The tour, tracks, and parties with Haim: Bret McKenzie on finding joy in ‘Freak Out City’ as the world “goes missing”
Bret McKenzie has noticed people are starting to go missing in New Zealand.
It’s not just a regional trend, either. It’s seemingly a global epidemic. Missing persons posters are popping up with increasing regularity in train stations, supermarkets, and on social media, sporting pictures of would-be young professionals who have, it would seem, eerily ‘gone missing’.
When they are promptly found, it turns out that they simply descended into a rabbit hole and dissociated.
This represents a rather unusual way for my chat with McKenzie to begin. This was supposed to be a lighthearted Zoom with my once comedy hero and present musical hero. But all too quickly, we descend into the current zeitgeist’s most prevalent sentiment: a creeping feeling that doom and dystopia are upon us.
“It’s really strange to see the sort of isolation and the social cracks that people are falling through because they’re by themselves,” McKenzie says, “I think it’s a big problem.”
“It’s pretty terrifying that it’s becoming not uncommon for there to be a post on social media from someone saying, ‘Have you seen this person?’ That’s pretty insane,” he muses. Thankfully, the evidence I found through police records doesn’t seem to corroborate a deeper seriousness to these increasing social media posts, but the notion of dangerous rabbit holes is a different beast, corroborated by endless research.
McKenzie knows about rabbit holes all too well. In fact, they helped to inform his latest album, Freak Out City. His late father served as the inspiration for the title track. “He passed away a couple of years ago, and he was living on a farm. I think people in rural situations that kind of just spend a lot of evenings on the internet got into some pretty deep rabbit holes around Covid. I think everyone had that around Covid, one of their friends went a bit… off,” McKezie elaborated. That’s never really stopped, and his brow furrows at the implication.
This is a feeling that I’ve been finding increasingly hard to escape: that something is off. In a frenetic state of heightened self-awareness as a journalist, I’m determined to not further fuel the mounting sense of doom that has held sway over the milieu, but article after article, I find it unavoidable to mention ‘these trying times’ or ‘this broken world’. When it’s near enough an interviewee’s opening gambit, it seems I’m not alone.
And then I went on holiday to Belgium. With friends, beer, and a 0–4 football win, the world seemed perfectly fine again. With that in mind, as I listened to Freak Out City on the Eurostar home, I came to realise that it’s another little masterpiece. The reason being: McKenzie captures the same feeling that I felt in Belgium, that life among friends is still, obviously, effing great.
As the artist inadvertently explained a week or so before my departure, even in the song that addresses the unfortunate conspiracies that his ailing father fell for, there’s “an uplifting feeling”. That’s almost how the title arrived for him. Slowly, as he was working on the song, McKenzie began to remember “a party in LA and it was called Freak City”.
“Me and Jemaine [Clement] went there, and we’re hanging out with that band, Haim, you know, the sisters? They were just starting off as a band then. They’ve had a really good few years since,“ he laughs, “and we were just goofing around at that party calling ourselves ‘Blazer Force’, and that party was at Freak City, and I always just loved that name,” he offered.
Then he began to remember other things he adored, like an “awesome” Todd Rundgren concert he went to a few years back, The Beatles, and the beautiful insight of Get Back, and the very act of “becoming a comedian to make light of dark situations”. He was renewed with enthusiasm about what can be possible with art and culture. That sentiment set the tone for the rest of the album, to address real issues “with a light, optimistic touch”.
“All these songs are still very sincere, though. I’m finding it so interesting working with sincerity,” he jokes, adding, “It’s just so unusual for a comedian, I think from my career, but, man, satire can go or irony can go a long way to helping people cope with dealing with a challenging issue.”
The Beatles, he feels, were almost the masters of this. The 1960s were also a frenetically fraught time, but retrospectively, they also looked awash with hope and cohesion. Maybe that’s because the Fab Four were at the helm; they made harmony out of dissonance on a whim. “I loved watching the Beatles documentary, and you saw Paul would sing a line, ‘We can do it’, or something, and then John would go, ‘No, we can’t’. And they’d have, within the song, these opposing ideas. It works really well, I think, for a song to have different perspectives happening.”
You find this motif throughout Freak Out City. For instance, in ‘Bethnal Green Blues’, a man who is tragi-comically squashed to death under a vending machine in a bid to collect a fizzy drink becomes a song about making the most of life. After all, you never know which soda will be your last. This deft piece of writing from the former Flight of the Conchords man, making him the natural heir to Randy Newman‘s ‘Dean of Satire’ crown.
However, above all, this doom-busting outlook is enforced by McKenzie’s band. “I also noticed as I toured the last record – and I toured with this magic New Zealand band who are all like the Wrecking Crew of Wellington – I could feel with the audience that they loved having some positive energy in the show. I liked it as a feeling for the audience,” he says. So, he’s looked to capture even more of it this time out.
Some of the songs were even painstakingly tracked live despite nine musicians being in the room, just to capture that “live feeling”, because live shows are fun, they make us feel connected. They are the antithesis of a startling ‘missing’ poster, making McKenzie‘s music pretty much the perfect antidote to the venomous woe of modern times. “I wanted to capture the energy of the band, and I wanted it to feel like people in the same room playing together,” he said. As The Beatles perhaps proved before him, coming together is the secret to good times, and good times are the secret to, well, good times in a grander sense.
From the inception of the album right through to the tour, the humble Kiwi has looked to bottle that. “It was probably the most fun session I think I’ve ever done, because there’s so much excitement, because everyone’s playing together, and you’re spilling onto each other’s tracks. And at one point, we all got the giggles, and just the whole room sort of broke down laughing, and it’s so fun,” he recalled with a smile. That same outlook is what makes the accompanying tour such a vital experience.
With dates still lying ahead in New York (October 17th and 18th) and London (21st and 22nd), McKenzie is enthused about showcasing a record built on communion in a fittingly communal setting. If Freak Out City is anything to go by, then a wellspring of “hope”, “joy”, “fun”, and songs about Thelma the Unicorn await on the road.
With a tour of Australia and New Zealand yet to be announced, you can check out the remaining dates for 2025 by clicking here.
