Below is the transcript of the above interview, which originally aired over the KALX airwaves on November 11, 2022.
MR GREEN JEANS: [00:00:00] I’m Mr. Green Jeans and I’m interviewing
BRET MCKENZIE: Bret McKenzie from Flight of the Conchords
MR GREEN JEANS: But currently touring as
BRET MCKENZIE: Just Bret McKenzie
MR GREEN JEANS: In support of his new album
BRET MCKENZIE: Songs Without Jokes
MR GREEN JEANS: and he will be playing in the Bay Area on
BRET MCKENZIE: I don’t know. Soon. Really soon.
MR GREEN JEANS: I think the ninth
BRET MCKENZIE: is it the Wednesday? I think it’s Wednesday.
MR GREEN JEANS: I figured because you are a comedy legend, I would pick some of the funnier questions that I had prepared for today.
BRET MCKENZIE: Okay, great. Yeah. Cool.
MR GREEN JEANS: You received an Academy Award for “Man or Muppet”.
What’s the next puppet troop you’d like to work with and what award do you think you’ll deserve?
BRET MCKENZIE: You know what I would like to work with? Emmet Otter, which is this really rare Jim Henson Christmas special. It was, there were no humans. It was all puppets. And, the award. Hmm, I dunno. I dunno. I’m pretty good with the [00:01:00] awards. I’m set, I’m done.
MR GREEN JEANS: What is the flat white and does it hail from Australia or New Zealand?
BRET MCKENZIE: The flat white is an old type of coffee that was really big in New Zealand in the nineties. And yeah. Is it in San Francisco? Do you guys get flat whites now?
MR GREEN JEANS: Absolutely not.
BRET MCKENZIE: It’s a black coffee with like, it’s kind of like a latte with less milk, but yeah, it’s a big New Zealand coffee drink. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: And you contend that the origin is New Zealand. Australia says it’s theirs.
BRET MCKENZIE: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Bit of competition, I think it probably is New Zealand to be honest. Yeah. We had this weird thing in Wellington where there were a couple of dudes just started importing coffee in the eighties and they’d been to Italy and, they started shipping it in and so the coffee culture kicked off late eighties and, yeah. Started, it was pretty, pretty old school back there. The good coffee scene. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: Your friend and long-term collaborator. Jemaine Clements [00:02:00] name is spelled J-E-M-A-I-N-E, with no R. And you’re named Bret as in BRET with no second “T”. What Mythical creature stole your letters?
BRET MCKENZIE: Hmm? Yeah. The extra letter dinosaur.
I don’t know, man. Yeah, that’s true. There were the secret, the silent letters were just cut off. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: Is that common in New Zealand?
BRET MCKENZIE: Yeah. don’t know, yeah, don’t know it’s not, no, it’s not that. Mind you, Jemaine’s, the only person I know called Jemaine and I dunno any other Bret with one T. So now very, very unique. Very unique.
MR GREEN JEANS: You’ve been Figwit and Lindir the Lord of the Rings franchisees previous installations, will you feature in the Rings of Power and what silly little elvish name will fans give you?
BRET MCKENZIE: Yeah, so I was in the first Lord of the Rings films as an elf, and then the Hobbit as another elf.
And the fans gave me a name Figwit, which stood for “Frodo is great… Who [00:03:00] is that?” And I was really just, I didn’t even have a line, I was just in the background. And it was sort of an online joke. It kind of blew up into an odd spot, international odd spot story. Yeah, I dunno yet haven’t, Amazon haven’t asked me to be in the new one, but, I think they’re still filming, so Yeah. Maybe there’s a chance I’ll get to show up on that.
MR GREEN JEANS: Do you get asked often about this still?
BRET MCKENZIE: Yeah, it does pop up ’cause it’s such a funny little story and yeah, it often pops up as like, what was this thing? A lord of the Rings and ’cause Lord of the Rings was such a big thing in New Zealand.
It was such a big, part of New Zealand’s film history . in a way, like when I came to America and started doing shows here with Jemaine, the reference point was Lord of the Rings. People knew New Zealanders, they didn’t know New Zealanders, but they knew what New Zealand looked like. They knew that New Zealand looked like Middle Earth.
