On music, connection, trust, and the freedom to simply be
I’ve been thinking a lot about music lately, which is interesting because music has been one of the great constants throughout my life, yet it’s something I’ve rarely written about. When I reflect on the many things that have shaped me, the communities I’ve been part of, the places I’ve travelled, the people I’ve met and the different worlds I’ve occupied, music has always been there. Sometimes in the foreground, sometimes quietly accompanying whatever else was happening, but always present. It’s been part of the landscape of my life for as long as I can remember.
I started playing guitar when I was young. Growing up in a gospel-esk church, music was everywhere. Gospel was a significant part of that environment, and through it I developed an early appreciation for the blues, soul, rock and roll, and the extraordinary musical traditions that influenced so much of what came afterwards. Growing up in Tokoroa, and then in South Auckland brought other influences. Hip-hop and R&B featured heavily in our communities, alongside the music that travelled from the US and found particular resonance among Māori and Pacific young people. There were the metalheads, the alternative crowd, the surfers, the hip-hop lovers, and all the different musical identities that seemed so important when we were young. I moved between them, appreciating what each had to offer, and I suppose I never really stopped. When I was managing pubs and clubs a lot more influences came through, I even managed an awesome jazz place which I loved – live music on-tap.
My musical tastes remain wonderfully eclectic. Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, the Rolling Stones, U2, old-school hip-hop, blues, jazz, classical, folk, country, reggae, rock, electronic music and everything in between. I don’t particularly subscribe to musical hierarchies. Every genre has its place, and every composition has the potential to offer something. I love the origins of music, the relationships between different traditions, and the way sounds have travelled through generations and cultures. I love instrumentation, arrangements, harmonies, the spaces between notes, and the way a composition can build towards something you feel long before you can explain it. Even when I’m watching a film or television series, I’m listening to the score as much as I’m following the story. Sometimes it’s the lyrics that capture me, sometimes a particular guitar progression, and sometimes it’s simply the frequency of the sound.
And that’s perhaps where this reflection really begins, because I’ve come to recognise that my relationship with music is about something more than listening.
Where belonging isn’t a question
Throughout my life, I’ve navigated many different environments, relationships, communities, cultures and expectations. I’ve reflected quite deeply on belonging, particularly through my experiences of adoption, identity and whakapapa. Growing up, I can remember moments of feeling simultaneously inside and outside different social spaces, of observing relationships and learning how people connected with one another. I was a happy and optimistic child, and I loved people, but I was also attentive to the subtleties of belonging. It’s something I’ve continued to think about as I’ve grown older and come to understand more about my own life.
Music, however, has always been different. I’ve never had to find belonging in music. I’ve never had to negotiate my place within it or wonder whether I was entitled to be there. I simply belong. It’s an interesting realisation because I experience something very similar when I’m in water. When I’m immersed in water, I’m not assessing my environment or thinking about how I might be perceived. I’m not trying to establish my place or reconcile different parts of myself. I’m simply there, entirely comfortable in the experience.
Music can feel exactly the same. Sometimes I want the sound to encompass me, sometimes I want to encompass it, and sometimes I simply want to exist with it. There isn’t necessarily a distinction between what I’m hearing, what I’m feeling and what I’m experiencing physically. I want to be where the sound is, or I want it to be with me. When I’m willing to enter that experience fully, the music becomes part of who I am in that moment. I don’t always need to understand it, analyse it or explain why a particular composition resonates. Sometimes I just want to be there.
I’ve found myself wondering recently how many spaces in our lives allow us that kind of freedom. So much of life involves navigating expectations, interpreting relationships, understanding responsibilities and responding to the needs of others. Even when those experiences are meaningful and fulfilling, they require something of us. Yet there are environments where none of that seems necessary. Places where we don’t have to demonstrate our value, explain our identity or establish our right to belong. We simply exist within them, and perhaps that’s part of what makes them so precious.
The many frequencies of a life
I have playlists for almost everything. Music for the car, music for mowing the lawns, music for a backyard barbecue, music for working, thinking, remembering, celebrating and doing absolutely nothing. Some playlists are organised around genres, others around periods of my life, and many are simply collections of songs that feel right together. I don’t necessarily choose music because I want to change how I’m feeling. Sometimes I want to stay with a particular emotion for a while, and sometimes I want to inhabit the sound without asking anything more of it.
There’s one playlist in particular that I’ve kept largely to myself. It’s called Down, and it’s where I occasionally go when I’m feeling vulnerable, angry, isolated, sad, or when something from the past needs a little attention. The music isn’t especially cheerful. Some of it is incredibly heavy, melancholic or confronting, but I find enormous comfort in it. It’s a place I know well, and importantly, it’s a place where I feel safe. I don’t visit often these days, perhaps two or four times a year, but when I do, I know why I’m there, even if I can’t immediately articulate what it is that needs reconciling.
