The album rollout isn’t entirely without humor, though, as a press release offers the following sample headlines for publications to use: Yeah. It’s cool. It’s great. Someone in the band suggested that we make an album at the end of the tour. That’s a pretty cool idea. We’re recording them, so we have the little demos. It would be a publishing nightmare. Flight Of The Conchords often played upon serious issues, be it in the heart-warming parable of ‘Albi The Racist Dragon’, the self-conscious sexism in rap pastiche ‘Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros’ or the hard-hitting images of gang violence, monkey diseases and globalisation peppering ‘Think About It’. But sometimes the laughter has to stop. Briefly. When I tell people I’m doing an album, they hit this wall: ‘Is it comedy?’ I’ve been working on it for two years, so I’m well past that, but until people hear it, it’s harder for them to wrap their head around what I’m doing.” Together, S ongs Without Jokes is an impressive, varied, unexpected album by an accomplished comedian navigating the strange, unmapped path toward more ‘serious’ artistry. Like an idiot, I hit record in the middle of a very serious, very deep conversation we were having about the American buddy cop sitcom/New Zealand smash hit, 1986’s Sledgehammer, so that’s where we are jumping in.

How has your transition from comedy been? I can’t think of very many comedians who transition into serious musicianship and I imagine it’s because of how daunting that is. At one of the gigs, it ended up being a song called ‘Australian Vampires Make Better Lovers’ based on this woman whose partner was in Australia, and they like dressing up as vampires. Yeah, the bands I’ve spoken to have all said that holding anyone’s attention for a full 45-minute set has become a bigger challenge. It’s funny that you mention Leonard Cohen because some of your songs are built a bit like, I’m Your Man, where the synth layer is strong, but rather than have it be the lead, the song itself is built around it. Yeah, some. Growing up I loved James Brown. I was in a band and I was the drummer and I spent all my time trying to play funk breaks. That was what I was really into as a teenager. At the same time I was into Leonard Cohen, but more of his sort of slightly more comedic songs, I guess. You know, the little ones where the production is like a Cassio tone and him singing over it. Even as a teenager, I thought that was cool. It’s funny because I’ve spent a lot of time working with Cassio tones. In Flight of the Conchords, we were always making our own beats and messing with little drum machines.Yeah, he’s been in all sorts of stuff. He’s a brilliant actor, but this was a comedy role. A sort of broad, stupid police comedy. Anyway, that was a funny example of how New Zealand was isolated and connected in different ways. I grew up before the internet, you couldn’t just look things up, and since Sledgehammer was on primetime and from America, it was the biggest show in New Zealand, we just presumed it was the biggest show everywhere. Basically our bread and butter was Rings fans who came to our show,” he says, ruefully. “They helped us get things started. We could always tell because they’d have a little ring. We weren’t complaining because we had ten people in the audience so it was good if four of them were Lord Of The Rings people. But it made me cautious about being in the public eye and connecting with fans. I was like, ‘Oh, this is pretty strange’.” Later, he would move into creating scores for film and television, writing songs for big-budget projects such as The Simpsons and the Muppets, while taking up occasional acting roles in films such as The Lord of the Rings and Austenland. His work has been marked by its delight, innovation and wordplay. He’s got so massive,” says Bret, beaming jovially down a Zoom window from his Wellington home. “It’s awesome. I sometimes forget how big Taika has become… It’s cool seeing the same ideas that worked in theatre carry on working on the big films.”

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ More on that later, because today not only signals new music is on the horizon, but we (we as in Aotearoa, New Zealand) are also being treated to a national bloody tour from Bret, his piano, his microphone and his 9-piece band. Well now that you’ve seen the rise of the internet, how has that changed New Zealand’s cultural frame? Yeah, there are some jokes. I’ve started to figure out how to describe that. I named the album that to sort of lead people into what I’m doing, what I’ve made so that they immediately understand, but some people think that is a joke. But then live is songs from the record, songs with jokes from before the record, and then new songs, then some jokes without songs, you know. It’s a bit funnier than I initially anticipated.

