Singer, songwriter and guitarist Ben Horlock of Mirage was among the successful applicants for APRA NZ’s SongHubs Waikato event staged in October 2023. The week-long Raglan songwriting camp resulted in a just-released single titled Summer Won’t Be the Same, which also received funding from NZ On Air and Te Māngai Pāho through the Waiata Takitahi funding program.

Despite a history of well-received online releases since he was 16, the now 21-year-old Ben confesses to feeling rather like the beginner in a room of professionals when arriving at the SongHubs event.

“Yeah, so we split up into random teams at the start of the week, and I got the privilege of getting one of the coolest groupings of people. I had Francis Kora, Christian Tjandrawinata who is one of the top producers out of Auckland right now, and I had Yahyah who’s another wicked musician from Auckland.”

That combo was made to order for Ben as in 2023 he was actively moving on from his teenage conscious pop singer-songwriter stage to being the songwriter/frontman of a band he envisioned inhabiting the success-laden territory of the likes of L.A.B., Kora, Corrella and Six60.

Following a brief spell in Auckland, these days Ben lives in Tauranga. An epiphany two years ago when playing as a solo artist at a Mt Maunganui festival headlined by Coterie transformed his musical life into his own Mirage.

“Coterie came out to a packed, big festival. Everyone was popping off, everyone was grooving, and I just saw the energy that they created. I got thinking that I wanted to have the crowd in the palm of my hand and have everyone jumping around like Coterie did!

“So that really almost changed my sound a little bit too, hearing that surfy blend between reggae, rock and pop music. I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to give that a good crack.’ So then I spent all of last year just getting this band ready, I suppose. And now we’ve got our music, we’ve got our footage, and we’ve got our show. So now it’s now time to do it like Coterie!”

Joining Ben in what was initially badged as MirageBand are Jaevyn Douglas on bass, Jacob Roos on drums, Josh Glennie on rhythm guitar, and most recent addition Angelo Cruzat on lead guitar.

With the confidence of a young band and an album worth of songs ready to go they’re shortening the name and Summer Won’t Be the Same is Mirage’s first radio release. It’s a track that encapsulates the classic Kiwi cruising summery vibe, and with versions in English, Te Reo Māori and a bilingual one to boot, a single that well deserves to crash into radio play charts nationwide.

Back to the SongHubs Waikato experience and the genesis of the track.

“I didn’t actually bring anything to that session. I had a topic that I wanted to write about, which was the most cliché of topics: that I split up with my long term girlfriend. You can’t get much more cliché! We were brainstorming ideas, and I was saying that this is going to be the first summer in four years that I will be having without my girlfriend at the time. You know, so I thought ‘this summer is not going to be the same’ – and then out came a song that I think is pretty cool!

“When I came back, it was essentially a done song. We have gone back into the studio to re-record vocals and tidy up certain things, and then to record the Māori version, but the radio version is quite similar to what was made in Whāingaroa, in Raglan.

“I like the way that the record is just the same as when we made it. It’s got the summary vibe and all of that, and it’s really fun to listen to. The live version is the one that’s a lot more experimental, that’s the one that we’ve really shaped as a band, it’s a lot bigger, and it’s a lot longer. That version is where us as a band really take the song and crack it wide open with guitar solos and big intros and outros and stuff. And it’s real wicked!”

Summer Won’t Be the Same is, he says, the first song that he really feels strongly about getting radio play and further exposure for Mirage with.

“You don’t want to be talking about yourself too much, but I feel like we’ve got a cool song here. It’s almost like lucid dreaming, where you’re like, ‘Wow, this is pretty wicked that we have this song, and it’s our song!’

“It feels like a wicked song to have in our bank and you almost don’t want to wake up. You want to just let it kind of take its course, and not push. I think that’s the thing about lucid dreaming, you don’t want to wake up. So, yeah, we want to keep dreaming.”