At the risk of confusing any entranced young listeners (or their equally entertained parents) Mr Roberelli is really a husband and wife duo – and increasingly a collaborative team of contributors. Based in Ōtepoti Dunedin, the very talented Wigley family members have recently released the 10th Mr Roberelli album ‘Catch a Breath – Nature Songs for Kids’, introducing it with another glorious piece of Mr Roberelli musical charm titled Tūī, It’s All About You. Songwriter and singer Rob Wigley talked with Kat Parsons about the new single, family walks and recording in the laundry. Made with support from NZ On Air Music.
With hilarious singalong story-telling songs like A Goat Called Ken and Never Lie On A Ukulele, Mr Roberelli’s 2009 debut album, ‘House on Wheels’, introduced a new Kiwi kids’ music talent that has grown since to reach audiences across the world. Writing in praise of the act, British magazine JUNO stated, ‘It’s hard to define Mr Roberelli’s music, and that’s a good thing. It really is unique.’
Heralding Mr Roberelli’s 10th album in about as many years comes the release of single Tūī, It’s All About You, a natural enough follow-up to 2021’s charming Where’s The Pīwakawaka?
“It might be on a bus,” smiles Rob Wigley considering his songwriting inspiration. “It might be a few minutes out in the sun if I have my guitar with me… I don’t sit down and say, ‘I’m gonna write a song about a Tūī’, that’s never happened. We’ve got 140 songs on Spotify or something, but none of them have ever come from a premeditated subject. It’s always just sitting strumming.”
Wigley’s wife Jen makes up the second half of the duo, replacing Paul and Rochelle Depledge who were credited in the original Mr. Roberelli line-up. Paul still participates in the instrumental creation process, but now living at opposite ends of the country this is mostly achieved via the internet. Cementing this as a family affair, daughter Sophie Wolff-Wigley has illustrated all of the Mr. Roberelli album artwork for over a decade, starting when she was just nine years old
“I’ve never done Mr Roberelli by myself and I don’t feel like I could, just because the gig involves so much interaction with the audience,” Rob explains of the performing version. “It’s always been a voice pairing rather than a single voice generally. And I have imposter syndrome because I didn’t train as a musician, so I’ve always loved having someone by my side! Jen plays the melodica and that kind of fills the parts Paul [Depledge] used to do musically, and she does a lot of actions. So that’s us at the moment and it’s working well.”
Tūī, It’s All About You is a thoroughly heart-warming song that can be enjoyed by the entire family. An exposé on the famously vocal and beautiful native NZ bird, the tune is equally educational as it is fun, with catchy lyrics and sing-a-long flow. The track was engineered and mixed by Jeremy Mayall and features the musical prowess of Paul Depledge. A congregation of voices guides the tune forward with a multitude of harmonies and echoes. Accompanying them are soft acoustic guitar tones, smooth, relaxed rhythm, and even the hint of a kazoo.
“It was the first lockdown and you know how birds find a frequency in the sonic landscape? They find the exact place so they can hear each other. Well, their sonic landscape emptied with the traffic gone and you started noticing the birds much more. It might have been about that time that the Tūī came into focus because they’re loud and very distinctive. I think that was how it happened. Otherwise, it was just that the Tūī was a pain in the arse because it was squawking so early in the morning,” Rob laughs.
“All I had was…‘Tūī, it’s all about you’, and those two chords going over and over, which is one of the hooks of the song, and I liked it! Then I wrote the verse chords, but the words didn’t seem to fit. I put it away on my little dictaphone and probably six months later played it to my wife Jen. It instantly appealed to her.
“Then my long-time bandmate Paul came down to visit and he played stuff over it and harmonised with that, and it became something more special – as it usually does when musicians work together.
“I recorded my rhythm guitar, my voice, and the little bit of recorder you can hear in my laundry. When you put reverb on them, they sound okay,” he chuckles. “It’s funny because my family goes to church on a Sunday, and I stay home and do my ‘GarageBand Sunday’. With Tūī it was just like that – my stuff was done in the laundry while the family wasn’t there!
“There’s lots of my wife Jen doing the echoes, again, in the laundry. Jeremy [Mayall] and Paul got together in Hamilton, and in the space of about 40 minutes, Paul put layers and layers of vocals on and the little country twangy bits on guitar. The tūī at the end is Paul’s voice – he’s so talented!”
