It almost feels like another life now.Īnd it also feels impossible now. Ben, our drummer, drove 10,000 miles – I’m going to have to fact check that. Yeah, was 27 shows in 30 days or something, and we had no tour manager. It’s so bizarre that you’ve had all these extremely normie experiences in between doing like, SXSW and everything. He was really good at stacking pallets, and one day there was this old guy helping us out for the day, and he complimented my workmate on his pallet-stacking skills, and he said “I’m happy to perform!” and I was like, “yoink”.Īnd then I threw out three grand worth of golf clubs and that was about when it turned to shit. The guy I worked with there is where I got the album title from, Happy to Perform. It was just me by myself in a big warehouse, and they’d say “move all these boxes from here to this place over here”, and they’d leave me alone and I could think about music.
The year before I’d been touring and playing music in Europe and America and all of a sudden I was at Golf Warehouse. While you were making this album you worked at Golf Warehouse for a while. I don’t know if it was worth it or what, but when you’re in so deep you lose perspective. We re-did – and it’s funny now, because maybe it didn’t matter at all – but we probably re-made this album three times. I need to know I’ve explored every avenue.
If I have any talent it might just be knowing when something has potential, and being able to picture the whole song quite quickly. I don’t know what I’m doing – I’m not technically trained or anything. It’s really a matter of playing guitar until I fluke something, and then just fleshing that thing out. I don’t have any kind of process that I go back to each time. Is the way you make music pretty accidental? I can’t remember if it was a conscious decision to play around with structures or if I’m just pretending it is now. They’re almost these linear things with a hook at the end or something. They don’t even have choruses a lot of the time. Kane Strang: Structurally all of the songs are quite weird. Can we talk about the structure of your songs? The Spinoff: So ‘Moat’ is pretty smooth but also a little bizarre.
We sat down to talk about ‘Moat’ and the journey that led to it. You hesitate to define him as easy listening, but I’ll be damned if he isn’t easy to listen to. Even though ‘Moat’ is brassy and chorusless it’s got that delightful peri-pop nature all Strang’s songs do. Without that funding the album may never have been finished – it arrived just in time to pay for the song’s studio session. The first fruit of his four-year labour is ‘Moat’, the NZ on Air-funded first single off his new album, Happy to Perform. He’s spent years drifting between Ōtepoti and Tāmaki, and between odd jobs and recording studios, but he’s never put music on the back burner. It’s been four years since Kane Strang’s last album and just like with those mushrooms, the hours and effort have paid off. It was a duty he took very seriously and slowly. The last time I saw Kane Strang was at a birthday brunch for his girlfriend, where he was in charge of cooking mushrooms. He talks to Josie Adams about his new music and why he’ll never stop making it. Kane Strang is back and Strang-er than ever with a new single, ‘Moat’.
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