For Geneva Alexander-Marsters (Ngāti Ruapani mai Waikaremoana, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairoa, Aitutaki, Palmerston) being in the throws of new love often feels like being out at sea.
When we sit down in a Ponsonby cafe to talk about her new single T(M)²I (pronounced Tangaroa Made Me Ill), released today under her musical moniker Geneva AM, oceanic shades surround us. We’re perched on plush cushions in an energetic hue. Much brighter than the dark choppy waters she found around her when she started composing the tempered track.
“I fell in love,” she says of the song's inspiration. “With a man called Mike Hall.”
“He runs a skate label called Arcade and is from Waiheke Island. I would end up on my way there in the middle of the dark sea at night time, after work. You always kind of go a bit crazy when you first meet someone, you want to see them all the time.”
She’s incredibly composed, so it’s hard to imagine the former bFM radio broadcaster, model (she's worked with like-minded brands Penny Sage, Ingrid Starnes and Gloria) and actor turned award-winning vocalist, who’s widely praised for her bilingual approach to songwriting, being anything but in full control.
“I was messing around with making beats on the 40 minute ferry trip on this particularly stormy night thinking, ‘What am I up to? I don't even like being this immersed in the ocean, I’m not a seafaring girl. I’m a sensitive creative type.’ I was playing around with that really foreboding Dracula sound and that's how I ended up with the solo part, it’s a very sparse beat.”
The beat may be sparse but the feelings weren’t. “The song itself is about the beginning of the relationship, everything’s a bit new and exciting. I use the analogy of the light changing. We would just sit and watch the sunset, suddenly it was dark. In the rural setting it’s really dark, there’s the moon and stars and it’s very romantic. But I wouldn’t even notice the sun had set because we’d been talking so much. It was like we were rushing to get to know each other and so the first line is, ‘The sun is setting and I didn’t even notice’.”
To extend the metaphor, it's about moving through the ambiguous darkness of the night – the uncertainty of past relationships and fears she was hopeless in terms of love. “Coming through it and seeing the morning light again in his eyes. Feeling safe and secure and in love.”
Geneva wrote and composed the song secretly, mostly in 20 minute bursts while Mike was out running. She was shy about showing him because, she says, “it gets all a bit gushy when you’re giving this romantic gesture. There’s always this initial fear in your heart - what if they don’t like it? I've poured my whole heart and soul into this!”
Now safe in the knowledge that he loves it, and her (the couple have a son, Kiwa, who is two-years-old), she’s releasing it to the listening public on Valentine’s Day.
“Initially I didn't want anyone to know about it, songs are very personal, you relinquish them to the public and then suddenly it becomes about someone else but that's the gift of music as well… slowly I’ve been like maybe more people should feel this. Even if they’re not with anyone. Especially on Valentine’s, which can be so cruel. There’s so many different types of love”
In our current socio-political climate she thinks it's especially important to show that love is prevalent and powerful. “It's what I'm putting all my energy into. As a musician I think it's really important to acknowledge that there is a certain power in music. If you’re going to put out sad songs, sometimes that comes back at you and that's not a great experience playing them over and over again.”
There is joy in playing some things back though. The music video for the track was shot partly by director Eddy Fifield at the family’s Aotearoa home and is intercut with self-taped footage of a family vacation last year to visit Kyoto-based friends who took them to the Naoshima and Teshima Art Islands
“Initially it was going to be a montage compilation of vacation footage but on the way there I saw the movie Aftersun, and it’s such a beautiful film about a certain time. The song itself relates to a certain memory and a certain time – I really wanted to have the impression that I was looking back at the footage but instead of it being bittersweet, it's just sweet.”
Just as Sophie realises in Aftersun, parenthood has heightened new mum Geneva to the delicate complexity of the parent-child relationship. “There are a lot of mixed feelings when you’re coming into your own body and mind. Turning into a grown up and noticing the humanity of your parents and realising, ‘man you don't really have it together like I thought you did… It's a real life lesson having kids. I was always aware that at some point, if I did have them, I’d have to show them my humanity because they do think that you’re perfect.”
There are two sides to every relationship, every story and the differences in perspective is something Geneva thinks a lot about a lot. She’s cognisant of the fact that though February 14 is a day where public discourse centres around love, it is also the day Captain Cook died, so there is also a post-colonial lens to the day. Though she initially wrote T(M)²I in English, she worked with Mātanga Reo Dr Tātare Jeremy MaCleod (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Arawa, Ngāti Raukawa te au ki te Tonga, Rangitāne) on a version in Māori.
Geneva knows just as there is power in music, there is power in words too, and in knowing how to wield them. “Knowing a different language in any regard is knowing not only the words but also the feeling. This attack on changing the public identity of te reo Māori is so backward because what you’re doing is stripping the cultural identity of the country,” she says. “It’s not just Māori, it’s everyone. Everyone is connected to this place and there are these names that exist and deleting them means that you're deleting the existence of the country.”
These revisionist histories aren’t a concept that were dreamed up with a change of government. Their shadows can be seen too in the press images that accompany Geneva’s latest release, depicting a seemingly bucolic picnic at Maungakiekie One Tree Hill. Look past the serene picnic set and there’s more there: a watermelon and a towering obelisk.
“The idea for the picnic came about when I was thinking about the many different global genocides that are happening at the moment,” she explains. “Take the obelisk that stands on top of One Tree Hill. That used to be one of the most populated pa sites in Auckland and the land was then turned into farmland and gifted back to the city, but not to the people who used to live there.
“The obelisk has an inscription that is a memorial for the Māori people, made with good intentions but its dedicated to the noble savage, and the nobility of the Māori people because they thought they were going to die out because of influenza and war, AKA genocide,” says Geneva. “They didn’t. I wanted to have a family picnic in front of it to show, ‘hey, we’re still here’.”
“It was a beautiful, victorious picnic. It was set up so well that tourists were coming up and asking if they could take photos in it.”
There’s an obelisk in the T(M)²I video as well, one in Naoshima inscribed with the phrase ‘May Peace Prevail on Earth’ to commemorate World War II. Returning home Geneva was surprised to find one on Waiheke too.
“With mass death comes these memorials, these lamentations of grief. It is not natural to want to kill people so much, they’re always really sorry about it but they still gain something from war. It doesn’t happen by accident. It’s very intentional. Just as much as love is. War and love.”
