NZ Listener
With a new purposefully unfunny album out, Bret McKenzie reflects on why life isn't always a happy song.
As it says on the tin, Songs without Jokes is a non-comedy album by Bret McKenzie, a man whose songs with jokes have done quite well, whether sung by him and that other guy in Flight of the Conchords or by Muppets.
It’s not that he’s run out of jokes or he’s taken by the mood of the times – though there is a line of where he’s ruminating on the state of things, such as the opener This World, the lockdown-inspired Crazy Times (“I guess everyone wrote a Covid song”) and the melancholy Carry On.
The last has McKenzie reflecting on being a parent and leaving an ailing planet to the next generation. The cover photo has him at an electric piano in rising seas on Wellington’s south coast.
“I mean, everyone's concerned about the future of the planet but I think as a parent, it's quite confronting. That sense of responsibility for the next generation is definitely a theme in there,” the father of three tells the Listener from his home in a waterlogged Wellington.
“A lot of songs in the evenings I'd write after the kids were in bed and reading the news and I'd be like, ‘gee, things are not looking good’ and then I'd start playing the guitar – that’s where a few of them came from.”
So yes it’s a personal album and it takes some adjustment hearing the voice behind so many great pop parodies in the FOTC era now not playing it for laughs. It was odd for him too.
“I was quite obsessive with this record that it was not going to be funny, because I wanted to step away from doing comedy.
“Being so used to working with things that are just sort of wrapped up in a joke or a character or someone else singing them, it was quite unusual for me to have a more open-hearted kind of approach to songwriting.
But the album didn’t spring from McKenzie feeling like he had something to say as a serious singer-songwriter. Its roots lay in his ties to his past studio work with Los Angeles producer Mickey Petralia who was behind the FOTC recordings.
Having worked with him on the soundtracks to the Muppets movies with many top LA session musicians, McKenzie wondered if they could do an album, free of Kermit and co, but using the same gun players.
Songs written, McKenzie headed back to Los Angeles for studio sessions involving such musicians as bassist Lee Sklar and guitarist Dean Parks, both of whom have a daunting list of album credits dating back decades.
When McKenzie said he wanted a Steely Dan feel on one song, Parks, who had played on five of the band’s albums, obliged with a smile.
Yes, they initially thought they were being hired for a comedy record. After all, the last time the New Zealander had worked with Sklar – a man who actually looks like he could have been a member of Muppet band Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem – McKenzie had been singing Miss Piggy parts.
Still, if the songs are more serious, they are certainly breezy in a 1970s-80s kind of way. If You Wanna Go has echoes of Randy Newman and Elton John; Dave’s Place and Here for You owes something to how American band the War on Drugs has recently recycled Dire Straits. Here for You sounds like brooding stripped-back wall-of-synthesizer hand-on-heart Springsteen, while A Little Tune does jazzy Harry Nilsson things to its tin pan alley tune.
But it’s all more homage than the FOTC pop send-ups of old.
“In Conchords we were often parodying a style, but with a lot of care and love for the original sound. In this one, it wasn't like parodying a style, but we were leaning on styles we loved and seeing how they could combine with a song.”
With an imminent national then an American tour with a large band of Wellington musicians, McKenzie says he’s about to find out whether the following he’s earned as a musical comedian can take him seriously. Since the recording, he’s found he’s not quite as serious about being serious any more.
“Now that I've done it, I'm a little more casual about things being funny. I'll be writing new songs and I don't mind if they are funny now.”
Songs without Jokes isn’t his first solo effort. Having been the keyboard player for the Black Seeds in the band’s early days, McKenzie released an album of electronic, reggae-fied chilled pop as ‘the Video Kid” in 2004, just as FOTC began to take off. What would the cool “Kid” think of his sophomore effort?
“I think he'd love all the synths,” says McKenzie with a laugh. But he might be confused about the retrospective touches? “Totally.”