The Los Angeles press call her a "Kiwi Siren". But the seasoned musicians who work with her know a grassroots girl when they hear one. Invercargill expat singer/songwriter Helen Henderson knows how to turn on the glamour for the giant stage, but where she really proves herself is in small Los Angeles clubs, often singing songs sprung from Southland. MICHAEL FALLOW reports.
"They change their skies, not their souls, who run across the seas." Dan Davin was fond of saying that, and from the other side of the world he proved it with stories that evoked, time and again, his memories of home in Invercargill.
From the small Oxford pubs where he famously held court, the celebrated writer would recognise what has been happening in the equally small Los Angeles clubs, where another Invercargill soul who ran across the seas has been taking the stage, night after night.
Helen Henderson is another who left - fled, actually - to express her talent elsewhere, only to discover in time that any natural thing that flowers must draw deeply on its roots.
She sings of Minnie Dean. She sings of her uncles, drowned off the Southland coast. Dark lyrics, given melodic appeal.
Of course you can't serve up a a bittersweet ballad to LA locals on a Friday night, so she and her band can also crank up the stonking rock, a side of Henderson that is not so far reflected in her spare, quite moving mini-album, The Sonora Sessions.
It's a working life higher on integrity than income.
Last year she and her band were whisked off to Austria to open for Rod Stewart "We were on a huge stage playing for thousands of people. I felt like a rock star for five minutes, then it was back to LA and stages the size of postage stamps. Back in the bloody trenches. It was a bit of a comedown," she smiles.
Still, after that first return gig, she did what musos are expected to do and showed up, tired and depressed, at a small club, verging on sleazy, called The Joint.
In the kitchen, an old musicologist saw her and his haggard face cracked into a smile.
Someone introduced them, and the educated old-timer grabbed her hands, announced a little loudly that he knew all about her, and gave her a hug. Then he took the stage and played a few songs in his own elegantly wasted style, guitar slung low and slinky.
Next morning Henderson called a friend, just to double check she hasn't been confused or kidded. That was Keith Richards, wasn't it? Yeah, the friend exulted. He wouldn't stop holding your hand.
How had he known her? Mutual friends, maybe, and it's entirely possible he'd heard her - Richards is a redoubtable student of music and its history.
The awareness that she somehow registered on that scale was welcome. There's something liberating about getting acknowledgment from a Rolling Stone.
Back in Invercargill on a pre-Christmas visit, Henderson is brimming with positivity.
It's true that her lyrics sometimes carry hard memories and regrets - "whatever I was dreaming of, it never happens here" she sings, with unaffected sorrow - but let's not forget that it's not all drowning images. Sometimes she sings of surfacing.
It's literally true, in her case. After her uncles drowned, when she was just 1-month-old, her family was torn by the hurt and loss.
"There were some things going on in my home that were painful, difficult," she says.
"But there's no family that can hang a sign outside that says There Are No Problems Here." Before rock and roll drew her in, she found an earlier escape into the countryside itself - "the way I coped here was to get very close to the land." And water.
"I've nearly drowned three or for times. The first was when I was 10 and fell off the branch of a tree. The furthest branch out over the river. I was always taking risks."
Time, and survival, have changed her view of the water. No longer does she believe the Pacific Ocean separates her two homes. No, it connects them. "We share it."
She certainly doesn't believe that her path is the only one to creativity. "You don't have to leave a place and travel the world to expand your mind. You can stay in one place and be part of its blossoming."
So now she's starting to think how she can most effectively strengthen the connections between two worlds that seem to be becoming one.
She'd love to bring her band here, so they can get a feel for the place. And she's working on two recording projects - a covers album, interpreting other people's songs, and an album of original material.
Though her own songs come naturally to her, it's by no means an easy process, particularly if the songs are to be honest.
"It's painful getting down to what you're meant to be doing. It's an archeological dig."
Practical problems intrude. For long enough, the struggle of keeping not just herself but her band going, while coping with marriage, parenthood and divorce, left her with little creative time.
Ideas came readily, but not the time to develop them.
"I had boxes of half-written lyrics."
Now the band's running along nicely, daughter Lily is securely in her rightful place at the centre of her mother's world, her daddy lives five minutes up the road, so that's figured out ... and the songs are coming out of the boxes.
"It's harvest time."
Let's see. There's "Out of the Woods," a classic rockabilly number reflecting Henderson's tendency to be the musical purist. There's "Better This Time," a lullabye-lament from hard times, and, oh yes, a provocative wee number about the "Beltane Fires." This song harks back to the pre-Christian ritual when people would light fires all over Britain, mask themselves, drink mulled wine, and choose sexual partners completely on instinct, rutting in fields and caves. The children that resulted from those unions were raised by their communities.
It was a ritual that cut across hierarchies and social standings, letting nature rule, says Henderson.
So she sings: No money, no land, no power, no fame Be stronger than the fires Of the Beltane flames. Henderson does not, and will not, compromise what she wants to communicate in order to pitch songs to either her LA audience, or a New Zealand audience, at the expense of the other. Good songs make their own connections.
"If the work is good work, if it is sound, then hopefully it will reflect in both communities in a really honest way."
And what of that LA press story that called her a siren? "I don't necessarily want to lure unsuspecting sailors on to the rocks," she says, after a moment's thought.
"But I would like to lure filmmakers and producers and musicians and tourists to the south.
"I'm excited about what I'm doing in LA, and about opportunities here too. I'm completely aware of my roots here. I'm tired of running away from whatever it was I ran away from ... this is the only place in the world when I come home I feel completely secure.
"I feel protected by the land."