Lyric Waiwiri-Smith chats to Marlon Williams about the six-year journey to releasing Te Whare Tīwekaweka, his first album entirely in te reo Māori.

Singer-songwriter Marlon Williams (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāi Tai) remembers a childhood where speaking “household Māori” was as everyday as the waves which crash into the harbour of Ōhinehou. At kohanga reo, he would hear Hirini Melbourne’s melodic waiata float from the classrooms, and outside of kura, sing waiata under the sunshine at the Kai Tahu Hui-ā-Tau.

“It definitely ebbed away as I got older,” he tells The Spinoff of his journey to re-learning te reo Māori. “By the time I sort-of properly came back to it at high school, I was back at square one – well, square one point five.”

There were more ebbs and flows between Williams then and the 34-year-old now. As an adult, he took reo Māori classes under his mentor and collaborator Kommi Tamati (Kāi Tahu, Te-Āti-Awa) – a former Whakaata Māori presenter, rapper and lecturer in Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury – who helped shape some “pidgin Māori” Williams had been writing since 2019 into an album filled with entirely reo Māori waiata.

Williams’ latest work, Te Whare Tīwekaweka (“the messy house” in reo Pākehā), is an album six years in the making and the result of a lifetime of learning. Across 14 tracks, Williams croons odes to whenua, moana, lovers, the language itself – the same subject matter of the Williams classics you know and love, but less country Elvis. And, guiding it all, a wise whakataukī shared by Melbourne, who remains a favourite artist of Williams’ and the album’s dedicatee: “if you can’t say it in four lines, forget about it!”

That sentiment lives in fifth track ‘Kōrero Māori’, which Williams describes as a “very tongue-in-cheek, playful idea of ‘stop talking bullshit and just run it straight’”. He recorded the song with singers from He Waka Kōtuia, Ōtepoti kapa haka roopu and whanaunga of Kommi, and dove back into his “warmest kapa haka memories” to create a waiata embodying the joy of, well, stopping the bullshit and running it straight. A pretty Māori sentiment in general, if you think about it.

Creating this album took a village, even if its origins mostly began with Williams working on it solo six years ago. It began with the third track ‘Aua Atua Rā’, a ballad of a hopeless death in the ocean, written when Covid-19 was nary a worry in our minds, and the idea of an artist creating a full body of work in Aotearoa’s indigenous language would still be seen as pretty radical for someone who had only used the occasional kupu here and there.

Te Whare Tīwekaweka has arrived in the era of the Treaty principles bill, some tense Māori-Crown relations and apparent backwards steps for te reo Māori, but making a statement wasn’t Williams’ objective, even if he says the album “was always going to be a big conversation piece against the backdrop of New Zealand politics and race relations.”

“It’s not an album of political songs, it’s an album of aroha and a whole bunch of subject matter, but it has a political element against the current backdrop,” Williams says. “I’m curious as to what some of these kōrero will be like [in response to the album] … It’s just another aspect that I’m not used to with putting music out, but we’ll just see. You just hope [people will] face it openly, and hope for some constructive conversations.”

Having to re-learn your own language already brings enough tense feelings into your life without having to think about the public reception to it. Williams says the emotions which have arisen on this journey sometimes takes you by surprise. “You think you’re all good with it. And then something really deep in you just jumps out and … it’s a hard thing to regulate.” His upcoming documentary Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds, out on May 1, explores these emotions in depth.

“It would be very easy to get on the defence and get frustrated with some conversations … I think I’m just gonna try and pay attention to where the intentions are coming from.”

Really, whether Barry from down the pub “gets it” or not feels like a pretty small trade-off for the joy of reconnecting with a part of yourself that somehow already knows you better than you know it. Williams says through writing the album he fell in love with the performance of waiata, with the conveying of emotions through the language, with the “universality” in Māori expression through music. “It can be an absolute taniwha, or it can be a beautiful angel,” he says.

“It’s there in kapa haka, the outpouring of emotion is equal in every direction, and it feels sort-of universal and interpenetrable,” Williams says. “The fearlessness of going into emotional spaces with an open heart and with open hands is just something that resonates with me.”

It’s a joy he’s also been able to share with his bandmates The Yarra Benders, who are Pākehā and Australian, to “bring them into the fold and make it be accountable to all of my worlds”. His album also includes ‘Kāhore He Manu E’, a piano-heavy duet with Lorde, sprinkled with birdsong as Williams muses on taking flight.

The two have collaborated before, for Lorde’s own reo Māori EP Te Ao Mārama, and now Williams says she’s at a point in her language learning journey where she’s “running full speed … she’s a phonetic wizard, she’s always has just been so sound oriented that she just picked it up”.

Lately, Williams has been spinning Dam Native’s Kaupapa Driven Rhymes on vinyl, enjoying Byllie-jean’s Taite-nominated Filter, recently spent a few days at Te Matatini and has been reading na moteatea. And now that Te Whare Tīwekaweka is out and Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds is also on its way, Williams will be brushing up on the tunes which started out as pidgin Māori, to now be sung for crowds in Tauranga, Rotorua, Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch, and others overseas. In terms of now singing what will be sets almost entirely filled with reo Māori, Williams says the task “makes me feel shy in some settings, and in others more proud.”

“I just take a lot of joy in the pure physics of the language,” Williams says. “You know, just the way it feels to be the mouthpiece.”