Who has changed your life?

Samuel | Pōneke

At 14, Samuel was asked to be the singer in the band that would go on to become the Phoenix Foundation and shape the rest of his life.

I think the two people who changed my life the most, outside of my wife and my kids, would be Lukasz Buda and Conrad Wedde from the Phoenix Foundation and from Moniker, which is our film music kind of collective.

I think the inspiration now is a really, it’s a cyclical thing. We’re all inspiring each other or annoying each other, you know, and that’s kind of part of it. That’s the yin and the yang of a creative partnership.

I didn’t even know that I necessarily wanted to make music when I was 14. I wanted to be in music class. I wanted to play guitar. But those guys knew that they wanted to be musicians. And so they came to me and they were like, “Do you want to be the singer in a band?” And I was like, “Okay, I don’t know, I guess so.” And that was, in a way, that was the catalyst for me having this whole life, I guess.

And I didn’t even really know I wanted to be the singer in a band. And in a way that, you know, I’m not even a great singer. What I am is just someone who kind of gave it a go and had a perspective, I guess. And to this day, we still work together. It’s been a really crazy up-and-down journey because, you know, most relationships don’t last this long, but it’s probably been 30 years since we first jammed out a couple of songs together in the Wellington High School music room.

And you know, they’re coming over in a couple of hours to work on some new songs for the next Phoenix album. So we’re still doing it.

I think it is something that probably did come out of Covid a bit, is that we all check in with each other all the time, and it’s invaluable. Our old Wellington High School group of friends, we all still meet up. We’ve all got, you know, the WhatsApp groups and looking out for each other. And you know, as you get older, you get, there’s more tragedies, you lose close friends and people’s parents pass away or they’re touched by things like suicide and drug problems and divorce and family problems and, you know, kids, you know, worrying about their kids and all that stuff, and we do just all communicate about all that stuff.

It can be so simple and so, it can be such a small gesture, but it can really improve your day when someone’s just like, “Hey, how’s the crew doing?” You know, “What’s up?” Or just not even need to ask it necessarily. You can just be like, “Did you see that the test match against Afghanistan is going to be rained out? They’re never gonna bowl a ball.” And you get to kind of connect on some level.

And, you know, I don’t know. I don’t even really know what it does, but it just makes you feel like that someone’s in your kind of clubhouse.