This strange thing happens for some songs I like, where all at once they open like a revelation; a moment the music just clicks into place. Writing about music is hard, but this is an excuse to share some favourite pieces and practice elucidating just what it is about some music which opens me up.

I still feel like I was a bit late to the Beths, because I heard about one of their shows in the student newspaper in the middle of 2018 and didn’t go, or even listen to any of their songs until the summer. It was the Future Me Hates me Video, the silliness of the pineapple head which pulled me in. It took a long time for me to be able to notice the lyrics in songs, and still think I’m not that good at it, so it helped that the video had the lyrics. “Future heartbreak/future headaches/ wide eyed nights late lying awake” sings Liz Stokes, and it perfectly encapsulated how I so often felt at that time, like all I was able to think about was ways things might go wrong. But there was something else: the bright chords and dancey melody made me realise that this catastrophising wasn’t everything, it was just the surface, that I could make fun of my anxieties rather than believe them.

There are fewer than 1,000 people who have listened to this song on Spotify, and I’m certain that I responsible for at least 300 of those listens. Te Toroa me te Tohorā was released as part of Forest and Bird’s collaboration with a range of New Zealand composers, to create an album about different parts of New Zealand’s natural world. The album uses a mix of taonga puoro (performed by composer Rob Thorne) and cello, violin and piano, performed by NZTrio. The piece starts slowly, deep long breath of music, lots of space to move. The sound layers, chirping texture added to the breathy flute, and then a line of melody. It’s about big whales, far out to sea, and albatrosses, with their long lives and wide wings.

I had tickets to the event to review it as part of the Auckland Arts Festival but there had been some mix-up, so I was in the very back row of the highest balcony in the Auckland Town Hall, sitting next to festival volunteers. I remember incredibly vividly what happened next: the piano started playing, twining through. For a little while the cello and violin and piano converse on their own, but somehow echoing the puoro. Then you hear it again, you see that bird and whale and human are not so different after all. Here is the puoro, like a current, pushing the melody into new shapes, determining where the whale dives and where the albatross turns toward home. It was electrifying, a universe sprouting from the stage, the flash of an albatrosses’ wing. This is what music should be, I thought, listening to the moment the violin and pūoro meet over and over again at work the next day. I still think that every time I hear it.

This song plays in a really beautiful montage in the Station Eleven TV show, which was the only TV show I watched in its entirety in 2023. What makes it click is the way the words layer, something not many songs do (probably because they’re not eight minutes long). By the time Callahan says “the mountains” the third time, you are longing for the sentence to be completed, and then the line is “the mountains bowed down/in the morning sun” and suddenly you are in a valley, and you are not sure what has happened to the rest of the world, and you are more alive than before.

Like Future Me Hates Me, Straight to My Heart works because it is both silly and serious. It’s a dagger going straight into the titular heart, of course, but the narrator also knows that “I’ve had worse/but each time felt like the first”. It’s kind of about panic attacks? And kind of about falling in love? And completely about being unwilling to trust yourself? So perhaps it has quite a lot in common thematically with The Beths’ oevure. But what really makes it click is those heavy chords, synchronised with the drums. Heart strings and heart beats, the blood still pumping.

I’m not sure when I first heard The Promise, because it’s the kind of song my mum would play on our iPod player that gave you an electric shock if you touched it while music was playing. I listened to it many, many times over a few weeks in 2013, when I sprained my ankle. As part of rehab, I was supposed to stand on the recovering foot with my eyes closed for five minutes, and The Promise is approximately five minutes. Each time I listened, vestibular system twitching, the muscles around my ankle growing stronger. These days, Fast Car is probably my preferred Chapman song (it’s so hopeful), but the longing in The Promise always gets me. “If it’s one that you can keep,” Chapman sings, and she’s not sure, and you’re not sure, if it is.

Éimhín got me to listen to Gang of Youths in 2022 because they wanted us to go see the band when they toured New Zealand. It didn’t work out, due to ex-tropical cyclones and Jetstar, but I did get to see the band in Tāmaki. I was already obsessed, mostly with their angel in realtime album. Where this song clicks is the lyrical unity: the mention of “ascending” above “overpass to overpass” referenced again in “you ascend in every skyline” a verse later and stitched together with a very ordinary street in the last verse. It works so well narratively, even though the song is so sad, and Dave Le’aupepe’s voice is so raw. 

Daisy the Great somehow evokes the feeling of spinning in circles then lying on the grass in this song, or maybe the feeling of hopping a fence and doing a cartwheel in a paddock even though there was a gate right there, or maybe the feeling of lockdown ending and going to a party and drinking an entire bottle of wine and walking around the Botanic Gardens with your friend on a warm winter night. The cadence of the lyrics is so perfect, and then there are layers of self-knowing silliness. “I like vintage dresses when they fall just below my knees/I pretend I scraped them climbing in the treeeeees” is a perfect line, delivered faultlessly. Pictures of the time I dyed my hair blue and it turned out a seasick shade of green are available on request. (The AJR remix is super fun too, highly recommend)

I’ve done my best to identify the exact part of each piece of music which make it click. That sense of revelation is so individual context-specific. As I’ve written this, I’ve realised how much particular circumstances of attention let a song unlock in this way, the levers inside moving to let me in. Live music, of course, demands attention; if Rob Thorne hadn’t walked into the Auckland Town Hall barefooted and blowing a conch shell, perhaps Te Toroa me te Tohorā wouldn’t have felt so extraordinary. If I hadn’t been boogieing next to Naomii, who is now such a dear friend, at Hans Pucket, Straight to my Heart might not have gone, well, straight to my heart. If I hadn’t been an overthinking adrift 19 year old, who had just spent two consecutive summer days entirely inside in the spare room of my grandmother’s house watching YouTube, before getting a long-distance bus to see my other grandmother, Future Me Hates Me wouldn’t have wormed so deep into my most fractured thoughts and made them playful instead.

Music sometimes feels rote to me, playing the same songs that I already like, again and again. But within rhythm and melody, it makes space for something new. That longing for someone else’s thoughts to settle in an exact shape that fits inside you is one of many things worth living for.