No matter how far I roam, no matter where I am in the world, something always draws me back to Aotearoa. There’s something about landing at Auckland Airport after crossing oceans, and just as the plane descends, Loyal by Dave Dobbyn begins to play. It’s happened a hundred times, maybe not literally, but close enough. The line “there’s a woman with her hands singing Haere Mai” hits me straight in the heart, every single time.
I’ve been mulling over that connection, music, place, memory, ever since I saw Don McGlashan perform a concert with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra a couple of months ago. It was, unsurprisingly, magnificent. Afterwards, I approached Don and told him how much his music has meant to me over the years.
I grew up in Wellington, and now live in Canterbury. When Don sings about someone leaving the Hutt Valley for the capital, or about the bloke running a sporting goods shop just around the corner from Cathedral Square, it feels painfully, beautifully familiar. It’s like he’s telling my story. Whether with The Front Lawn or The Mutton Birds, his songs pull me back 20, sometimes 30 years. And like all journeys traced by memory, they leave me misty-eyed, longing for simpler days, people who are gone, versions of myself I used to be.
That night, I started wondering what it must be like for someone like Don, who writes songs that bring strangers close to tears. I dabbled in a few instruments back in school, and studied music in high school. I wasn’t good, quite the opposite in fact. My music teacher at High School, one of New Zealand’s most highly respected music educators, Shona Murray, undoubtedly despaired of me. But I learned enough to feel the beauty when I heard it, whether in Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture, Dobbyn’s Loyal, or countless tunes that touch the soft places inside me.
Music stirs something in me. For others, it might be literature or visual art. I’ve been lucky to wander through some of the world’s best galleries. Yet whenever I stop at a portrait, I find myself more curious about the person’s history than the brushstrokes themselves. Literature tugs at me differently. My favourite book is Wuthering Heights. That one does not let me leave dry-eyed. Looking at Charlotte Brontë’s portrait at London’s National Portrait Gallery started my preoccupation with the Brontë sisters and their lives.
Carrying all this around in my thoughts, I messaged an old friend. He’s an accomplished musician and has played with leading orchestras, toured with a famous New Zealand band, and scored for theatre. In earlier years, he even performed with the Army Band, representing New Zealand at official functions around the world.
I wanted to know: when your work is about creating beauty, does it ever become ordinary? Does earning a living at it make it feel routine? Does deep familiarity with the craft, the theory, the industry, the endless hours of practice eventually strip away the magic?
My friend’s answer surprised me with its warmth. He’s been playing since he was six, he said, so there was never a sudden moment of “deep connection”, no lightswitch. It’s been a slow burner, especially with the brass instruments he plays, where you make the sound yourself (which, he added, makes it even more satisfying). These days, he’s involved in just about every dimension of music: creating, recording, teaching, performing, and still turning up as a punter at gigs to simply enjoy it.
For him, knowing more doesn’t diminish the beauty. If anything, it adds to it. He talked about playing in the Christchurch Symphony and thinking about what certain composers suffered for their art. He mentioned Troy Kingi, seven albums in seven years, three still to go to complete his 10/10/10 project, each in a different genre. “Mental!” he said. “Inspiring.”
He wasn’t trying to make a tidy point. But what came through was this: the theory, the history, the skills, the industry knowledge, none of it makes music smaller. It makes the world of music richer. And he feels very lucky, he said, to be part of it on so many dimensions.
And there it was: the arc of the story. The opening image, the plane returning home to Auckland, the familiar notes of Loyal greeting me, becomes more than nostalgia. It’s a snapshot of something universal: how certain songs are small portals that transport us home, across time, across loss, to moments when we felt most ourselves.
Writing this, I’m reminded that beauty isn’t in the object, it’s in the invitation. Poetry of place, the resonance of memory, a voice that knows your story better than you do. That’s what music gives us. And maybe, when something that seems bound to routine, like a beloved song at arrival airport volumes, still has the power to make us tear up, that’s proof enough that beauty is never dimmed by familiarity. It’s renewed every time we look for the heart underneath.
Beautifully written