Home»Performance portraits: The young folk

This project is to draw attention to the new generation of folk and country musicians of New Zealand. I believe they represent a new way of New Zealand personality that is based on generosity, openness, emotional honesty and connecting with the past for strength, rather than just recycling. These performance portraits aim to interpret these people in this way as well as to say thank you to them.
Note: I largely wrapped up this work mid 2014 as everyone is getting famous, and I needed the time for other bodies of work. There will be very occasional additions from special occasions!
About three years into the project I found the words that sum up why I'm doing it, and inevitably they are from Woody Guthrie. Why didn't I look to him first?!

"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built. I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work." From Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woodie Guthrieby Ed Cray (Amazon)

Over the top of this I add that these are the songs of people who don't think that they are better than or cooler than or in any other way distant from the listener.