The questionnaire: Steve Abel

Thursday, 15 September 2016

Steve Abel, 46, is an Auckland alt-folk balladeer and 'singer-songwriter of the truth'. His much delayed third album Luck/Hope is out now on his own Kin'sland Records label. It's the first release since highly praised 2008 album Flax Happy, and features contributions from local heroes Milan Borich, Gareth Thomas, Buzz Moller and Ed McWilliams and American musician, Jolie Holland, among others.

What are you plugging right now?

'My new album Luck/ Hope, which has been eight years in the making. The first recordings were made in way back in November 2009 in New York, but then there were all sorts of things getting in the way. My mum died in 2010, and my son was born in 2011. I had this interesting experience where songs I'd written earlier seemed to have a prophetic nature, as if they're a premonition of things to unfold. This album's full of existential songs about life/ death/ birth stuff, but not in a way that's too overt or literal, though the song First Part is specifically about my mum dying. But yeah, it's really liberating, finally getting this out there. I'm very proud of it. Part of the creative process, I think, is that you need to purge yourself of stuff that's sat around too long in order to feel free to come up with other things. And I've already started making a few demos for the next one.'

The single, Best Thing, is very special, with superb vocal harmonies and violin from Jolie Holland. A brilliant video, too, from local director, Florian Habicht…

'I wrote that song nearly 20 years ago and it's taken all this time to get a version of it I liked enough to release, but over that time I've sung it at weddings and funerals, and it seems to evoke a lot of different things to different people. The video was entirely Florian's reaction to that song. He came up with that idea, with those two lovers in a room together, and the intimacy in it feels really authentic, somehow. He met those two actors in Berlin and shot it there, and I'm really stoked with how it turned out. As for Jolie, I went to one of her gigs in Auckland and gave her a copy of my first album, which she really liked, and then a while later she was back in the country we sang a few songs together that ended up on Flax Happy. She got me up on stage to sing a couple of songs in London one time, too, then I was coming back through New York in 2009 and we recorded five songs then in (Tom Waits' guitarist) Mark Ribot's practice space. The other four on this album were recorded back here much more recently.'

What's your idea of perfect happiness?

'Performing and writing again is just that for me, really. I've had such a long and distracted hiatus that playing for people in an intimate setting seems marvellous again. It always brings me a huge amount of joy.'

Which living person do you most admire?

'I'd have to choose Harry Belafonte. My roots are in the Velvet Undergound/ post-punk school, but I'm also really interested in that crooner tradition of people like Belafonte, Bing Crosby and Sinatra, and this beautiful, heartfelt, subtle approach they often had to delivering a lyric. I'm so weary of the loud over-singing you get on American TV talent shows. I admire Belafonte's politics, too, as a civil rights activist.'

Ever stolen anything?

'Yes, actually, though I'm not proud of it. I lost my money belt when I was hitching up the east coast of Australia in 1997. I had almost no money, so I went into this dairy, bought some things and stuck some other things in my pocket. It wasn't very rock'n'roll, to be honest. It was stuff like yoghurt. But I was hungry and I was broke.'

Which living person do you most despise?

'I guess a lot of people might choose Donald Trump, but I'm more offended by Hillary Clinton. Trump's a very dangerous buffoon, of course, but Hillary frustrates the hell out of me because she represents the failure of the left to provide an authentic alternative. It's like we're reliving that inter-war period between 1919 and 1938, when there was an ugly rise in extremism while the left struggled to get its act together. To me, Hillary represents a missed opportunity when we need a really galvanising figure on the left. I also loathe Simon Cowell. A friend of mine calls him the Taliban of Music, such is the level of destruction those emotionally manipulative, anti-artistic shows like X Factor and American Idol have had on popular music.'