Tēnā koutou katoa!
It's been quite a while since we've put out one of these lil updates, so we thought we'd send one out in the lead up to summer and Christmas! We hope you're doing okay out there, it's been one heck of a weird couple of years on planet earth hasn't it? Who would have thought an international pandemic was just around the corner when we were enjoying summer 2019-2020. Wild. While it has been rather gutting to see all the dates of our nationwide He Wai release tour being crossed off in the diary as each week of the unpredictable lockdown continued, and now seeing the summer shows and festivals we were hopeful might get to happen being cancelled too, we have so much to be thankful for. We were soooo looking forward to seeing you all, and for our first trip around the motu with our little miss Olive who would have been 6 months when it was due to start - little did we know she would get into a habit of waking 5-7 times a night for the next couple of months at that point! - perhaps it was a blessing in disguise, having the comfort of home and no need to be anywhere at all at that time :p Our latest project 'He Wai' was released into the world on September 3rd, an EP of 5 waiata inspired and guided by our relationship to te taiao and what we can learn from it about ourselves and each other - stories of our waters. We had fun celebrating the release from home, and are super thankful for our publicist Cheree Ridder who did an amazing job helping the music find it's fins - here's a link to our media page on the website if you're interested! Spotify informed us we had 124% more listeners once the EP dropped compared to the previous month too - thank youuuu for listening! Apparently there's 11K of you jammin' our tunes which this lil duo is pretty stoked about.
It's been a happy time here. Instead of doing all the live shows, we filmed a live vid for each of the waiata on He Wai which are over
HERE on our FB page. We've been writing too and are excited to announce we have a lil Christmas EP coming out this December! But mostly, we've just been enjoying all this time we've had to spend with Olive, and each other. The early days of parenthood have been an absolute joy, we love this little bean so very much!
Thankful for NZ Music Commission who funded the making of our He Wai Educational resource, which we share in schools - and have been able to do a bunch as online workshops this lockdown. Also thankful to NZ on Air who recently funded the making of a music video which is for Tohorā (last track of the new EP) - which we'll be sharing in the new year before a bunch of shows we can't WAIT to announce!! The amazing film directors who made the gorgeous video for
Tauhou back in 2019 are filming this one - it's guna be spesh!!
We're so looking forward to being able to hug our families and see our friends and travel again to perform live and see YOU all again. But this lil duo/trio are doing good and we just thought we'd drop you a line to say hello. We hope you're all doing okay :)
Aroha nui e hoa mā
Aro,
Emily, Charles and miss Olive x
Oh and just one final reminder that we have plenty of the new He Wai CD's available - Christmas is comin'
Grab yours HERE
😉
🎄🎄🎄
