After years of performing overseas gaining an international profile, musician Moana Maniapoto is ready to start focusing on her New Zealand audience.
Maniapoto, who is promoting her latest album, Wha, with her band The Tribe, says because her energy has been put into performing offshore, she has started only recently to focus on building up her New Zealand base.
Part of the reason behind the change in focus is Maniapoto's belief New Zealanders are ready to take a little bit of a risk and try something they hadn't heard before.
"The music is really rooted in New Zealand - the album talks about stories from here."
While the album is all in Maori, Maniapoto, speaking from her home in Grey Lynn, says she would like to think New Zealanders would be more open to embracing that style of music now.
"I hope that they wouldn't be so afraid of that as they might have been 10 years ago."
Maniapoto has good reason to believe her music is finally getting the recognition here comparable to that she receives when she tours overseas.
"I'm seeing a lot more middle class, white New Zealanders coming to our gigs, just quietly.
"People come up to me afterwards at festivals and go 'that was great'.
"I don't know what they're thinking they're going to get. Maybe a reggae band or a kapahaka group or 'get off my land!'
"And they get a little bit of all three of those things, but they really genuinely enjoy it."
Maniapoto says her regular performances at overseas festivals, which she describes as "quite styley", have had a positive effect on how her music is perceived.
"The punters think, 'well they can't be that tragic if they're in these things'."
Wha is Moana and The Tribe's fourth album as part of a sequence that began with the release of Tahi.
Two other albums have also been released and there's also another European tour planned for the end of June.
"I'm not as slack as everyone is making me out to be."
When the band is not touring, Maniapoto says it is planning for its next tour or recording,In January 2002, Maniapoto was taking time out from her music career which has spanned two decades, when her manager in Munich suggested the time might be right for a band like hers, with its strong New Zealand identity, to release an album and tour Europe.
"It was off the back of the Lord of the Rings movie and New Zealand's profile was benefiting internationally from it - everybody's blinking favourite place."
Moana was given the challenge of putting an album and a band together and to get to Europe by June.
"I was sitting on a deck in Gisborne thinking 'hell yeah, OK!' My god it was a lot of work."
As well as the logistics, pulling together a new band also started her on a "different musical phase, a different sound", she says.
"Same kind of elements but more of an acoustic vocal-based sound and then we've just grown our little fan base offshore.
"We're not wildly successful but we've got a modest following."
Maniapoto is also a documentary maker, a role which she credits her partner, Toby, a documentary maker, for mentoring her in.
"It's all about storytelling. I don't see that too far apart from music.
"You're capturing stories, you're presenting them in what [you] would hope to be an artistic way to as many people as possible. So those are the two things I focus on."
Maniapoto laughs at using the term artist to describe all the creative mediums she works in.
"I always think artist is a bit high-faluting. I think Michaelangelo was an artist. I like creative arts, that's my kind of buzz."
Maniapoto was gradually drawn to music while studying law in the 1980s, playing gigs to support herself.
"I kind of just gravitated more towards music.
"I was put off the law. I studied a lot of New Zealand history at law school and saw how the law was used in a way that wasn't as value-free as I thought it would be.
"It was used against Maori and I thought 'I don't know if I want to be part of this' and then I thought, 'well, it's all a bit boring compared to music really'."
Her law degree still gets used though.
Maniapoto reads her music contracts and often writes up her own.
The reality of the music industry means she is living on three credit cards, but she is not letting any barriers get in the way of an opportunity to perform.
"We're not a commercially successful band here in New Zealand; we don't have a big record company behind us, but we've never had to decline an opportunity because of money because I'll find it somehow.
"It's a real achievement for any band to stay together for any length of time and export themselves offshore. It's hugely challenging."
Maniapoto says she is proud of Wha, which is a more complete album.
"The other albums I've done were sort of individual songs which ended up on the albums and this one is a bit different - it was thought through in its entirety.
"It still has strong traditional Maori elements, like haka, but I think people will be pleasantly surprised to see how it's used."
Wha is available now.
