweat lodge ceremonies no). Half of the series is over before the music even starts.

Kingi says, “I talk in the documentary about trying to find that flow that I had earlier on in my career. I was still trying to write - Desert Hīkoi doesn't show me writing stuff in the dark and that - but the way that they've put it together reflects that I was searching for something, and not exactly knowing what it was. Tom Hern is great at making a good story arc, and it’s reflective of how the first three or four days were. We were basically just meeting people and having experiences.”

Those people and experiences include Dr Sean Milanovich, an elder and historian from the area’s indigenous Kawiya tribe, and a long trek with him through the desert, up a mountain, and into a cave - and a different spiritual dimension. 
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 If we were writing this album in the snow in Alaska, it would sound completely different. I feel like the desert itself had a big part to play

Not every musician would ask a tribal elder to help plot a course out of a creative deadend, especially when they're already bouncing ideas off Rancho De La Luna owner Dave Catching (Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal) and, earlier in LA, Serj Tankian of System of a Down. But for Kingi it was a natural thing to do.

​“It's just the way that I've been brought up. Especially coming from such a small town, Te Kaha down the East Coast, if you have visitors you welcome them in. It goes back to the core thing of pōwhiri onto a marae. When someone first comes on to the marae they’re waewae tapu, which means ‘sacred feet’, until that exchange breaks that tapu or the taboo-ness. Then you can walk around without having that hanging over your head. That's always been my thinking and all my friends who are Māori artists have that same core value.
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“My thing was, if we're going over there we have to at least meet some tangata whenua who can do that for me, for my spirit. That’s so I feel calm and feel that I can come and work on someone else's land, essentially. It was quite crucial and quite essential that we did do that,” Troy says.

After being sure to meet Dr. Milanovich, Kingi was less clear on what would happen next. But he was happy to be led into the wilderness.

“I've always been known to not read the run sheet until the day. As long as I know where I'm supposed to be at a certain time. I don't look too far ahead. So it was a surprise to me that we were going to have this massive hike into the middle of nowhere. But going out there was probably my favourite part of the whole thing! Especially in America, where you feel like every place has been touched by millions and zillions of people. But this place? Not many people have seen it. It felt really special in that way,” he says.

“Wherever I've been overseas, any country I've been to, I meet indigenous people and I automatically feel at ease. Essentially we have the spiritual realm that we try and connect to. The essence of it is that we’re all people of the earth.
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“Honestly, after we've hung out long enough, all indigenous people just, like, feel Māori to me. In America I don't know if they took anything away from me apart from just feeling like they're hanging out with their family. All I can say is it felt real natural.”

​There was no deliberate attempt to fuse any of this with the music of Leatherman and the Mojave Green. Kingi says, “I was just trying to take in my surroundings, take in experiences and let them speak for themselves. As far as the album trying to sound indigenous? I wasn't trying to do that. A few of the things we did there ended up becoming songs, like 'Hot Medicine' after we did the sweat lodge.

“I feel like every experience - whether it's indigenous, whether it's just meeting someone on the street, whether it's taking a hike through the desert - is going to add something to what you're creating. If we were writing this album in the snow in Alaska, it would sound completely different. I feel like the desert itself had a big part to play and connecting with Dr. Mailanovich helped my mind and spirit ease into the surroundings and be able to let nature in, basically, and feel comfortable doing that.”

10 out of 10 out of 10

Troy Kingi’s 10-10-10 project, now 80% done, is a uniquely ambitious and difficult way to go about making music. His seven albums before this one have been dirt blues, psychedelic soul, roots, funk, folk, 80s synth-pop, and ambient-ish instrumental. It’s been like this since Guitar Party at Uncle’s Bach in 2016. 

So after acclimatising to the desert, and the land of the Kawiya, and even the potentially overwhelming history of Rancho De La Luna (Queens of the Stone Age! Dave Grohl! Kyuss!), there’s something else to prepare for. Rock.

To make ten albums in ten genres is a challenge that many musicians wouldn’t want to take on in an entire career, let alone one decade. Spotify is littered with unloved and unconvincing efforts to change course even once, from Snoop Dogg’s reggae album to Andrew WK’s piano ballads.

On top of that, ten albums in ten years is a massive undertaking. Very few artists write and record so fast for so long, and when they do quantity often wins over quality. But Kingi hasn’t been phoning it in. He’s won the Taite Prize, APRA Silver Scroll, and multiple NZ Music Awards and Waiata Māori Music Awards.​

I knew rock was going to be somewhere along the line, but I wanted to explore other things first. I always felt like it didn't matter when I came back to rock. I thought, why don't I try and tackle a few harder ones, and then come back?

