To mark New Zealand Music Month Te Marama O Puoro, Music 101 asks more local musicians to pick one New Zealand song they wish they'd written.
Musicians featured in this weeks 'The Song I wish I'd written' Photo: Supplied
NZMM - Teremoana
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Teremoana Rapley wishes she had written 'For Today' by Netherworld Dancing Toys.
For Rapley, as a child, the song meant she got to see a Cook Island woman on TV.
"It was written by Malcolm Black and the reason why I guess I really love this song is that it was the first mainstream song that I ever remember seeing a Cook Island woman featuring in.
"As far as I was concerned as a child, it was [featured vocalist Annie Crummer's] song. I didn't know who all those Palagi people were standing around her.
"Just being able to know that if I turned on the TV and that song came on, there would be a Cook Island woman on it. I guess that's what attracted me to it."
NZMM - Erny Belle
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Singer-songwriter Erny Belle wishes she wrote 'Golden Dawn' by Golden Horse.
Belle says her first memory of listening to the song was on a CD in her father's 1970s Ford pick-up truck while driving to school over the Auckland Harbour Bridge.
She recently covered 'Golden Dawn' for a live show with her band and realised just how complex the composition was.
The song has a "recipe" Belle gravitates to in her own music and is "so unassuming in its complexities" with beautiful lyrics, she says.
NZMMTerrible Sons
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Matt Barus of Terrible Sons wishes he wrote 'System Virtue' by Emma Paki.
He heard it for the first time in the early 1990s at the Dux de Lux in Christchurch - the "best play to see shows".
Hearing Paki perform a raw version of 'System Virtue' was a "revelation", Barus says.
"The reaching melody, the ambitiousness of the lyric, the anger at the way things were, the longing for justice, they all made a really big imprint on me."
NZMM - Rodney Fisher
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Rodney Fisher, a vocalist and guitarist for Goodshirt, wishes he'd written 'A Chip That Sells Millions' by Bressa Creeting Cake.
Bressa Creeting Cake was an "amazing band" formed in the early 1990s that produced revolutionary and imaginative pop music, he says.
The first time Fisher heard 'A Chip That Sells Millions', he was attracted to the sound of it and the way the guitar bounces around.
"You are drawn into a world and all of a sudden the lyrics are right there and you are a kid in the playground talking to another kid with a bag of like Raro sachets or something, you know, that's what popped into my head, obviously this is a chip flavouring.
"It's just such a clear image and it really tapped into that feeling of being a kid at school and I just thought that was such a cool thing to put in a song and I'd never ever heard that before."
NZMM - Jenny Mitchell
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Award-winning songwriter Jenny Mitchell says 'King of Country Music' by Tami Neilson is the song she would love to have written.
The first time she heard it was at a small hall concert in Hawke's Bay.
"I just remember leaning in to make sure that I didn't miss a single word and I just love the lyrics so much.
"I feel every word of this song and I love it so much that my sisters and I covered it at almost every show we played last year."
NZMM - Lou'ana
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Kiwi-Pacific artist Lou'ana says 'Settle Down' by Kimbra is the song she wishes she wrote.
Lou'ana does not remember when she first heard 'Settle Down' but spent a lot of time singing it in her aunt and uncle's vintage second-hand store in Auckland while at university.
"So the song reminds me of those wonderful days, singing on a sunny afternoon to weird taxidermy statues and treasure-hunting humans.
"Kimbra is such an amazing songwriter, musician and vocalist. With this song, I love the way the song sonically and lyrically takes you on a journey ... The way things layer and built and drop out just works so well with the story."
NZMM Martin Phillips
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Martin Phillips from The Chills wishes he wrote 'Offside' by The Bats.
Phillips thinks he must have first heard 'Offside' when it first came out in the 1980s.
Songs by The Bats were often "pretty upbeat" and positive, he says, but 'Offside 'was something else, striking him as a different, beautiful and "lowkey number".
He believes the song is about those days when you're young and just feel a bit hopeless.
"This song seems to be dealing with that."
Samoan composer Dr Opeloge Ah Sam is Head of Arts at Kaitaia College, director of the Kaitaia Community Voices choir and in charge of the Far North Pasifika Festival.
He wishes he’d written the Crowded House classic, Don’t Dream It’s Over, especially as performed by Stan Walker.
“I love the lyrics in the first two lines – ‘there is freedom within, there is freedom without’ – because we live in a world where so many things make us question that idea of freedom.
“For me, it’s really personal one, but also every time I’ve been overseas and I’ve heard that song it reminds me of New Zealand. I really like the Stan Walker version, but I’ve also recently found a version by Nyssa Collins, who was an ex-student of mine at Mangere College. She’s come up with a version in Samoan language, which I love hearing. I love hearing all three languages together. I’m working on that one with my school choir at the moment.”
Wellington-based composer William Philipson has recently landed the job writing the incidental music for long-running TV soap Shortland Street. He’s chosen David Long’s score from the BBC adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries.
“David Long is an incredible New Zealand film composer. It’s a beautiful score, it’s got such such textured sounds. David is really the master of the kind of sparkly ear candy… and the score has the main theme with its odd time signatures, but it’s still so memorable.”