You can tell by the catch in Neil Finn's voice that it was a tough gig to play and sing this song for his former band mate.
Then, one day, I am sitting in an okonomiyaki restaurant as a rare treat, when Bridge Over Troubled Water comes on the radio. A song so familiar that I had ceased experiencing it as a piece of music a long time ago. If anything, I was slightly dismissive of it: the glossy production, its mawkish grandiosity.
I'm eating a cheap and nasty pizza – a fitting feed for a failed novelist. I’m watching The Panel. About three slices in they introduce a New Zealander called Bic Runga. I’m enraptured.
My heart hurts as we head towards Port Arthur. So much can depend on one moment; the café we walk into, the car that stops. And as we drive, I tell you about my moment.
Save for the weeds, not much grows in our front yard. The soil is rubbish, almost literally. “What’s the plan?” my neighbour says cheerily, as I'm weeding.
Can’t think of a song all festival that blew me away like Old White Men did. When I caught it at the tail end of Vance Gilbert's set I welled up like everyone else.
After calling out to the members of the audience who had ever experienced mental turmoil, or just emotional struggles as a whole, the rollicking beauty of steady electric guitar along with the angelic high pitched crooning of Sultana, the flash light on thousands of phones swayed in time to a truly memorable cacophony of sound.
In that dark small house for two single souls I found that I was in love. It had taken three years of house-sharing for the obvious to dawn on me.
While I loved music and sat in class day-dreaming that the girl sitting in front of me in class was the girl Marc Bolan swooned over in Hot Love, I hated school, a situation reflected in my term reports.
Over fifteen years, brick by determined brick, we built a life out of thin air and intentions. When I first met you, my mother could not tell her friends her eldest daughter was a lesbian. Talking to her friends, she would shorten my girlfriends’ names to androgynous mysteries. Jo. Nic. Lou.