Troy is quick to find new grooves and absorb different subcultures. The harder part is adding something, rather than just playing along, and he’s largely pulled it off every time. If anyone has the recipe for successful shapeshifting and regrowth, this is the guy.

He says that the hardest turnaround was from funk (The Ghost of Freddie Cesar) to folk for his fifth album, Black Sea Golden Ladder. “I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do but that didn't really pan out when I started writing. Luckily I had Delaney [Davidson] come on board and help guide me through that section, through a style that he's lived in for a long time. That was a lot of learning, having to essentially compromise. Up until then it wasn't exactly easy, but I felt like I was starting to get into a zone where it was getting too comfortable.”

When it comes to making the next switch, and the next, he says, “I don't really have the blueprints. The only way you can do that is to embrace it fully and jump in head first, and in some ways forget the previous albums. Just look at the one in front of you. You’ve got to relearn a few things and change a few habits. Going into any of these projects, I want it to be as authentic as possible. I don't want it to be pastiche or like I’m mimicking the style of the genre
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“I ask myself: Can I be authentic and can I do it and feel comfortable with what I've created? Not like I'm putting an act on or anything. Can I actually just do it for what it is? There's a few genres I steered away from, knowing that I could never do them complete justice. Jazz, for instance. I'm not a schooled musician. You have to have more knowledge than I have to do that. I could bring a lot of cool cats, mean jazz people, in but I'd still feel like a fake-ass dude.”

Fake-assery was never a risk with the rock album. This is a return to the music that Troy loved as a teenager.

​“I knew rock was going to be somewhere along the line, but I wanted to explore other things first. I always felt like it didn't matter when I came back to rock. I thought, why don't I try and tackle a few harder ones, and then come back so we can have a bit of a break at some point. I felt like it'd be an easy one,” he laughs.

“Easy in my mind!”

The Mojave Green team

The crew playing on Leatherman all go way back. Bassist Marika Hodgson is one of Troy’s best friends, “the one you can rely on”. Drummer Treye Liu and guitarist Ezra Simons have their own history.

“I've known Treye since he was at high school. I was a few years older, tutoring guitar. I met Ez then too. He and Treye were both in a band called Milk that won the Northland Rockquest. And I just remember hearing them practise at school and thinking, far, that drummer! He's freakin’ amazing! So I pretty much stole him from his band and 15 years later he's still here. It's pretty cool,” Troy says.​

Meanwhile, Ez’s band Earth Tongue are on tour right now in Europe. If you're trying to remember when you first heard of them, that might be a few months ago when opened for Queens of the Stone Age, who Ezra first discovered thanks to Troy, in his role as guitar tutor back at Kerikeri High School. Two young rock fans in the north of New Zealand, bonding over CDs that had been recorded at - yep - Rancho De La Luna.

Knowing each other so well, and for so long, would surely have helped when the band had only a few days at Rancho to work out and record a lot of songs. The sessions, overseen by Dave Catching, got a lot of work done.

​“I've always been the one who didn’t study until the week leading into an exam. If someone gave me three years to write an album, I'd probably still write it a couple weeks before getting into the studio. You have to set goals and boundaries. Otherwise, you could go around in circles of ideas for ever and ever. I have got a lot of friends that do that very thing. It's good to know that on this particular date we're gonna be in the studio, so I've got to start getting my head into the zone,” Troy says.

My thing was, if we're going over there we have to at least meet some tangata whenua who can do that for me, for my spirit.

Even so, his way of working stood out to a man who you might think had seen it all. 

​“I think Dave thought I was a crazy man, the way that I was working and churning out stuff. He was watching songs being formed then recorded in real time, at lightning speed,” Troy says.

Catching was so impressed that he invited Troy into a special project of his. The Rancho De La Luna 30th Anniversary album is going to bring together some massive acts, and there’ll be shows in Las Vegas and LA next year as well.

Troy says, “Vegas is the main release show. We’re still waiting for firm dates. Pretty much most of the crew that have worked with Dave or recorded stuff at Rancho will be part of this so, shit, it'll be amazing.”

At the time Troy’s contribution was just another song to add into a busy session.

“Dave had a couple of riffs that he played, and I formed the structure of the song real quick. Within an hour we’d recorded the bones of it. I had no words for it until the last day of vocals. Well, actually, I still had five songs to record vocals for on the last day, and they all had no words. So the night before, I wrote lyrics for 'Ride the Rhino', which is the opening track on the album and probably my favourite. It’s very Black Sabbathy. Then I fell asleep.

“I was waking up at five every day for some reason over there. I knew what had to be done and I just started smashing out the lyrics. We had about half an hour before going to the studio and I still hadn't written anything for Dave’s song. The words came really fast. I wrote them, we got there, and it was the first song that I tracked that day. Dave loved the concept, loved the words.”

