Jordyn with a Why: Putting the ‘why’ in waiata

Sunday, 6 July 2025

From personal grief to soulful healing, rising star Jordyn Rapana ‒ better known as Jordyn with a Why ‒ has found her voice at the intersection of love, justice and language reclamation. André Chumko reports.

Love, justice and the reclamation of te reo Māori.

Those three things guide every decision rising star Jordyn with a Why makes with regard to her own life.

“That is genuinely my why,” the Auckland-based singer-songwriter says over the phone.

Born Jordyn Morgan to Luke and Marieta Kaa-Morgan, and raised in south Auckland’s Ōtara in a mixed Māori and Samoan family, the 32-year-old, whose iwi include Whāingaroa, Ngāti Koata and Samoa, has walked a somewhat unconventional path into the world of music.

The recording artist, who is now married and has the surname Rapana, has, over the last decade of her life, been reconnecting to her heritage alongside her wider whānau.

Growing up with a church minister father who also wrote music, Rapana remembers always singing together with her community in worship teams as a young person.

But it wasn’t until 2021 that Rapana released her first single as a solo artist, Te Ao Mārama.

“[I had] no intent at all for it to become a career, it was more of just a personal process,” she says.

In 2022 she dropped Brown Melodies, which to date has more than 2.5 million streams on Spotify.

In 2024, after meeting several producers, securing funding and engaging in reo Māori songwriting programmes run by music rights management organisation APRA AMCOS, she released her first album, the soulful Hibiscus Moon, Love & Justice.

“It’s kind of just been like a snowball effect … I’ve just been riding this wave, and now music is mostly what I do in my life.”

You wouldn’t know it from her upbeat and highly infectious energy, but Rapana’s journey to becoming a public-facing artist started from a place of deep grief and sadness.

Te Ao Mārama, her first single, was written after she experienced a miscarriage. She says writing the song helped her navigate the process.

“It’s such a sad song, but in a really dark and beautiful way it kind of birthed a whole other career. I just needed a process. … It opened an opportunity, which is really beautiful when I think about it.”

Te Ao Mārama loosely translates to the world of light, or the world of understanding.

“It’s the space that I like to be,” Rapana says. “Caught between the tensions … in those spaces where it’s both beautiful and a bit sad or frustrated, but also freeing.”

She says the overwhelmingly positive response she received to the track’s raw, heartbreakingly honest lyrics opened up a space for conversation about miscarriage.

The release of the song happened to coincide with policy changes around leave allowances that were announced for women and families who experience miscarriage.

After the song’s release, many women reached out to Rapana to share their own stories of grief.

“A lot of wāhine (women) are really expected to move on quite quickly, like you’re [supposed to] get back to work,” Rapana says.

“It became a track for a lot of wāhine to be processing their own grief. For some it was miscarriage. But then for some other wāhine, it was actually not being able to conceive.”

Writing the song was both natural and necessary for Rapana’s own creativity and coping, during the pandemic lockdown period in 2020.

One year earlier, in 2019, she was studying a year-long full immersion reo Māori course at Te Wānanga Takiura in Auckland, and learning about the more fulsome Māori understanding of grief.

Her language studies have inspired her other songwriting, too ‒ for instance, the stories of dancing atua (gods) Hineruhi and Tānerore, influenced her uber-successful Brown Melodies.

Rapana still takes language classes today, and says her songwriting and music has become more unlocked because of it. Many of her newer tracks are sung bilingually, with a mix of both te reo and English lyrics.

She says it’s almost as if she’s recording her language reclamation journey in real time.

“I’m just writing it with what I’ve got right now… The ideas, quality and the stories that I pull from are just so much richer because of this journey,” she says. “Without this particular journey, there is no Jordyn with a Why.”

It has also positively affected the lives of her family.

Rapana lives in Auckland in a reo-speaking household with her husband Thomas and their two sons, Toa-Awanuiārangi, 8, and Pakotāiko, 3. The latter is a native speaker, whose first language is te reo.

“That’s a different kind of wealth. … It’s really cool to just be exactly who we are right now and to know that’s enough, and to know that has impact, that it’s valuable and that it can contribute to a wider movement.”

Whatever music she creates, Rapana says she wants to tell something honest.

“It doesn’t have to be sad or dark to be honest. Sometimes I think celebration can be really beautiful and vulnerable,” she says.

Her sound blends soul melodies with pop, RnB and other influences, including an undeniable 80s and 90s vibe that feels contemporary, fresh and culturally relevant.

She cites Luther Vandross and Motown artists as some of her musical influences.

“They’re really honest and quite simple actually in their lyrical content, but you can feel it ‒ they sing like they really mean it. They sing it like they experienced it, like they lived it ‒ so it feels true and it feels convincing. And I think that’s always the basis from which I write,” Rapana says.

“It’s lived, it’s true. I know it tangibly, I know it in my body, I know it in my experience.”

Her album Hibiscus Moon, Love & Justice took its title from Rapana’s nana Taulapapa Fuala’au, who died in 2022.

A chief back home in Samoa, Fuala’au made the sacrificial decision to migrate to urban New Zealand, working in a hospital as a cleaner in the 1970s to provide a better life for her descendants.

Like many other Polynesian families, Fuala’au’s property was adorned with hibiscus and gardenias.

Still to this day, Rapana thinks of her grandmother’s beauty when she sees a hisbiscus flower.

As for the moon reference, Rapana says it’s consistent and true, also like Fuala’au ‒ someone who orbited around her family.

Love and justice, meanwhile, are two guiding principles for the artist.

Since the album’s release she’s toured the country over summer, playing at festivals including WOMAD, and other gigs far and wide. She loves performing with live bands.

At this year’s Aotearoa Music Awards Rapana was nominated for Best Māori Artist and the Mana Reo award, the latter for her waiata (song) Reia.

Her journey has even taken her to Wales alongside fellow rising Māori stars MĀ and MOHI ‒ the trio represented Aotearoa in May this year at the Focus international music festival.

Rapana drew parallels between Wales’ purposeful, deliberate reclamation of the Welsh language to our homegrown efforts with te reo.

“Every sign is first in Welsh then in English, but it’s been that way for years. … When you’re walking down the streets, mostly you hear people speaking Welsh ‒ it’s really normal. It was really beautiful to then give imagination to what Aotearoa could be,” she says.

Rapana ‒ who also teaches at a wānanga ‒ wants to keep normalising te reo Māori in mainstream music, and continue exploring and pushing into her own sound.

A self-described activist at heart, Rapana coined her artist name because of everyone spelling her given name wrong when she was younger. “I feel like I just grew into the name.”

As for her next project? She’s still in the brainstorming stages. “What would it sound like? What would the topics be? … That’s the space that I’m in.” She teases that she has a few singles ready for release later this year.

Rapana is thankful to Māori artists who helped to carve the path she walks today, including Waiata Anthems champion Dame Hinewehi Mohi.

But she wants to take the Māori music movement even further ‒ to the world.

“I’m so confident that we’ll get there … There are so many indigenous communities that we can relate to globally. We just have to lead people like distributors into that imagination and into that idea ‒ that actually, we’re a global community,” she says.

Rapana says she’s an optimist, and someone who naturally leans into hope.

She says she could not have achieved all she has in music so far if she tried to enter the industry earlier than when she did.

“Everything is so timing-based for me. I just didn’t have the same confidence or comfort in my own skin. … I feel really in my bag right now, just doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”