HELEN HENDERSON: Press

While advertisers and film-makers are constantly transforming New Zealand locales into exotic European and American ones, during the past 12 months Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Helen Henderson has had a problem of her own - how to make California look like ... Winton.

"The director, Rose Bauer, was going to do a piece for New Line Cinema and she heard the song, and said `why don't we do a 35mm (film) for The Ballad of Minnie Dean instead'?" Henderson says.

The two ended up filming in Pasedena, the LA Arboretum and on the railway tracks in El Monte to get that "virtual New Zealand" look.

"It was wonderful really. We went out and I said `look you can't do anything Hollywood, because this is a real person and a real story and in honour of that we have to choose locations that are fitting'."

The Southland-born musician is about to launch the music video for her song The Ballad of Minnie Dean in New Zealand, having released it in the United States in April.

Henderson may have beaten a path halfway across the world - from Invercargill, to Britain, to LA but, like a gumboot in the mud, she says her heart keeps getting sucked back to her origins in the deep south.

"As a songwriter, I can say that everybody has their demons and mine were alive and well (in Invercargill) ... so I took off thinking I could get away from them.

"But then I end up, years and years later sitting in the bathtub in LA or something or in a place above Nashville and I'm writing about these mythic things that happened.

"Like the drowning of my two uncles or the hanging of Minnie Dean."

It's all about roots.

It's a word that pops up a lot in our conversation. Henderson's style of music is often called roots-rock.

Her self-produced album the The Sonora Sessions, released in New Zealand in April, is full of clear well-crafted songs that belie their complexity. On a cursory listen it's easier to spot the overseas influences.

Henderson's sweet country-rock voice has been compared to American Lucinda Williams or Linda Rondstat, there are upbeat versions of the jangly guitars, folk-rock rhythms and vocal harmonies that remind of The Byrds, Gram Parson's and The Band. The folk-country rock influences are not particularly surprising.

Henderson hasn't lived in New Zealand for the past 20 years, leaving Invercargill at 19 with rock 'n roll dreams for Britain and setting down in LA in the late 1980s.

Signed to Barbara (wife of Roy) Orbison's publishing company, she regularly travels to Nashville to write country music.

Members of her band, called Henderson, have impressive rock pedigrees and her music probably reminds of West Coast folk rock because her bandmates have worked with luminaries such as Neil Young, Stephen Stills and The Eagles.

Still, if you listen closely to Henderson sing you can hear the subtle slide-in of antipodean vowels - and the lyrics in The Ballad of Minnie Dean, a story Henderson grew up with, are explicit about the south.

"I very much wanted to stay true to the story of Minnie Dean. Both what I carry subconsciously as a child growing up in Southland, and what I learned about Minnie from Dunedin author Lynley Hood's book about her (Minnie Dean - Her Life and Crimes).

"I don't say whether she is guilty or not but I simply tell the story, present the facts and let people make up there own minds."

Even more personal subject matter is her song, Gordon and John, released on her first independent CD, Have Your Own Way, about her two uncles that were sucked out to sea in a dingy in 1953.

"People who read the (The Southland Times) newspaper they will remember. Because apparently people in Invercargill, friends of the family, in fact the whole city of Invercargill, turned out and just combed the beaches for days just looking for the bodies and they only found one.

"That really affected our family. It really affected me because it especially affected my mother - she was devastated."

The Southland songs are about coming full circle, she says.

The American influence, listening to the Eagles in Invercargill in the 1970s while hanging out with newer-sounding bands such as The Answer, The Drifters and The Early Vision, which were "... part of a very alive music scene in Invercargill."

Much of the songs on The Sonora Sessions are hard-luck stories - being unlucky in love, trying for something you can't get.

Henderson admits a life of music hasn't been easy, getting signed in Britain, almost making it, the late nights and hard work, the kind of thing she describes in the song Nothing Happens Here.

In the late 1980s, she decided to throw the whole lot in and teach yoga but after a couple of years found she couldn't not follow her passion.

"As miserable as I was being a struggling singer-songwriter, I ended up being more miserable not doing it.

"I have to say that when I came back from my second-time around that was when my most authentic material started emerging then."

Perhaps it's this authenticity that led to her being a finalist in last year's LA Music Awards in the best new female singer-songwriter category.

After years of hard work, Henderson says it was pleasing to get some recognition for her songs.

"The LA awards are special because they're a grass-roots Grammys, a People's Grammys if you like. Entrants get sent out to people in the music industry, musicians, producers, sound technicians ... and they vote on the awards.

"What really gratified me was that they didn't know if I was an American, a New Zealander, 15 or 75, there was nothing (identifying her) on the CD - apart from the songs - and the people voted me in."

So what of the future? Part of the plan is to reconnect with the home country.

She comes back to Invercargill every couple of years to see her mother, who is in her 80s. She loved coming back last time - in early January - and she plans to return to tour New Zealand with her band later this year.

"From the moment that I flew in as I was looking down it was still light, it was a freezing day but Invercargill looked really green and it was nicely turned out. There was this wretched wind when I got off the plane.

"When I was driving along in the taxi I had to pinch myself because I thought `now hang on a minute, normally when I'm in my home town, you know all your old demons and all your angels are in your home town' And I was driving along and I felt - I feel really comfortable, what's going on?

"I'm barely here, and I'm going to this gig, and I looked outside and everything I was looking at - my outer landscape - completely fitted with my inner landscape.

"And so suddenly everything I was doing here in LA and my life in Invercargill merged. It just didn't seem far away at all."