Evoking the spirit of ‘Goodnight Kiwi’, Dave Butler delivered a stunning animated music video for the track, providing a wholesome and nostalgic feel. It follows the morning accolades of a Tūī bird as he interacts with the world around him, and also features the live rap performance of 10-year old Wolfgang Mayall.
“When Dave did the video, I asked Jeremy to just shoot Wolf in front of a green screen. Once the video was coming together and there was the section with Wolf I thought, ‘Okay, this makes it special.’
“I guess from my perspective, even though I’m writing for kids, I’m writing for how I want them to be,” Wigley contemplates. “It’s a pretty wholesome video and Dave, who made it, could have had some modern gimmicks in there, but I didn’t want that. That’s the feeling we go for in all our music. We want it to belong to all ages, I guess, and not just have references to today, which don’t resonate with people who are a bit older.
“I’m lucky enough to play it to kids in the classes that come to me during the week and they’re all glued to the screen,” the primary school-teacher-by-day adds. “By the end, they were singing the words.”
Wolfgang is the son of Mr Roberelli’s recording engineer Jeremy Mayall, a talented vocalist and visual artist, who at only 10 years old has already collaborated with prominent Kiwi children’s entertainer Chris Lam Sam, and released three albums of his own work.
“This song for the first time, I wrote a kind of a rap section, which is the thing that comes after Wolfgang’s little appearance,” Rob reveals. “I said to Jeremy that it’d be cool if Wolf sang that part. It was an afterthought – I just thought it’d be nice to have a kid’s voice. What Wolf heard was my attempt at a rap which was ,‘blue feather, green feather, aquamarine feather…’
“I love how he took what he heard because I don’t know if he would have used the word ‘aquamarine’ at all, but he put it in with his words and it changed it up,” says Wigley enthusiastically.
“I was at the airport, coming back to Dunedin and Jeremy had mixed the remix and said, ‘Wolf gave you this, he thought you might like it.’ I listened and it was uncomfortable at first because I was so used to the song. I said to Jeremy that we’ll put it as a remix on the album, but I don’t think that it’ll be the main thing. Then, over time, it became the main one…”
This unexpectedly happy collaboration, along with other tracks on the new album, extends Rob Wigley’s newfound enthusiasm towards Mr Roberelli working with other artists.
“It’s kind of the direction I’m heading in terms of collaborating with people,” he conveys. “Before, I was anti-pigeonholing my music as Kiwi stuff. I was anti-collaborating because I thought that would take away the purity of my vision, but maybe with maturity both of those things have faded away, and collaborating is so exciting.
“The cool thing I’ve noticed about working with Kath Bee on a song called Ramshackle Yellow Car, and Levity Beet on The Children on the Train, is having someone take your ideas somewhere completely different; it is so refreshing,” he explains. “It adds so much to a song when you can let go of what you have and let someone else come and work on the song too.
“It’s also very edifying to know that people like Kath Bee and Levity Beet when we talk about lyrics on Zoom. Their standards are so high that it gives me great faith. The thing that I guess annoys me the most about some children’s music is that the craft is cheapened when you get lazy rhymes or stuff.
“Kids are the ones who you want to teach good poetry techniques – they need to be exposed to that just as much as adults. They’re still working in their heart-realm and their feeling-realm, so anything that comes at them they’re absorbing it. With kids’ music you are educating them, but not in a teach-y way. It’s just that their expectations will be high if you give them good stuff.”
‘Catch a Breath – Nature Songs for Kids’ is the follow-up to Mr Roberelli’s 2018 ‘Midnight Feast’ album. An introduction and reflection of New Zealand nature through song, the album presents songs for children to listen to, learn from and then go outside and experience.
‘It’s a celebration of nature,” Rob smiles. “But at the same time, it’s got slightly political underpinnings in that I totally abhor screen culture. I’ve read all sorts of books, but a couple that have come my way lately have been about how nature is good for mental health – and lack of it is not. Lack of nature coupled with lots of screen time is detrimental to mental health.
“I have a 19-year old and a 23-year old and when we go for walks in the woods they will start singing I Love the Woods, which is one of the songs on the album. When we get up in the morning and see that Venus is still hanging in the sky when all the other stars have disappeared, we start singing Bright Star. You connect those things. We’ve got songs about the woods, about native birds, about the last star in the sky. I’m not singing about my iPhone. I’m not singing about motorways. I’m singing about those things because I think they’re important.”