Four lyric writing sessions and five lead vocal takes in one day. I just need to write that again. Four lyric writing sessions and five lead vocal takes in one day. 

“I’m not saying that my lyrics are good. People might think that they’re pretty shit, but lyrics have always come really fast to me and I’ve always written them last. I'll have a beat or a style or a few chords first, and flesh out the whole song. I'll sing the melody and I'll just keep going over until it's an interesting melody to me. Once that's all done I put the words to it,” he says.

It wasn’t always like this. Troy has stories about songs he agonised over for a year or more. The way out was to cut down on self-judgement.

“Time’s never gonna stop. So I let the wall down to see what happens when you just write, just let it flow. Then the words just come. There might be three or four words that are cringy, and those are the ones I'll change. That's my litmus test. If I can sing a song from start to finish without being like, ‘augh, I'm not sure about that part’, then I'm happy. Any parts that are like that, I just keep smoothing it over, changing words until something clicks.”

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Next stop: Last Place

And so to the national tour. How does a guy with so many different styles in his back catalogue approach a thing like that?

“It's gonna be a full-on rock concert,” he says, “even if I do [older] songs like ‘Aztechknowledgey’ or ‘Grandma’s Rocket Poem’, I’ll be doing rock covers of my own songs.”

The sold out signs are nearly up and Last Place is going to be packed. Kingi wasn’t looking for larger venues, though. “If everyone can't get in, then everyone can't get in. It’ll make everyone that can get in feel special. I want it to be intimate and squashy and sweaty.”

​“I’m looking forward to it, but it's probably the hardest set I've ever had to learn! There's some hard riffs, man, and it makes me want to not play guitar so I don't need to think too much! You’ve got countermelodies going over different rhythms on the guitar...it’s the most I’ve ever practised in my life. It’s bloody hard.”

The band can’t rehearse all together until Ezra’s back from Europe. Troy says, “We'll have maybe a week of rehearsals before we get into the tour, and then as soon as we finish he's off again. Then we've got a few other shows, so I'm trying to find someone at the moment to fill his boots on screaming and guitar duties.”

Even if the gig is full-on rock, there’s no telling what sort of music the average Troy Kingi fan wants to hear. Describing the audience that he’s built throughout 10-10-10, Troy says, “I’ve differently got the stayers that have been there since the start, but I'm also picking up new ones at every stop. 

“Going back to the [fifth] album with Delaney, we played somewhere and a whole Māori crew come through. I think they were expecting to hear the [roots album] Holy Colony, which was two albums before that! And this was a sit-down, really theatrical thing - a thinking type of concert. I was just, oh man, I hope these guys are going to be alright. Afterwards I went out to sign stuff and they come up with one of my albums and said that was the best concert to ever been to! That’s cool, man! You never know what anyone's gonna get out of it, especially if they're not getting what they’re expecting.”

Number 9, time to rhyme (sorry)

The pace of 10-10-10 means that even before anyone had heard Leatherman and the Mojave Green, and well before the release tour, Kingi has already been getting ready for what’s next. It’ll be a big change, of course.

​“I've stopped listening to rock music. I give myself maybe a month to not think about anything, and then I start listening to music in the next style. That's what I've done with every album up to this point. But it is a hard thing to do when you haven't even brought out the last album,” Troy says.

“My next album is hip hop. I might end up rapping on some of it, but not really. I'm not a rapper! I want to produce it. I sent out the call to most of my favourite NZ rappers and MCs, and I got a hundred percent hit rate. Everyone's come back saying yeah, we’re keen to be part of it.

“The concept is that there are 10 artists I’ve asked to work with. We're just going to go into the studio for one day per artist, and we're going to write the song on the day. By the end of the 10 days we should have at least the foundations of the album. Then I'll probably give myself another week to do overdubs, and then sit on it for a little while. You can only do so much in a short amount of time and then your ears just stop working. Then I’ll come back to it, see all the holes and the mistakes, and start cleaning them up.”

Sadly, Hamilton Underground Press is officially not cool enough for inside scoops. “I don't want to tell you who's coming on board yet, I'll leave that for a later date,” Troy says.

“So that's what I've been doing in the background, but you can never give yourself fully to it until the one before it has finished. We’re not finished until the album is out and we’ve toured New Zealand. You can only do so much prep work. My mind is still not fully there because I'm thinking about what we're about to do with this rock album.”

If you’re quick enough to grab one of the last few tickets, you’ll be able to see exactly what he does with Leatherman and the Mojave Green at Last Place on September 20.