We’d be out trying to give out flyers,” Bret remembers. “This woman was walking home with her groceries and we managed to convince her to come into the creepy basement venue with her groceries at, like, 11 in the morning. Then we start playing these weird comedy songs. I can’t remember if it was her or somebody else but at some point we had an audience of one, and they left halfway through the show. That made it into the TV show.” I mean, Conchords have made albums, but they were more like compilation albums of songs we’ve collected. Like Multi-Genre albums. This album is still pretty eclectic, but I think maybe more organized and focused. Growing tired of writing songs for films that “have to do a lot of jobs, a lot of character work or tell the story”, Bret began filing away ideas for more serious songs. “As much as I love comedy music, I don’t really listen to it in everyday life,” he admits. “I have a fondness for the funny song within an album that might be more serious. Lots of people have them. Courtney Barnett has some really funny lines and Leonard Cohen has a lot of funny lines. I was interested in something in that zone.” My songwriting had started to open up a little bit,” he says. “We were writing songs all the time in Conchords, but they were always based on a gag. Then the movie stuff often required more story and character, so sometimes what might be a funny song also had to be an emotional moment. I wanted to do some songs that didn’t have to be anything for anyone else, songs that could just exist. It’s kind of bizarre, because 99 percent of songs are like that—there’s only about 10 people who write comedy songs. So mostly this was just me wanting to write songs that didn’t have to do anything apart from be a song.”Nah, there hasn’t been anything like that. There are some comedians who are pursuing serious musicianship, but it doesn’t happen often. Do you know Tim and Eric? Tim has done a few albums. Hannibal, too. Up In Smoke is a heavy piano ballad. It is reminiscent of something you might have heard from darker end of The Beautiful South and Paul Heaton’s pen. It is a brilliantly placed piece in the album and breaks up one side from the other. Carry On has a similar feel but with added flourishes from acoustic guitars and light synths.

By the end of season two in 2009, Bret claims, “we were very burnt out” and “finding an idea that we hadn’t done was harder than it had been in the past.” Bret had also had his first child. “Making a TV show and having children is just not very compatible,” he explains. “We’d work 12-hour days for weeks straight. I was definitely more interested in being around for my family.” The idea of sporadic, brief tours was far more appealing, between writing songs for Kermit and Fozzie Bear. So, yeah, Bret’s a ridiculously funny dude, and you might even call him one of the best comedy songwriters in the biz. (In Bret’s own words, there are fewer than a dozen people in the world writing comedy songs today, but who’s counting?) He’s had smash hits, he’s won major awards, he’s the better-dressed part of his duo...he’s got a good thing going! So, what gives with this whole “songs without jokes” solo stuff, man? Yeah. I was thinking about the live show and how it moves around a lot. I do some comedy songs and I do a bit of this comedy banter between me and the audience, so there’s a lot more than just the songs. The drummer described it as a variety show in a way. What’s fun is the audience doesn’t quite know what’s gonna happen. I’m kind of feeling that out, though. We could do a whole set of just our songs, but that might be less appetizing, or less exciting, I think, for the audience. When some vim and energy are injected into the mix, the results are much more pleasing: “If You Wanna Go” has an infectious Randy Newman sprightliness; “Dave’s Place” tips its hat to Flight of the Conchords’ “Inner City Pressure” but comes with a Springsteen-like drive; and aforementioned highlights “This World” and “A Little Tune” stand out for their bright jazzy tones, being the definite takeaways many listeners will return to.

No Where To Go But Up

Today, Bret is busy at work on some animated movies and several labour-of-love projects including a theatre adaptation of George Saunders’ surreal political comedy The Brief And Frightening Reign Of Phil and a bubbling-along fairytale musical. The kind of imaginative, experimental and off-beat pitches that tend to excite Hollywood’s ideas guys but terrify its money men.