Amy Ku’uleialoha Stillman, associate professor in American Culture and the School of Music, took center stage, with Tia Carrere and Daniel Ho, at the 51st Grammy Awards to accept the award for the Best Hawaiian Music Album, ‘Ikena. In this article, she discusses the writing and collaborative processes for creating an award winning CD and the Grammy experience with Susan Najita, associate professor of American Culture and English.
Susan: Congratulations on your win at the 2009 Grammy’s in the Hawaiian music category. You were recognized as a haku mele lyricist and co-producer on the CD, ‘Ikena. Would you tell me about the inspiration for the album and the collaborative process?
Amy: Thank you. Daniel Ho and I had co-produced two prior CD projects of repertoire from the tremendous archival stash that I have been documenting in my research (Kaakaua 2006, Kapiolani 2007). It was Daniel’s idea to collaborate on creating original songs with Hawaiian language lyrics. That’s what got us started. But I never dreamed I would be a songwriter, much less a published one, and then on a CD that just won a Grammy award!
Susan: How did the two of you work it all out?
Amy: It was totally open. We worked every possible way. Sometimes I completed lyrics first, then he created the music; other times he would send me tunes, and I would figure out what the character of the tune suggested in terms of topic, then find ways of expressing those thoughts poetically. We emailed lots of text files and mp3s back and forth (Daniel lives in L.A.). Fortunately, we’re on the same cell phone network. It took us over a year to create the songs, then several more months for Daniel to work on the recording and engineering. Tia Carrere came on board as vocalist about halfway through the composition process.
Susan: How did you approach the actual writing of the songs?
Amy: I start from a theme and ponder the various expressions available. Then, to expand my resources, I explore a wider vocabulary in the Hawaiian dictionary and see where it takes me. I begin to have a sense of poetic expressions coming together, and I start to be aware of things like line length, duration, and meter.
Susan: Would you talk about “The Spam Song,” a composition that has extremely playful lyrics, the sounds from one line are echoed in the next line.
Amy: Even metrically, there’s a parallelism in how the words fall. In the first stanza, there are two lines that have four-syllable verbs starting the line. I didn’t arrive at that consciously or intentionally; I just played around with what I wanted to say, and it flowed. It’s a kind of affirmation that I’ve internalized a lot of the poetry I’ve been studying for years.
Susan: One would think that as a historian of hula, you would be committed to a fairly rigid notion of tradition. Yet, in the liner notes, you write about moving beyond the boundaries of traditional poetry.
Amy: This project was really an opportunity to explore different terrain, outside of the conventions, outside of the expected. My intention was to explore what was possible. It’s like saying, “Let’s see what else we can come up with” as opposed to “Let’s just replicate what we already know and have.” I guess, too, as a historian, I knew that really interesting interventions have been put out there by people who shocked listeners in their own time, but in hindsight they were revered and appreciated such that they became convention for subsequent generations. There’s always a risk in pushing envelopes, because you never know if anything will ultimately backfire in your face. Daniel is respectful of tradition, but he is not going to let that respect paralyze him.
Susan: Is it necessary to understand some of the formal conventions of Hawaiian music in order to appreciate the innovations on ‘Ikena?
Amy: When you know the rules, you can begin to see how rules have been exceeded. I do think it is important to understand that there are rules. Rules are most successfully broken when the people breaking them know exactly what they are breaking. “Hula in Seven” is an obvious example. I saw Daniel in a concert with the South Bay Youth Orchestra. One number featuring Daniel and his drummer was a rhythmic routine with pairs of sticks, like a stick game. But they went off into these odd meters. I thought, “You know, this would be cool in hula using the kala‘au sticks.” So “Hula in Seven” is designed as a play on meter. There’s no reason why we cannot do rhythm routines in groups of seven beats; it’s just that we have been chosen to be bound by groups of four beats in 4/4 common time! It’s the same with “Papahanaumoku”—a chant, but in 7/8 time.
Susan: What you just said made me think about time. “Welo” has a floaty feel—really free, not necessarily going anywhere.
Amy: “Welo” actually uses the 5-7-5 syllable pattern of haiku. It is deliberately amorphous and ambiguous, because it is really about modes of movement and mobility.
Although it can be about something specific, it doesn’t have to be. In that respect, that‘s already outside of conventional Hawaiian songwriting techniques. Songwriters have always grounded their lyrics in specific subjects or events. One of my challenges to myself was, “Can I write lyrics that can be about more than one thing at the same time, depending on your perspective, depending on where you are standing?” “Welo” was like that.
This project started out being a grab bag of songs that explored different musical possibilities. In hindsight, there appears to be an organic trajectory that was actually coincidental. The connecting thread is in the CD title, ‘Ikena, which translates as “panoramic vistas.” On our life journey, seeing new things and opening ourselves to new experiences broadens our horizons. The sense of motion in “Welo” carries the listener into recollections of past experiences (in “The Spam Song,” “Pineapple Mango,” and “‘Oia Uka”) and future aspirations (“Hula in Seven” and “Papahanaumoku”), as the three of us—Tia, Daniel and myself—have moved from our island home across the ocean (“Na ‘Ikena Like ‘Ole”).
Susan: Can you talk about the controversy in Hawai’i about the Grammy? In the five years’ history of this category, the award has gone to producers of compilations. Tia Carrere and Daniel Ho are the first artists to be recognized. Although both grew up in Hawai’i, they now live in the diaspora.
Amy: Clearly, there are widely divergent perspectives on what the Grammy Award should be for Hawaiian music. Many would have liked to see the award go to someone who has had a long, established presence in Hawaiian music in Hawai’i, as if it were some kind of lifetime achievement award—which it is not. Those who look to the Grammys as a way to affirm the Hawai’i music industry fail to recognize that Hawaii’s music industry is part of a broader national context, and that there are people producing Hawaiian music outside of Hawai’i, like Daniel, who operate in this broader sphere. Then, there are those who assert that voting members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences do not know Hawaiian music. That may be the case, but voting members are industry professionals who use their knowledge of professional standards of excellence to cast their votes. They may not know all of the intricacies of Hawaiian music, but they recognize when something has been engineered well, and they recognize excellence in artistry. I think our positioning outside Hawai’i complicates all of these questions about Native Hawaiian self-determination in Hawai’i. But I also think that these questions are entirely separate from the merit of what we have created.
