'Puna Ora' wins Aro the APRA Tohu Maioha

Last week Charles attended the APRA Silver Scrolls, with our 4 month old baby Ru, my sis and our recording engineer Emily Wheatcroft-Snape, as finalists for the Tohu Maioha for our tune 'Puna Ora'. To our absolute surprise and utter delight, we took home the Tohu Maioha, and have been rather buzzing ever since!

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It was an incredible celebration of a night, APRA turned 100, and NZ's most 'prestigious' music awards - to us they hold this title because the APRA Silver Scroll and Maioha awards are ultimately chosen by fellow songwriters, APRA members, hosted at Taamaki Makaurau's Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre. Initially a panel selects the longlist finalists (of which Aro had 2 of our tunes from Tāwauwau in the mix - something that apparently hasn't ever happened before in the history of the Maioha Award!) - Whakataratara and Puna Ora were in the mix. And then the finalists are chosen and on the night everyone finds out together who wins each award. Other awards celebrated on the night are the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, the APRA Best Original Music in a Feature Film Award, the Best Original Music in a Series Award and for the first time ever this year, the Te Tihi o te Maunga Tito - celebrating Kapahaka songwriters.

One of the things I've always loved about these awards, is that the night is full of music, performances of the songs of all the 5 finalists for the Silver Scroll award, and a performance of each of the winners from the other category's awards too. You never know who is going to be performing the songs, or how they might be interpreted, so, it's exciting! And the room is full of songwriters, incredible songwriters and artists who we have all loved from this sweet country of ours from today and the years gone by. It is a buzz of a night, and made even more special for us getting to enjoy a night (as finalists) in a lovely hotel across the road! We made a whole day out of it, got all dressed up in lovely kaakahu we got to borrow from Kaahui Collective (an amazing selection of clothing made by some of NZ's best Maaori & Indigenous designers!) - Charles wore J'AKE and I wore Hunaarn.) Charles sister Chrissy did my hair up all fancy and the girls (our plus ones, sis and Emily WS) joined us to doll up before we all headed over the road with mr Ru in his little pram *turns out he was the only baby at the awards night haha classic us bringing our kids/or at least one to everything :p

We were into the second half when it got to the Maioha awards turn... baby was fast asleep on my chest and I had tried to talk to the adrenaline bubbling away inside me that we hadn't been seated in the front row where it seemed all the finalists (at least for the other awards!) were sitting... and so when they played our little clip with our studio time and funny Puna Ora dance and our little Olive and Teau making me all teary just by seeing their sweet faces on the big screen, I was getting ready to cheer one of fellow finalists tunes...

Hearing "Puna Ora, written by Emily Looker & Charles Looker, performed by Aro" was wild. Up we went, with the sleeping baby, and gave a speech that covered maybe half of what we had thought we might say IF we maybe did win - wish we had written something down!

First and foremost, we gave our thanks to God. Cause both Charles and I believe none of us would even be here without him, so, naturally he got the first thanks. We thanked APRA, and Te Māngai Maho (who supported us in this step into full time music for Aro, with the Oro Kura Roa grant) ) - who's support also funded the making of Puna Ora and the entire Tāwauwau album. We thanked Emily Wheatcroft-Snape, Bass - Marika Hodgson, Dean Rodrigues, Abraham Kunin, Ben Whitaker, Callum Lee, and our whaanau, who made making/ recording this whole project possible! Our village. Also a shout out to Godfrey De Grut who was the musical director for the night at the scrolls, but who was also one of our lecturers (alongside Tipene Matthews!) - two legends who have supported us in our writing since we began/met back at pop school!

In our rather overwhelmed state of excitement and stokedness, we forgot to thank the following people who were just as much a huge part of this project with us. Kawiti Waetford was the first person who got to hear these tunes, as our Maatanga Reo. Once we'd finished writing this album, we headed to his lovely home in Kerikeri and had a waananga over a few days where we went through each song and made sure the reo Maaori was absolutely tika, right. It was so easy working with Kawiti and we value the mahi he put into this project with us so much. He should have got the first mention really, since he was a key part of actually finalising the writing/the kupu of these tunes.

Others we want to celebrate are Cheree Ridder who has been our publicist for this whole project and several projects before too, she helped this song get out into the world in the best way possible and is a dream to work with, our mastering engineer, Vivek Gabriel (who has been part of almost every Aro project since we first began recording our music!) The album and this tune was recorded at The Lab recording studio in Mt Eden (thanks Ollie!), and distributed by DRM, and supported by Songbroker. Truly grateful to everyone who has been part of making and sharing this music with us!! And of courseeeee to all the fellow songwriters out there who voted for our wee tune!! HOW COOL WE WON?!

Absolutely chuffed.

Thanks for sharing in this win with us whaanau, it really means so much to us!

xoxo

Emily (and Charles)