And so you’d get in a taxi and they’d say New Zealand, Lord of the Rings, you know, that’s what their reference point was. And then Jemaine and I did the Flight of the Conchords TV show and that was what was cool about that was it. Got it. Let Americans see what New Zealanders are [00:04:00] like as a culture and the people how we talk and so that in a way Conchords and Lord of the Rings two of the, couple of the big kind of reference points for America, for New Zealand’s.
MR GREEN JEANS: Speaking of New Zealand, in a 2006 New Zealand Herald interview conducted while you were still in the process of developing the Flight of the Conchord’s HBO show, you said. I quote, profile wise, it means we will probably be recognized in the street maybe once or twice. End quote. Have you been recognized a second time yet?
BRET MCKENZIE: I have been. Oh, sorry. Yes, I’ve been recognized twice now. Yeah, in America. So, yeah, it blew up. It really blew up. The TV show blew up.
MR GREEN JEANS: Do you have any good stories of being stopped on the street by fans?
BRET MCKENZIE: Yeah, I guess when the show was was on tv, there was I’m walking around New York people would sort of follow us around.
That was quite, quite hilarious thinking that we couldn’t see them trying to sort of sneakily follow us like a fan and like a fan in the show. And then one [00:05:00] other thing that’s quite cool was people started dressing up as us for Halloween. And people still do that, still get pictures sent of, just last night I saw one from this Halloween with someone pretty, outrageous helmet hair costume based on me. It was pretty funny.
MR GREEN JEANS: What did you dress as for Halloween this year?
BRET MCKENZIE: This Halloween. You know what, we were on the road and we stopped in a place in Nebraska. It was pretty low key. We ended up going bowling with, the crew and, just didn’t seem to have, have much of a costume scene going on. I was dressed as myself. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: So, I, I don’t wanna overly focus on your past work because I know you are touring in support of a new album. So I wanna ask you about Songs without Jokes. So. How is this new album, Songs without Jokes, a culmination of themes, both lyrical and musical that you’ve been developing throughout your career?
BRET MCKENZIE: My new record is something completely new for me. I’ve been working on obviously Conchords for several years, and then I started [00:06:00] working on films like the Muppet Films and various TV and, you know, film projects. I did some songs for The Simpsons and all really fun, cool jobs and after just a couple years ago, I thought, oh man, it’d be quite fun to do something different, you know, and, that’s really where this album came from.
It just, it was an idea to try something new and something different. And it’s always important, I think as a creative person to keep exploring new things. And so yeah, this was an album where I kind of challenged myself to not concentrate on the jokes and let the songs be more emotion based or, and about an experience or a feeling and see what that, what happens. And it came out as this kind of seventies, well started off as quite seventies. Then we tried to make it more contemporary and it ended up being eighties. And yeah, it’s kinda a seventies, eighties, retro kind of vibe. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: They say when it comes to acting that a lot of the best dramatic performances are from comedic actors, you [00:07:00] see people like Bill Hader, for example, who had a long career in comedy and then when they branched out into something dramatic, it was received well with a lot of acclaim. Do you think the same holds true when it comes to music, that your history of working in more comedic spaces has prepped you in a certain way for a new more? I wouldn’t say serious, but less comedic, less humor approach.
BRET MCKENZIE: Yeah. Yeah. Less comedic. Okay. Yeah, still the music’s still quite playful. I don’t know. I think it’s all similar stuff, like you say, comedy actors who then do dramatic acting. One thing that’s good about a comedy actors is, they know how to play, they know how to improvise and they know how to make things come to life.
One thing I think you see often is they try too hard to be serious, you might get a comedy actor who’s doing their first serious role and you see them trying so hard. And I think the reality, once you, then you, I think then they realize, oh, you don’t actually need to try that hard to, you know, and in a way, the same thing’s happened to me on this record.
I was like, I was trying really hard. I was like, [00:08:00] oh, I’m gonna try and not do jokes. And it’s funny coming out the other side of it, now I’m writing new songs and working on a new record and I just kinda lied. I’m not, I’m not so fussed about whether there’s, to me now, the songs are all kind of, you can have songs that are not comedy, songs that are still funny.
Lots of my heroes, like Harry Nelson and , you know, Leonard Cohen and Randy Newman, they have these songs and then they have a couple of lines in there that are really funny. So I’ve kind of like, I’m not so fussed about it anymore about. I was quite on this album, I was like quite obsessive, like no Dick jokes.
