Globetrotting With Ladi6 (Interview)

Ladi6 has just announce her latest tour, which will take her throughout New Zealand during August along with support act Team Dynamite. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda met up with Ladi6 just before she was about to head off to tour Europe and America before returning to NZ in August. They talked about her overseas adventures, her new video and recording new music in Berlin.

Listen to the interview with Ladi6 here:

Or read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: So you’ve been travelling around the world. I know you were doing some dates in South America, you’ve got dates coming up in Europe. You’ve spent some time in the States but not a lot but you’re planning on it. So when you’re travelling around, how do…especially somewhere in the States where the kind of music that you do kind of originated from there…and you’re arriving from New Zealand… what is the reaction to someone coming from such a remote place and presenting them with this music?

L6: In the states?

MD: Yeah.

L6: I’ve never played in the States before so we have a tour coming up in July and that will be our first time ever playing there. So that exact question is sitting at the back of my mind to like what will you know, what will they think of this, I suppose, reinterpretation of their own sound, you know, I have no idea.

MD: Well it’s a classic thing that keeps happening. I mean it’s what The Beatles did and The Stones they you know, they sold them their own music back to them.

L6:  Did they love The Stones though?

MD: They love The Stones. There were no complaints. Alright, but what about, say South America where you toured.

L6:  South America is really interesting. They were kind of like ‘are you an American artist or are you a New Zealand artist?’ and then the question was ‘so what makes you, what makes, what’s the difference between your music and American music?’ And it kind of stunned me actually I was kinda like well, we come from New Zealand and I hope that they’re New Zealand stories. But actually it was kind of like yeah, good question there, cause it’s not, we don’t necessarily use a Kiwi accent or any traditional Kiwi, I mean what is Kiwi music really though? And then the question starts to get bigger and broader and it’s kind of like yeah I’m not sure but I suppose what makes us Kiwi is the fact that we’re Kiwis and not necessarily anything within the music aside from maybe the stories that could be New Zealand but I actually think that they’re sort of universal, the universal stories of love, friendship and all those things you know so. But music has always, always gone through languages, it’s always been you know, broke barriers when it comes to culture and language.

MD: and I think if you start thinking about it too hard, you’re gonna mess yourself up anyway.

L6: Definitely yeah, you’re gonna totally screw yourself, stop thinking about it.

MD: Alright, so your tour that you’ve got coming in August, You’re touring with Team Dynamite. I think I saw you at The Power Station last time you were with @Peace, is that right. So and they were, they seemed to have quite a bit of input into your set as well, there was a lot of interaction between. Do you plan on that happening with these guys as well?

L6: Um, I actually knew the @Peace boys before we went on tour and with me personally, I don’t actually know Team Dynamite, I don’t know those guys very well, except for um, I know one of them, the DJ but I don’t know the MCs so I think for me it’s just gonna be getting to know them. It might happen, you know, it happens that you get close on the road, you’re sitting in a van together for however many hours, playing at all these different things, it could happen that way, that we all jump together. But it’s not something that’s pre-thought, it’s sort of organic, just if it happens, it happens and if it doesn’t that’s also totally fine.

MD: So the show that I think I saw you at Powerstation, I think it was last July. So it’s a year later.

L6: Yeah.

MD: What is changed, what will people be expecting to see that they didn’t see, say, at that show.

L6: Um acrobatics and …..no

MD: I’m in!

L6: Pyrotechnics. No um, actually I think last time we were there the album hadn’t come out yet so we hadn’t fully gotten into the record and we hadn’t done a lot of the songs, we did just a small snippet of songs of the record because we weren’t super familiar with them as playing them live. So I think now they’ll get the entire record and also like more favourites of old records. It’s a weird thing when you release your record then you look back on all your catalogue and music and all those songs that people really love that you hated because people really loved them and always wanted to hear them, so you played all the time and then they got played out. We might actually do a few more of those ones. Also it’s a maturity thing I think, you know, I feel sorry for the people that buy a ticket and come to your show and then they don’t hear the one song that they fell in love with your whole, you know, your whole thing just through that one song. So I think um, we’ll definitely have that. As usual we just wanna like, we just wanna have a party and make everyone feel like they are happy when they leave and not disappointed.

