When it’s sunny in New Zealand, it’s hard to imagine living anywhere else. Today, in fact, is one of those days: every window open, the wild summer light, fat birds stealing ripe plums in the yard. When it rains, though—and reader, it rains a lot—my sense of geographical destiny blows clean away.
There’s rain on my windowsill, I sing on those wet July days. There’s a storm blowing past my door, I cry as I set up the clothes tree under the heat pump, while my heart wanders away over the cold sea. I write it down in this letter to America.
The Warratahs’1 great NZ-to-US lament, written by frontman and Kiwi music icon Barry Saunders, has been my go-to homesick jam for years now. For a certain lonesome that’s beyond homesick, too, on the grey afternoons when you realize the rain is yours now. Y’are where y’are for a reason, even if you can’t always pin it down.
Saunders has effortlessly packed in all these feels in a few short lines: the eternally weird inversion of the seasons, the resigned nod to NZ’s seat at the edge of the party, the loved ones whose entire hemisphere you might never cross again. The song tells no story, and offers no resolution. There’s only the missing and the rain and the ticking clock. It’s pure middle-aged antipodal blues, built of an E minor chord, a crying fiddle, and Saunders’ brakeman wail and rumbling worry: Meanwhile back in winter / Daddy’s burning time…
Meanwhile, back in summer, Saunders lives here in Greytown. He’s down the block from daughter’s old kindy, living for a couple decades now in what’s quietly the coolest settler cottage in town. On a hot, still afternoon I rode my bike over to chat.
“It was written from the couch in Mount Victoria where I was living, in the middle of winter,”2 Barry explained. We sat on couches now ourselves, with guitars lying about. “My son was living in New York City. We used to talk all the time. It's just a very simple idea, a simple thought. He had this life in New York, and I was sitting on the couch in Mount Victoria, with rain coming past the window, and wasting time.”
A dagger, this was! I’d had the song pegged as your standard romantic affair, with the ‘daddy’ just kool-kat slang. All along I’d been singing the words of a lonely father. For this prodigal son it felt a little too on the nose.
I pressed on to the second verse: Haven’t heard from the old girl in a while / Starting to believe that I never will. Barry laughed. “There’s all sorts of other things in there,” he said, taking the gentleman’s route. “Probably best to leave that out.”
Whoever he’s missing, Saunders is working within a long tradition of country lonesome. Feeling sad and watching the skies? That’s Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” which is itself nearly Tang Dynasty poetry. Wishing you were at the cool kids’ table? That’s Tom T. Hall’s “Spokane Motel Blues.” Feeling far away? Saunders is working with a scale that makes Dwight Yoakum’s “Thousand Miles From Nowhere” a mere Sunday drive.
Now listen closer. Li Bai and Hank Williams are outside under the moon. Tom T. Hall is stuck in a motel. Dwight shot that music video on top of a freight train. What makes “Letter to America” a great song all its own—what makes it a great New Zealand country song—is that Saunders is home and dry.
There’s his window. There’s his door. The rain is outside. Inside, he’ll write the letter and moan the blues, but he ain’t leaving to fix ‘em. New Zealand’s got a distance you just can’t fix. On The Warratahs’ recording (see below), Nik Brown’s fiddle begins the track brave as a train whistle, but by the last chorus has broken down into a single tear. We’re both too stubborn and stupid to change anymore / Still that’s not telling you anything / That’s OK. The shrug is everything. Being home is its own resolution. Enough moaning, let’s get on with it. If this were a Kiwi novel, he’d finish the song and go boil the jug.
Saunders’ son would be about my own age. He lives in Germany now, about two thousand miles farther from NZ than he was in New York. Does he know the song’s about him? “Yeah, he does,” Saunders said. His eyes crinkle up in pride. “He doesn’t take much notice of what I do. I like it that way, too.”
Then he kindly played me “Letter to America” while sitting right there on his Greytown couch. Then we bid goodbye and I walked my bike up the drive, the cicadas singing and the handsome cottage vanishing once more into its high-summer garden.
That night at home I played back the video to learn the chords. My six-year-old daughter, who’s heard the song on a loop this week, heard my fumbling and looked up from her dolls. My Kiwi daughter, whose American passport we’ve just applied to renew.
That’s one by the singer you met! she said. Did you tell him I love the song?
I’m telling him now, sweetie. //
A warratah (originally waratah) is an Australian shrub with enormous red flowers. In NZ it’s also a fencepost.
Mt. Victoria is a neighborhood in central Wellington. Wellington’s famous for bad weather. In fact the rain that inspired “Letter to America” gets its own song, called simply “Mt. Victoria Rain.” It’s also lonesome and lovely.
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