Coromandel guitarist and singer-songwriter Dylan Wade Lajunen may not have mainstream recognition, but he is something of a legend in his own not-too-small circles. With an organic, soulful sound and grassroots approach inspired by the legends of last century, Dylan’s long performing career has touched many a heart. March 2026 saw the release of his seventh album ‘The Light’, a raw, lucid guitar-driven body of work incorporating influence from rock, folk, reggae, world music and other genres.
Back in the 1990s Dylan Wade Lajunen was among the first to introduce Coromandel music to the rest of Aotearoa when he toured the South Island with his band Castle Rock. Since then he has toured in the US and released multiple albums. The last of these, the episodically eclectic ‘Life’, was released in 2012.
“Life!” Dylan says with a laugh when asked what eventuated the 14-year gap to his just-dropped 2026 album. “That was the name of the last album, and that’s what’s been getting in my way! I’m generally a slow moving person with career and that sort of stuff, but I’ve played so many gigs over those years. Recording and releasing music is a real challenge for me, and there’s been a lot of change in my life.
“We all went through the difficult years of 2020 and 2021. The challenges I had with losing a lot of income were very difficult, and my disillusionment with the materialism of the world we’re in. I went through a period of a couple of years of thinking, ‘What’s the most important thing for me?’ and it wasn’t actually releasing the album and furthering myself as a musician or my career. The most important thing was to help myself become a healthier person and become balanced, and to see the perspective that had been brought in front of me to do with life and what we really need to be a happy person.”
To tell of the making of ‘The Light’ would mean backtracking to 2017, when Dylan was studying towards a Master of Arts (specialising in music). For the academic portion of his study, he wrote a thesis with a title that doubles as a statement of his personal values; ‘Music, Inner Peace and Social Harmony’.
“That’s what my music is about,” he says. “Helping people feel better, and helping people get on better, and not being afraid to talk about things that we feel we need to talk about. We don’t have to have battles and wars over it; we can disagree and find a compromise, and find a way of working together. Music helps people do that.
“I remember talking about my dissertation with the drum tutor at one of the schools I was working at. As soon as I said the title, he was like, ‘Too deep for me!’ I tried to explain that we all need inner peace, and we all need social harmony, and music helps us do that, and there’s so much evidence of that around the world! It was amazing researching and hearing all these stories of how music has healed and helped, and it just continues to. I think music can save lives; it saved my life, and it does save my life.”
The practical portion of his studies involved producing a body of music, which would become ‘The Light.’ For the initial sessions, Dylan spent two days in Roundhead Studio B with his long-time drummer Yair Katz and Dutch-born bassist, Wouter Schild, who at the time was residing in Te Puru, a Thames Coast village not far from Dylan’s home in the neighbouring settlement Waiomu. Scott Seabright and Paddy Hill were the studio engineers.
“I had a deadline to work to, which helped get all the initial tracking and the first stages of the production all completed. For our session I’d said that I was mostly wanting to record good drums and bass… but what I didn’t really explain was that I also wanted to record good guitars and vocals! When I got there, there was this beautifully mic’ed up drumkit, an old Ludwig with 14 mics on it, and the bass rig was all set up. I brought my Marshall in, and they had an Orange amp in the amp room which is separate to the studio itself. So we set up and recorded simultaneously into those two amps, and that is how we got the guitar sound!
“It was amazing, a really cool space, really cool lounge and kitchen area, and really good monitor headphones! I wasn’t used to hearing such great sound when I was recording. Scott and Paddy, were really efficient and really good. I’m really happy with the end product, but I’m also really happy with the start product. The original sound of those beautiful Neve preamps that they have, and whatever plugins they have in the studio there. It made for a great sound, and it was worth spending that extra money.”
Following those initial sessions, Dylan spent five years refining the album, working with Seabright, Whitianga-based producer Dave Rhodes and Andrew Burt, adding overdubs of additional instruments. These included Tui award-winning keyboardist Liam Ryan, backing vocals from Auckland jazz powerhouse Caitlin Smith, and flute from fellow Coromandel music legend Helen Lee.
“I went round to people’s places with my remote Korg D3200 mobile studio, all around the Coromandel and in Auckland. I’m so grateful for the players and their performances, they really enhanced all the songs. All the musicians gave beautiful, high performances for it, and it was a big project to tie it all together and edit out any glitches. It was a pleasure to work with them and play with them.”