And I probably, you know, I’m not really, I think I’ve written enough songs with dick jokes in them for one life. But I’ve definitely lightened up and now I’m kind of happy to explore comedy and music and let it all kind of merge together.
MR GREEN JEANS: That’s amazing. I’m just, I’m very impressed.
I gotta admit, I really like the album. I listened to it over the last few nights to get ready for the interview.
BRET MCKENZIE: Oh, cool. Thanks Tohar. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: I really did hear the influence from Nelson. What, where do you think that you were drawing a lot of the inspiration, not just [00:09:00] musically, but what was the impetus to write this album as opposed to like your previous works?
BRET MCKENZIE: Well, all the, a lot of the, my previous work has been really story specific or Conchords songs. We really wrote them for comedy clubs. You know, we, we’d write the song and then we’d try in a comedy club and if parts were funny they kept in, if they weren’t funny, we rewrote them or changed them. Whereas this was different, I was writing, I didn’t have a kind of a theme or an idea. It wasn’t like a concept album beyond it not being a comedy album. And I was kind of drawn towards, I did it in Los Angeles and I was really drawn towards, I kind of loved that LA Studio sound and I worked with a lot of amazing session musicians who I met doing film work.
And so it was something about those seventies and eighties that time for me is quite romantic in the recording industry. It seems like to me like a time when a lot of artists that I like achieved some really amazing things in the studio that now a lot of recordings are made in [00:10:00] bedrooms and at home and on, you know, I was kind of excited about the idea of working with the musicians in kind of a retro way and, colluding, yeah, that was part of the attraction to it.
But the actual songs themselves, I really just collected. Fragments of songs and pieces that I’d over time and, I’d write songs at nights and little ideas. And then the next day I’d listen back to them and be like, oh, that’s kind of cool. And I’d keep working on them. And, yeah so that part of it was, I wasn’t so on a clear mission of what I was gonna, what the music.
I didn’t really, didn’t know what the album would sound like until I finished it. Nice. All that phone’s ringing. Hang on. Hey, sorry I’m in a hotel. They’re trying to kick me out of the room.
MR GREEN JEANS: Tell me about video kid.
BRET MCKENZIE: Oh yeah, video kid was a music project I did. God, that’s quite a long time ago. Maybe
MR GREEN JEANS: 2004 I believe.
BRET MCKENZIE: Four. Okay. So it was a time when I was doing a lot of music. I played in a lot of bands in Wellington, as well [00:11:00] as doing Conchords. I was in a really big band called The Black Seeds, which was like a reggae kind of dub festival band, and we toured a lot, toured for years actually playing festivals.
And around that time, all my friends and I, we all started getting pro tools, little computer bricks and learning how to record. And Wellington at the time was cool, we could get cheap studio spaces. So, we rented this warehouse and we all had like, about 10 of us had, you know, spaces in it. And we all started just making music and recording and learning how to use drum machines and synths.
And that was my first experience in the sort of playing with computers, making music, and yeah, I put together a little album of kind of synthy, kind of, kind of jams. It was, it was really fun, but I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing. But, it was fun.
MR GREEN JEANS: Do you think you’ll ever return to the video kid moniker and try to revive that sort of sound? Or do you think you’ve matured past it?
BRET MCKENZIE: Probably, probably. I don’t think so. I mean, I, I do really, I really like it, but, I mean this, it’s funny, the similar things I’ve always liked, I’ve always liked synths and drum [00:12:00] machines and songs and stories and narrative songs. , Some, a lot of it came through in Conchords as well as well, you know, like robots, like you talked about.
That song was kind of synthy and, and then, the Boom King was this song kinda like a sort of dance Hall song. So all these songs that were kind of these styles that I liked and then we then parodied and Conchords and, but I still really love the, sounds like it’s a lot of the music that Jemaine and I parodied. It also came from a place where we really loved it.
So I actually loved David Bowie’s music. I love yeah, a lot of the genres that we sort of copied and played with it ’cause, you know, we were fans of that music too. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: I was gonna say, Bowie’s in Space is right up there on my favorite of all time probably Parody Music, I think Bowie’s in Space.