MD: And the songs that are on the new album that you kind of touched on, cause I remember the show and I remember thinking ‘oh I wanna know that one, I haven’t heard that one before’. So do they go through any kind of  evolutionary process? Do they change because now that you’ve had the chance to deal with them.

L6: Absolutely, yeah absolutely that’s exactly right and it will change again when we go over to Europe because we have to make our group a little bit smaller because Julien Dyne our drummer is not gonna be with us this time so, yeah and we’re hoping to make some new music in Berlin while we’re there as well so who knows what we’re gonna bring to this new CD? We always hope to bring something new, something brand spanking fresh new just for our sakes more than the audience’s sake just so we have something to play with while on tour. So yeah.

MD: Recording in Berlin sounds very interesting. Are you going there specifically to record because it’s Berlin or is it just happened to be where you’re gonna be when you feel like making some new music.

L6: Well actually our Europe tours always we base ourselves in Berlin. So we get ourselves an apartment there and the whole band stays there and we’re just gonna turn one of the room into a studio because we’re there for six weeks and we think why not. You know, its perfect set of activity for us to do on the down time but as well I think, I think we feel like we’re, we’re ready to make another record, this record was great and we wanna move on. We’ve played a lot over this summer and we’ve kind of um, I think we’ve yeah we just feel like we’ve gone through the ins and outs of what this record is and we just really gearing up to go to the next phase so yeah. This album was really exciting for us cause musically we felt like we finally clicked into what sound it is that we’re actually trying to get and I think now that we’ve done all the live shows, we just want to make it better, you know and it’s a great place to be really.

MD: Are there songs in the can or are you, have you got things written?

L6: Absolutely no songs in the can. It’s so crazy, we’re just…Parks has been making its own EP, who’s sort of like the main producer of the records and Brandon’s been working with @Peace and they just had their record released. Um, so there’s absolutely nothing in there but just this motivation and wanting to create this thing so. We may come back with nothing.

MD: You’ve also just made a new video.

L6: Yes.

MD: So, it’s for the song Hold Tight, which of course has been around for a while since the album came out last year sometime. Why did you decide that that was the next one to kind of put the focus on maybe? and I haven’t seen the video, I think it’s just being released tonight.

L6: Tonight, maybe like 6 o’clock or something like that

MD: Yeah, so maybe you can tell me a little bit about it.

L6: Why did we wanna put out Hold Tight? I think um, we felt like it was different from all the other songs that we’d, it’s just another perspective of us I suppose. The emotion that’s on the record and I really love that song and so I kinda fought for that song. Parks kind of fought for Automatic and so it was kinda like I won. Basically I won and I got my song and yeah Hold Tight is a really interesting song, it wasn’t even really gonna make the album. Parks didn’t really like it, I made, I wrote this song at home, it was just kind of this beat that Parks made and put on a CD and popped in the stereo and I wrote a song for it. He was kinda like ‘mmm it’s alright’ and I secretly showed Waajeed when we were in Detroit and was like what’d you think? And he was like ‘it’s gotta go on the record’ and I was like ‘oh well, Waajeed’s spoken, it’s gotta go on the record’. So for me I’m kinda like, it’s my proud little baby there and the video, we just felt like it needed a video, some sort of visual representation and we got this incredible guy doing these images. It’s basically an animated video of my face singing the song but he did the album cover and he’s done a lot of the posters that we’ve done lately. Yeah he’s just incredible and he’s done such a great job so, it’s a really rare combination when you get a director who can actually make the whole video by himself and has that creative vision that’s equal to yours when you wrote the song. It’s quite, yeah it’s quite an amazing thing so I think this video is definitely one of my favourites that we’ve ever made.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FDaiuH2UcI]

MD:  Did you talk to him quite a bit before the actual making of the video? To get a, so that your and his vision were kinda the same.

