MARLON WILLIAMS - Te Whare Tīwekaweka - [SELF-RELEASED]

“Ko te reo Māori, he matapihi ki te ao Māori” goes the Māori whakatauki [proverb] that has guided Aotearoa singer/songwriter Marlon Williams’(Kāi Tahu, Ngāi Tai) fourth solo album, Te Whare Tīwekaweka. Translated, the proverb means “The Māori language is a window to the Māori world” and expresses Marlon’s motivation behind his first te reo Māori album. “Through the process of constructing these songs,” Marlon says, “I’ve found a means of expressing my joys, sorrows and humour in a way that feels both distinctly new yet also connects me to my tīpuna [ancestors] and my whenua [land, home].”

Te Whare Tīwekaweka translates as ‘The Messy House,’ a title that for Marlon describes a world in creative flux, one that is dynamic and alive. “A messy house is one in which the occupants are busy,” he says. One could be forgiven for seeing Williams’ musical world as “a messy house,” his propensity for hopping between genres within the space of a single record now well known. The first songs Marlon remembers were simple melodies sung among classmates in his Māori-immersion early education, some of them written by the album’s dedicatee, legendary Māori songwriter Hirini Melbourne. Later came classical training, and then the passion for country, folk and bluegrass that has underlaid much of Marlon’s musical output to date. Those influences, along with many others, are all there on Te Whare Tīwekaweka but here there's a musical and lyrical honesty that more seamlessly than ever integrates them into the songwriting entity that is Marlon Williams. “The title,” he says, “is both an acknowledgement of the chaos at play in bringing diverse creative strands into a single body of work, and also that perfection is not a precursor for inhabitation.”

“Te reo Māori allowed me to be more candid, in some ways,” Marlon says. The language gave the album its kickstart when, having difficulty writing in English, he switched to his other ancestral tongue and found it unlocked a new means of self-expression, even if it meant writing in a language that he’s not yet fluent in. Like many other indigenous people, he is on a life-long journey to reclaim a language colonisation took from his ancestors. But making a record in te reo Māori despite that lack of fluency was an important act of reclamation, while also giving its language a powerful simplicity. “E kore e rongorongo i a au te reo tohu / I te tāone nei, i te ao tūroa / I tenei ra, ia rā, ia rā / Whakawhārōrō nei,” Marlon sings on the album opener “E Mawehe Ana Au.” Here, that voice is unadorned, its isolation in the sonic wilderness a nod in the direction of the words’ rawness, translated into English as: “I cannot hear a guiding voice / In the town, in the whole world / Today, and every day, / I am utterly stretched.”

Those words were written in an act of what Marlon calls “dire self-therapy,” something the language enabled. “If I had tried to write those words in English, that’d be a really hard job,” he says. The same follows for much of the album at large. Even a famous whakatauki expressing communal solidarity – “he waka eke noa”, meaning “we’re all in this boat together” – inspired Marlon to respond, in the first song he wrote for the album and its first single, “Aua Atu Rā,” with a mournful lament on isolation. “I am alone / in this boat / on the ocean,” he sings. That was written five years ago, its simplicity representative of a time when Marlon was even less confident in the language, but also of a Hirini Melbourne dictum Marlon holds dear: “If you can’t say it in four lines, forget about it!”

The growth of the album since then perhaps represents the spirit of the proverb more than Marlon’s response. Covid forced Marlon to settle into life in Lyttelton, his small hometown, after a nomadic preceding decade. In familiar surroundings, the songs accumulated along with a growing cast of collaborators and influences – most notably KOMMI (Kāi Tahu, Te- Āti-Awa), the Lyttelton-based rapper who performs in the Kāi Tahu dialect. Marlon’s vulnerability in the language invited the collaboration at the heart of the record, and the majority of the lyrics were written by Marlon and KOMMI together, the first hum of inspiration usually provided by Marlon, KOMMI helping flesh out the bare bones of those original compositions. Te Whare Tīwekaweka would have been a different album altogether were it not for what Marlon calls the “subtlety and humour” of KOMMI’s mind.

Family also played an important role – represented on the album cover by a piece that Marlon’s mum, artist Jennifer Rendall, drew while pregnant with him and which uncannily resembles an adult Marlon. The nature of the project encouraged Marlon to reconnect with his Māori heritage, including an emotional first-time visit to his dad’s ancestral village on the North Island’s remote Eastern Cape. There was the input of chosen family, too: old friend Lorde contributed to forthcoming single “Kāhore He Manu E,” while Marlon decided to record the album, co-produced by Mark Perkins (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui), with long-time touring band The Yarra Benders, comprised of Ben Woolley, Gus Agars and Dave Khan, none of whom are Māori. “Deciding to lean into the depth of understanding of our mutual musical language, while acknowledging the challenges of working with non-Māori in a Māori world, was a very conscious and deliberated-over choice,” Marlon says. “I am deeply indebted to them for their bravery.” The beautiful voices of the He Waka Kōtuia singers, Marlon says, helped “ground the project.”

Marlon needed the influence of old friends for a project that represents a journey back to family, home and a secure sense of himself after spending his adult life building a career. That career has seen Marlon release three studio albums with Dead Oceans, win six New Zealand Music Awards and an APRA Silver Scroll Award, sell out headline shows around the world, collaborate with the likes of Florence & The Machine, Yo-Yo Ma and Courtney Barnett, tour with Bruce Springsteen and Eagles, and grace stages at the Newport Folk Festival and Austin City Limits, as well as the screens of Later with Jools Holland, Conan and NPR's Tiny Desk. He has even found time to build a nascent acting career, including roles in television series Sweet Tooth and The Beautiful Lie, films Bad Behaviour and True History of the Kelly Gang, and the Oscar-nominated A Star Is Born.

Switching to a language that thousands rather than billions understand, then, might be regarded as a brave step for an artist on his trajectory. But once the muse had nudged Marlon, he knew he had to go all in, even allowing cameras to intimately document the process of the album on the feature length documentary Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua - Two Worlds, which was directed by Ursula Grace and will be released alongside the album. The documentary gave Marlon the opportunity to reflect on his motivations for the project, while also providing encouragement to others travelling their own dusty roads of reconnection.

For connection is what this album is all about. “I hope that music may do the mahi (work) that conversation cannot, and that it may broaden and deepen our sense of interconnectedness, our enmeshment in the world,” Marlon says. By expanding into the Māori language Marlon has widened the portal through which that connection might happen. Te Whare Tīwekaweka, he says, has given him “a bigger playground.”