Spare Room Be our guest…

NZ singer-songwriter Anna Coddington talks about her forthcoming debut solo album, life and “a little bit of politixx.”

I’m at Roundhead studios again doing my last day of mixing (fingers crossed — got three more songs to do today). I like being in here. It makes me feel rich. We just decided that we needed to replace one of the piano parts so I was calling around trying to pull a favour then Neil Finn walked in (it’s his studio after all — he’s allowed) so he did it. What a nice fulla. He’s pretty good too.

I’ve done some pretty cool stuff in the last couple o weeks — went down and played at the Gisborne food and wine festival. Mostly wine judging by the state of everyone. I was playing drums with Tim Guy down there. At top is a photo of yours truly playing the infamous leopard print velour covered drum kit. Pretty classy.

What else? I played at the Dogs Bollix on Friday night for Tim Guy’s album release show. It was a total success. I’ve developed a new strategy, which is to win over the entire country one person at a time. Then the world. After that show I reckon it’s three down, 6,699,999,997 to go. Roughly.

I read in the paper on the weekend that there’s 6.7 billion people in the world and a study by 400 scientists for the UN says we’re pretty much fucked. That’s us and the planet — the water, the forests, the climate, the atmosphere, biodiversity and ecosystems and all that. Serious. No bias, no hidden agenda, nothing. But we all pretty much know that. Just no one really knows what to do. I showed the article to someone and she said “oh don’t read it! It’ll make us feel bad!”. Indeed.

But if every single person on the planet (those that have such luxuries, that is) kept their showers under 3 minutes, only flushed when they needed to (bit awkward), recycled everything they could, bought local produce, had gardens, solar panels, windmills, good insulation, and hybrid cars, were more selective in when they needed to drive or could walk/cycle and about the things they spent their money on, etc, etc, etc, could we collectively save the world? I think yes, but the problem is maybe that a) most people think because no one else is doing it their doing it won’t help and b) if it’s a collective effort by everyone on the planet (those with a choice), no one gets to feel morally superior and bask in the glory of being “green” or “conscious”. And c) it’s scary to get all environmental on someone’s ass because no doubt they’ll find somewhere to trip you up and call you a hypocrite (“but where are your shoes from?”).

That is, if you can’t do it 100% across the board, why bother? And of course d) people like stuff. People don’t really like to work but when they do they get money and the reward of it all is that we get to buy stuff. Ay? I like buying stuff. But I also like swimming and breathing and that.

Heoi ano, I watched that movie Sunshine and on that they made a spaceship to take a bomb up and re-explode the sun to make it brighter (because it was nearly dead so the earth was all covered in snow and that). So there’s always hope that if people just keep making more bombs and spaceships we can in fact save the planet. Ahem.

Well… that’s a little more ranty than I usually like to get but oh well. Good work if you got to the bottom. I might post up some more mixes soon (see MySpace page). I hope you like them. I know some people got quite used to the “lo-fi” (read “budget”) sound of my demos but trust me — it’s about 5 steps up. Flash is good. Isn’t it? Is it? Isn’t it?

Read Anna Coddington’s previous post here
www.myspace.com/annacoddington