I think there’s a great deal of wisdom in allowing ourselves to experience difficult emotions without immediately treating them as problems to be solved. There’s nothing inherently wrong with feeling down, being angry with the world, feeling isolated or acknowledging vulnerability. Those feelings are part of being human, and sometimes they deserve a little space. When I enter that musical environment, I give myself permission to sit with whatever is present. I don’t need to justify it, suppress it or rush towards feeling better. I can simply allow the music and the emotion to exist together.
Sometimes, somewhere between the notes, something begins to settle. A thought becomes clearer, an uncomfortable memory finds a different place, or a feeling that was difficult to articulate becomes easier to understand. At other times, there’s no particular revelation, just a sense of having allowed myself to experience something that needed attention. I usually listen before going to sleep, and when I’m ready to finish, I choose a final song, often something with a beautiful or powerful instrumental passage that allows me to remain immersed for a little longer. Then I stop. I’ve visited that place, I know it well, and I’m ready to leave it.
Haere tonu. Life continues.
What interests me is that the same relationship with sound exists in entirely different emotional environments. My Good Vibes playlist might accompany me while I’m mowing the lawns, driving to a hui or getting on with the ordinary tasks of the day. It moves through soul, funk, rock, reggae, hip-hop, electronic music and whatever else happens to belong there. The songs don’t necessarily have cheerful lyrics, and they aren’t all conventionally uplifting, but they create an environment I enjoy inhabiting. The music becomes part of the experience, just as it does when I’m listening to something more introspective.
Perhaps that’s the common thread. Music doesn’t always need to take me somewhere else. Sometimes it allows me to be more completely where I already am.
The connections we find through what we love
Music has also been one of the great connectors throughout my life. Across different jobs, countries, communities and kaupapa, I’ve discovered how easily a conversation can begin when two people recognise something they both love. I’ve worked in environments where music was central to the experience, including the pubs and nightclubs I used to run, and I’ve spent time in places where music was simply part of the background until someone mentioned a particular band, song or musical arrangement. Suddenly, there was something shared, something familiar, and often a conversation that might never have happened otherwise.
Because my musical interests are so broad, I can usually find something to talk about with people who have very different tastes and experiences. Someone might love classical compositions, someone else might be passionate about 1990s hip-hop, and another might know every guitar solo Led Zeppelin ever recorded. I genuinely enjoy those conversations, not because I’m trying to establish common ground for some particular purpose, but because I love music and I love hearing what it means to other people. There’s something wonderful about discovering that another person has been moved by the same composition, even when the experiences or memories attached to it are entirely different.
And it’s not only the content that connects us. It’s the passion. When someone talks about something they genuinely love, you can often hear it in their voice before you fully understand what they’re describing. There’s an energy in that exchange, particularly when two people share the same enthusiasm. You might begin by discussing a song, a book or a film, but what you’re really sharing is something about how you experience the world. I’ve found that these moments can create genuine connection across age, culture, profession and circumstance.
I experience the same thing with cinema, books and comics. I’m a cinephile, and my love of movies has deep roots in the comics I read when I was younger. I still get enormous enjoyment from superhero films and the Marvel universe, and I can happily spend time talking about characters, storylines, cinematography, musical scores or how a director has interpreted something that once existed on a comic-book page. These are interests I’ve carried throughout my life, and they’ve provided countless opportunities to connect with people who might otherwise seem to have very little in common with me.
Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate that connection doesn’t always require us to begin with our differences, our responsibilities or the roles we occupy. Sometimes it begins with a song, a story, a shared memory or the simple recognition of another person’s enthusiasm. Those moments can be fleeting, or they can become the beginning of something much more enduring. Either way, they have value in themselves.
Being authentic doesn’t mean revealing everything
Thinking about connection has also led me to reflect on trust, and particularly the difference between being authentic and being completely known. I’ve spent much of my life moving between different social, cultural and professional environments, and I don’t feel that I wear a mask when I engage with people. What they encounter is genuinely me. But I’ve also learned that being authentic doesn’t necessarily mean sharing every part of myself with everyone I meet.
Life teaches us things, and some lessons are harder than others. I’ve had experiences that have made me more thoughtful about where I place my trust and how much of myself I choose to reveal. I can connect deeply with people through shared interests, values, experiences and kaupapa without necessarily giving them access to every part of my personal world. That doesn’t make those relationships less genuine. It simply means I’ve learned to recognise that connection and complete disclosure are not the same thing.
Even within loving family relationships, there can be aspects of ourselves that we choose to hold privately. My parents, for example, are deeply religious, and I grew up within that environment. The values of service I learned through the church remain part of who I am today, although my beliefs and understanding of the world have evolved considerably. I don’t necessarily share every difference in perspective when we’re together, not because I’m pretending to be someone else, but because I recognise the nature of our relationship and make choices about what needs to be said. I’m still myself. There are simply parts of myself that I choose not to bring into every conversation.