BRET MCKENZIE: Yeah, that was a fun song that one started off was actually Jemaine and I were driving around Wellington and there’s a student radio station there that I used to play on a lot and, you know, friends DJ’ed on and [00:13:00] they were running a competition. You know, we had to call in. And, we were just driving around and we called in and pretended to be David Bowie to enter the competition like, hello, it’s Bowie here, it’s Bowie. I want to enter the competition. And then, and that just cracked us up so much. We kept on being Bowie. We just kept on being Bowie for a couple of days. And that’s when we started writing that song, just pretending to be Bowie.
MR GREEN JEANS: So good.
BRET MCKENZIE: Yeah, it’s pretty fun.
MR GREEN JEANS: it’s funny that you mentioned student radio. I have here another question for you. If you were a college dj, what would your DJ name be?
BRET MCKENZIE: ooo, um, sometimes I DJ parties as DJ fantasy. So maybe, maybe that. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: Respectable. Nice. Very coherent. As far as answers to that question, usually go.
BRET MCKENZIE: Yeah. I used to DJ a little bit on student radio in Wellington, and we used to hang out there a lot.
It was really good times, actually. Cool, cool way of yeah, knowing what cool, what music was, what gigs were [00:14:00] on and what bands are coming through, and hearing lots of friends, it was just exciting to get a song and you’d record it and then you’d get it on the radio. It was really. It was a cool buzz. Very cool.
MR GREEN JEANS: You’re a very prolific musician in many circles of music. At this point, you’ve like worked in all sorts of, you have a finger in every pot kind of.
BRET MCKENZIE: I do. I do a lot of different, yeah. Jobs in the kind of tv, film, music world. Yeah, I’m really lucky and through Covid I was super lucky ’cause I write songs for films now and that work kept going through Covid.
So I was in New Zealand for four years, but I was able to write songs for animated films and develop films and, so really lucky to keep working. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: If, if I may ask, do you have a dream musical collaborator?
BRET MCKENZIE: Oh, I think lots of them have probably passed away. I mean, I would love to have done something with Bowie that would’ve, and Harry Nelson.
I mean, a lot of my heroes are kind of have passed away actually. But, I don’t know. [00:15:00] Hmm. Who’s still alive? I dunno actually. Yeah. It would be cool to do something with Randy Newman. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: Just outta okay. Just outta curiosity, what studio in LA did you record Songs without Jokes in?
BRET MCKENZIE: One thing I love about LA is all these amazing old studios and they’ve all got, they’re all got incredible history in the corridors. They’re full of these gold records, and there’s several great studios there. I’ve been lucky to get to record in a lot of them for different projects, but this album we recorded in two studios.
The first one is called United, , and it used to be called Ocean Way. And then the, we, a couple of songs were recorded at a studio called East West, which is actually just two doors down the road from, from United. Yeah.
MR GREEN JEANS: I hear the knocking on the door.
BRET MCKENZIE: Can you hear the house? Yeah, the hotel is like, come on, get this guy outta here.
MR GREEN JEANS: Okay. Okay. Last one will be very quick.
BRET MCKENZIE: Okay, last question then. Housekeeping’s gonna like gonna throw me outta this hotel.
MR GREEN JEANS: What’s a question that you wish [00:16:00] you would be asked in interviews?
BRET MCKENZIE: Um. Oh, okay. Um, oh, gee, I don’t know. , What do you like about America?
MR GREEN JEANS: Well, what do you like about America?
BRET MCKENZIE: You know what? Oh, thanks for asking me that. That’s funny. I’ve always wanted someone to ask me that. Oh no, I, you know, what I love about America is the optimism. You know, I know America’s got some serious problems and touring around, you see the cracks very clearly appearing. But, but what I love is there’s this attitude here where people think that, you know, you got your dream of something you wanna do you can do it. And not only yourself, but you encourage other people to follow their dreams. And even though it can be a little misguided sometimes, you know, you get some people who have fools doing crazy dreams. But, but most of the time that positive attitude, that optimism, I think really helps people grow and helps people.
Artists particularly take risks, and in New Zealand there’s a little bit of an attitude of, [00:17:00] ah, you’ll never be able to do that. thats the problem isnt it, it’s less optimistic, it’s more pessimistic, I guess. And so coming here, I always really appreciate that, that positive energy and, and I think that’s, you know, despite its many faults, that is one strength that America has.
MR GREEN JEANS: Thank you so much Bret. This has been a fantastic interview. I really enjoyed.