L6: Well that’s the weird thing like, not really like not really at all. It was that instinctive trust and because we’ve worked with him before we knew him stylistically that he was right on the money and um, yeah we just kind of left it up to him. He came up with the treatment and the idea to just film me, I think it was, everyone was kind of saying in our team that it was quite important to have my face in the video because in the last few videos, I wasn’t in it, which I was happy about because I hate those, I’m not an actor, I’m a musician. But yeah so it was great for me to just have him record my face and animate it cause it’s kind of like you’re in it but you’re not really in it you know, and I really liked that yeah.

MD: Alrighty and finally, I just, I know you’re aware that Maya Angelou past away.

L6: I know.

MD: And from what I understand she was an inspiration of yours and I was hoping maybe you’d just kind of elaborate on that and give me an idea of how she affected what you do.

L6: Well Maya Angelou actually was bought into the household when I was a teenager through my mum. My mum was a huge fan of hers and we all read her books and read her poetry and shared it around. I have four sisters, we shared it around all of us so, something that’s really connected my mum to us. So we’ve actually all-day been grieving, all of us. It’s quite um, it’s quite incredible, her stories, very similar to I suppose, in a way to my mother’s own story about, just about feeling like you’re a foreigner in another land you know, my mum came here from Samoa and a lot of things were very, storylines were very similarish and we just really related to that and related to her especially in her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Yeah and after that I got into her poetry but first and foremost it was really that book. Um, and yeah I just love her and after that, just YouTube’d all her different interviews, she’s such an eloquent well-spoken women, she’s so intelligent you know, all of her kind of T.V interviews, she’s treated with so much respect, you know like it’s sort of like the host knows she’s smarter than him so don’t, so you know like be cool like don’t try to outwit her or anything. Yeah, I love the way she speaks, I love the way she hold herself you know. Yeah I like to say it’s almost liking it to like Nina Simone in a way. Just the way that they had that like, she seemed a little bit more happier than Nina Simone.

MD: That wouldn’t be difficult.

L6:  Yeah, but it’s almost like a silent confidence. Not really like ‘I am this’ although she did kind of do that in a way but it’s just you know, I don’t know I never ever met her. So I always feel a bit silly because I don’t even know this woman but I feel like I totally know her.

MD: Well that’s part of what makes her, what she does great because you do feel like you know who she is from reading her and seeing her on T.V

L6: Well, I mean I know all about her life you know, like if I talk to her I could say ‘oh how was that with um’ you know, like I could literally detail things, it’s quite, yeah.

MD: Well it’s interesting you mention how her persona kinda came through her interviews and how she related to being interviewed and you know this hierarchy of how much do you think of me and my intelligence. Does that kind of go into what you do as well? Is that an issue with when you’re out there in the world and people are talking to you like we’re talking now…does that ever come up? Do you fell that you know, sometimes you’re running into people and they’re just like ’this is just musician, theres another one coming through’ and they don’t really take you seriously or….

L6: Do I find that… no not really. I mean, I think I’m lucky in that regard but um, I definitely feel like I personally lack like the confidence that I think people expect me to have sometimes and I look at people like Maya and Nina and I kind of like try to emulate this sort of like confidence that they have that I maybe don’t have all the time. It could be even just the Kiwi thing. Just being a Kiwi and not being able to really play into and then them being American and me being a Kiwi, maybe that’s culturally something that’s just completely different, you know. But yeah I love seeing these women do their thing and I kind of like, I like that sort of strong sort of classic, sort of, what is it, kind of like a, yeah it’s a type of strength and it’s just like. You can tell, you know, she didn’t have to be sort of super beautiful, neither of them did have to be super anything you know, they’re just themselves but they were staunchly themselves and I love that and I feel like I don’t have enough of that and I’ve always felt like that so I love to look at them and just take that from what I see from what they say and how they are.

Click here for more info on the Ladi6 NZ tour.