With my husband, Dave, it’s different. He knows me, including the parts of my life and experiences that aren’t visible to most other people. When we’re simply at rest together, there’s nothing I need to manage, explain or withhold. I can be entirely myself, and there’s something profoundly freeing about that. It’s a different kind of belonging from what I experience through music or water, because it exists within a relationship of mutual trust and understanding, but there is a familiar quality to it. I don’t have to establish my place or wonder whether I’m fully accepted. I know where I belong.
I’ve been thinking about how interesting it is that we can have an extraordinary breadth of connection with people while reserving our deepest trust for very few. Those things aren’t contradictory. We can be open, warm, curious and genuinely interested in others while still exercising discretion over what we share. We can value relationships without needing every relationship to hold the entirety of who we are. Perhaps recognising that distinction is part of understanding the different ways belonging can exist in our lives.
What travels between generations
One of the things I love most about music is its ability to travel across time. A composition written long before I was born can resonate with me today, just as a song I loved as a child can still move me decades later. I sometimes think about how extraordinary it is that a particular arrangement of notes, rhythms and harmonies can remain meaningful across an entire lifetime. I could hear something as a child, encounter it again at 45, and perhaps, if I’m fortunate enough to reach 90, hear those same sounds and experience something familiar.
The meaning might change, of course. The memories attached to the music might be different, and I may hear things in the composition that I never noticed before. But there’s a continuity in the sound itself that fascinates me. Music can connect us with earlier versions of ourselves without requiring us to become those people again. It can remind us of places, relationships and experiences that might otherwise remain quietly tucked away in memory. Sometimes it brings those memories into sharp focus, and sometimes it simply gives us a feeling we recognise without knowing exactly where it came from.
Music also travels between people and generations. The waiata we inherit, the songs our parents played, the music that filled our homes and communities, and the sounds our children and mokopuna grow up hearing all become part of our shared histories. Some compositions carry stories of resistance, grief, celebration, faith, love or hope. Others carry nothing more complicated than the joy of a rhythm that makes people want to dance. They all have their place, and they all contribute to the extraordinary ways people express and share their experiences.
When I think about the music that surrounded me growing up, I can see how those sounds connected me to people, places and traditions beyond my immediate world. Gospel, blues, soul, rock and roll, hip-hop and the many other genres I’ve come to love have histories that reach across generations and continents. They have travelled through communities, been reinterpreted by different artists, and found new meaning in places far removed from where they began. There’s something deeply human about that continuity, and something beautiful about the way music can belong to so many people without belonging exclusively to any one of us.
More than what we do
Much of my adult life has involved moving between different worlds. Governance, technology, education, economic development, emergency management, iwi, communities and the many kaupapa that sit between them. I’ve spent considerable time reflecting on how I navigate those environments, how I think, how I contribute and how the different parts of my work connect. Those reflections have been valuable, particularly as I’ve become more intentional about where I direct my energy and what I want my contributions to mean over time.
But this recent exploration of music has reminded me how easily we can come to understand ourselves primarily through what we do. We describe our roles, responsibilities, achievements, capabilities and contributions, and over time those descriptions can become the dominant narrative of our lives. They’re important, certainly, but they don’t tell the whole story. They don’t necessarily reveal the music that moves us, the books we return to, the films we’ve watched a hundred times, the places where we feel most at ease, or the people with whom we can simply exist without explanation.
I’m beginning to appreciate the value of paying more attention to those dimensions of myself. Not because they need to explain my professional life, or because every personal experience must reveal something profound about how I think or lead, but because they are part of who I am. My love of music doesn’t need to be justified by my work, my history or my responsibilities. It doesn’t need to produce an outcome. It has value simply because I love it, and because of the extraordinary ways it has accompanied me throughout my life.
There have been periods when I’ve played guitar constantly, and other periods when I’ve barely touched an instrument. My guitars are still with me, and although I don’t play as I once did, the music itself has never really left. It has connected me with people, accompanied me through difficult moments, filled rooms with laughter, brought back memories and given me somewhere to simply exist. It’s been part of my childhood, my relationships, my travels, my communities and the many different versions of myself that have emerged over the years.
And perhaps what I find most interesting is that, despite all the different ways music has featured throughout my life, I’ve never really questioned my belonging within it. I haven’t needed to. It’s always been there, available to me in whatever form I choose to experience it, whether I’m listening to a symphony, a blues recording, a piece of hip-hop, a guitar solo or something entirely unfamiliar that happens to capture my attention.
There are so many environments in life where belonging can feel complicated, where we navigate expectations, relationships and different understandings of who we are. But there are also places where none of that seems to matter, where we can experience something without needing to explain or establish ourselves within it.
For me, music is one of those places.
And I’m grateful for it.