Yeah, the bands I’ve spoken to have all said that holding anyone’s attention for a full 45-minute set has become a bigger challenge. Basically our bread and butter was Rings fans who came to our show,” he says, ruefully. “They helped us get things started. We could always tell because they’d have a little ring. We weren’t complaining because we had ten people in the audience so it was good if four of them were Lord Of The Rings people. But it made me cautious about being in the public eye and connecting with fans. I was like, ‘Oh, this is pretty strange’.” We’d be out trying to give out flyers,” Bret remembers. “This woman was walking home with her groceries and we managed to convince her to come into the creepy basement venue with her groceries at, like, 11 in the morning. Then we start playing these weird comedy songs. I can’t remember if it was her or somebody else but at some point we had an audience of one, and they left halfway through the show. That made it into the TV show.” That’s my new buzz is what I’ve been doing with the live show. I do this thing, kind of like doing a collab where I write a song with a volunteer from the audience. So halfway through the show, I ask for a volunteer who wants to write a song with me. They start telling me a story about their life and then up turning the pieces into a song. Well, I talk to them and I guess, and I did it when I did it in New Zealand. Someone got up and goes, ‘I want a song about my car. It’s a love song about my car,’ and we went, alright, we can do that, but this guy had, like, a whole thing prepared. He was crazy. He had a whole song written and he was ready to go. He was like, ‘No, the chorus should be like this! It should be an F Sharp!’ He had a key. I was like, What? Who are you?

There’s also a strong ecological thread to the record, with the ironically jaunty ‘This World’ detailing the pollution and corporate lies resulting in a “broken” and “bleeding” planet. Piano ballad ‘Up In Smoke’ uses wildfires as a metaphor for a torched romance. For inspiration, Bret only had to look up. The Australian wildfires of 2019 sent an apocalyptic smoke cloud across the South Pacific to New Zealand. Yeah, some. Growing up I loved James Brown. I was in a band and I was the drummer and I spent all my time trying to play funk breaks. That was what I was really into as a teenager. At the same time I was into Leonard Cohen, but more of his sort of slightly more comedic songs, I guess. You know, the little ones where the production is like a Cassio tone and him singing over it. Even as a teenager, I thought that was cool. It’s funny because I’ve spent a lot of time working with Cassio tones. In Flight of the Conchords, we were always making our own beats and messing with little drum machines. Yeah. I was thinking about the live show and how it moves around a lot. I do some comedy songs and I do a bit of this comedy banter between me and the audience, so there’s a lot more than just the songs. The drummer described it as a variety show in a way. What’s fun is the audience doesn’t quite know what’s gonna happen. I’m kind of feeling that out, though. We could do a whole set of just our songs, but that might be less appetizing, or less exciting, I think, for the audience.He’s got so massive,” says Bret, beaming jovially down a Zoom window from his Wellington home. “It’s awesome. I sometimes forget how big Taika has become… It’s cool seeing the same ideas that worked in theatre carry on working on the big films.” If You Wanna Go” charges out of the gates like a classic Randy Newman kiss-off served sunny-side-up, with an instrumentation that somehow manages to sound contemporary and vintage all at once. “A Little Tune” is a vampy, barroom piano romp with a great big smile, loads of style, and nary a yuk. And the driving, synth-laced rhythmic pulse and bathroom stall wisdom of “Dave’s Place” offer a sense of groove and strong, understated vocals that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Dire Straits record. This is not to suggest the new songs are wildly exposing or unduly austere; rather they just land differently. “There’s still a bit of a lyrical playfulness that I find hard to resist,” he says. “But it was interesting even starting to play these songs to other people and see they were all surprised – this is not what they were expecting.” I had to record another version of Man or Muppet because they didn’t really like it … It was a cultural adjustment Yeah. It’s cool. It’s great. Someone in the band suggested that we make an album at the end of the tour. That’s a pretty cool idea. We’re recording them, so we have the little demos. It would be a publishing nightmare.

I’d had this idea of wanting to do something different and I mentioned it to Lee one day,” he remembers. “And he was so positive and enthusiastic. He said: ‘That sounds great, I’m in!’ It was a cool moment for me, because his enthusiasm for the idea and his willingness to be involved gave me this real boost of: OK, I should do this! I should go for it!”At one of the gigs, it ended up being a song called ‘Australian Vampires Make Better Lovers’ based on this woman whose partner was in Australia, and they like dressing up as vampires. So, yeah, Bret’s a ridiculously funny dude, and you might even call him one of the best comedy songwriters in the biz. (In Bret’s own words, there are fewer than a dozen people in the world writing comedy songs today, but who’s counting?) He’s had smash hits, he’s won major awards, he’s the better-dressed part of his duo...he’s got a good thing going! So, what gives with this whole “songs without jokes” solo stuff, man? Later, he would move into creating scores for film and television, writing songs for big-budget projects such as The Simpsons and the Muppets, while taking up occasional acting roles in films such as The Lord of the Rings and Austenland. His work has been marked by its delight, innovation and wordplay.