When he was “around 14”, Bret McKenzie became obsessed with the Leonard Cohen album I’m Your Man. Its synth-heavy tales of geopolitics, romantic devotion and the poems of Federico García Lorca made it an unusual choice for a pubescent boy in suburban New Zealand. Nevertheless, at school, he and his friends would happily sing along to tracks such as Jazz Police and First We Take Manhattan when passing between lessons.
As they sang, McKenzie listened to the voices of his peers, plumbing Cohen’s baritone depths. Meanwhile his own, still unbroken, squeaked along beside them. Even then, he saw the comedy in this collision: the autumnal wit of the lyrics, the juvenile scratch of the voice. It instilled in him a new sense of how songs could be: “Serious, but also strange, and funny in a weird way,” is how he describes it. “I think that’s always stuck with me.”
