Tu meke music

The boys of Little Bushman stoked with their latest album. Photo: Dominika Zielinska - www.dominikazielinska.com

What happens when you take four leading  musicians and put them in a studio with no restraints, timelines or goals? If those musicians are Warren Maxwell, Rick Cranson, and Tom and Joe Callwood – the answer is sonic splendour. Melody Thomas talks with Maxwell and Cranson about their latest great achievement.
LITTLE Bushman is a prime example of how too many chefs can enhance the broth. All legends in their own right, the band’s members somehow combine forces to produce something greater than even their four parts would have you expect. In making Te Oranga, their third studio album, they’ve taken “complete anal control” of the process for the first time; recording, producing and mixing in Maxwell’s own Stonefeather studios.
“We’ve been able to really get inside a lot of the sounds, and purge what our collective, creative, cerebral hard drive has been trying to get out. We’re all very happy with it, which for four very fussy and pedantic musicians is quite an accomplishment,” says singer Warren Maxwell.
Drummer Rick Cranson agrees.
“He’s dead right. We’re fussy to the point of, ‘Actually I’m not happy with the tops of my snare drum, we need to spend a day on this’,” he says.
A luxury they couldn’t have afforded in any other studio.
“If we’d had to pay for this with real money, in real time? I don’t own a home but all the other boys would’ve had to mortgage theirs. We’ve really lucky,” says Cranson.
When we speak, Maxwell’s at Stonefeather, (a play on ‘Featherston’, where the studio is), wearing the gumboots he puts on to feed his chickens. The home he shares with his partner Ange, their two kids, and his Mum (in her own granny-flat), is just down the road.
“I could walk to work in my pyjamas and a dressing gown and no-one would even blink. It’s great, you can really let go of all the bullshit like aesthetics and judgement, and just do your own thing.”
The Bushman’s ‘thing’, relies largely on exploration.  Fans will have heard some of the new songs played live, but on Te Oranga they take a completely different form.
“Listening live at a pub or a festival, as opposed to at home on an iPod, are very different environments. Similarly, a song can be written in so many different ways,” says Maxwell.
“It’s been a two year process, but they’ve changed so much that we’ve basically got whole new songs to get rehearsed and ready to play,” says Cranson, who admits he’s not usually nervous this early on.
Te Oranga was made with positive intentions in mind, but Little Bushman songs will probably always venture into darker musings on the political and social worlds.
Maxwell: “We find it really difficult to write lots of happy, ‘Wiggles’ type songs. There’s some innate thing in humanity that likes to hear about darker issues, so if you’re gonna write about positive stuff, you’ve gotta have little dark twists in there.”
Little Bushman Te Oranga release, The Garden Club, April 8.