The finished album has the raw yet rich sound of a band playing live in studio. Moving through high energy rock numbers and reflective folk singer-songwriter moments with flavours of blues, reggae, Celtic and Eastern music, ‘The Light’ is as musically varied as all Dylan’s work. However, it has a unified, cohesive sound that was less present on his previous recordings.
“The whole album has a looseness and a spontaneity to it. I think we captured the songs in their essence of where they were at, and all the guest musicians had the challenge of trying to add to that, after the effect!”
He admits struggling to decide on a title for the collection.
“I was gonna call it ‘The Wheel’, and people suggested a few other things. I still feel a little bit apprehensive of calling it ‘The Light,’ because it feels to me like a really big thing to call an album, but I suppose ‘Life’ was too! I’m a simple man, and ‘the light’ is so important to me, whether it’s the light of day or the light inside us, but particularly the light of love.
“It’s a spiritual statement, because the light spark in our life is what we are. That, to me, is God and consciousness, and all the songs on the album came from a spiritual place. When I was driving to Roundhead, coming along the motorway early in the morning, the plinth at the top of One Tree Hill had the rising sun on it and it was just sparkling with this big, bright light!”
The title features in Into the Light, a fiery, riff-driven rock anthem where Dylan indignantly confronts the wrongdoers of the world but ends on a note of hope.
“That song is about how no matter who we are, and no matter what we’ve done, we can surrender to our true nature and come into the light for our redemption, for our saving. If you think about the horrendous things that some people have done around the world to others and to themselves, that burden must be so heavy. Into the Light is addressing that in those people, and also in ourselves, because it’s a constant thing. We need to surrender to light, to truth, to love, to the light.”
Into the Light contains a roaring guitar solo that Dylan is particularly proud of.
“That’s my favourite solo on the album because I did some cool things there that I have no idea how I did them! I was just reaching. Driving around listening to the recordings afterwards, it’s so fun to hear myself doing my best on electric guitar!”
Eternal Mystery, a quieter, more reflective number, also contains the title. ‘Sometimes’, sings Dylan in a near whisper, ‘when you look towards the light, you will see a face looking back at you.’
“That’s a spiritual song in a very different way, and it’s about the eternal mystery of consciousness. When we look to the light, we realise that we are a part of it, and it is a part of us. It’s a unifying statement.”
The songs on album were written over a span of 27 years, the danceable Celtic-inspired instrumental opener Celtiki being the oldest. The Wheel is one more recent song, a folk-rock number in rolling 6/8 time that Dylan was inspired to write after reading an interview of Leonard Cohen in Paul Zollo’s book Songwriters on Songwriting.
“I was really inspired by what Leonard Cohen said and I was just feeling his spirit. Oftentimes in the past I’ve felt like I need to write a song that has something catchy or some upbeat tempo, but with that one I didn’t. I just let myself go and let it be slow, and I was thinking about poeticism in lyrics. I sat down and it was a stormy night, and the curtain was blowing in from the west, and it looked like a sail of a ship, and that just triggered the whole song.”
The lyrics tell the whimsical story of an ‘ancient mariner’ caught in a storm at sea and tossed to shore but miraculously surviving. Dylan leaves the listener with the evocative image of the beached mariner clutching at the wheel, which is all that remains of his ship. The wheel symbol first came in a dream.
“I and some people I know were in a cavern with an underground river. I picked up this disc-shaped object that reminded me of a Mayan sundial or a ship’s wheel. There were some codes on it, and we were on some kind of quest where we were following that underground river. That circular image was in my mind when I was writing the song.”
Though understated, The Wheel is more musically ambitious than Dylan’s previous work, using every chord in the key of E Major.
“I’d begun my Masters study, so I was reading a lot about songwriting and getting into what I wanted to do, and who I am and all this other, more intellectual stuff about musicians through literature that I’d picked up through my supervisor and the school. I also think I’d matured as a songwriter. I wasn’t just writing to a thrre-chord, bluesy sort of thing, which I’d done a lot of. I was trying some interesting chords, including a half-diminished shape that I found through Django Reinhardt’s music, and that happened to work perfectly when I was searching for a chord.
“All of a sudden, I found myself writing a song that has every diatonic chord in that key! I didn’t even see it at the time; it was only later when I analysed it for my course that I thought, ‘Hang on, I wrote a song that has every chord!’ And it works!”
Dylan is proud of the finished album, in all its many shades, and hopes it resonates with listeners.
“It’s for joy, upliftment and pleasure with some depth to it that I feel is important for people to feel, because it’s important for me to feel a depth with art or anything I engage in.”
