Erakah
// VocalistERAKAH is an award-winning singer-songwriter, and vocalist from Auckland, New Zealand. She has won several awards for her music and performances, including the Flava People’s Choice Award 2010, and Best Female Pacific Artist 2010. Her debut album “Infatuated” (2011) is available from Warner Music New Zealand. Her singles “Everyday”, “Hold You Near”, “In or Out”, “Natural”, “Day & Night”, “Your Style”, “Wonderful”, and “Infatuated” are all available from the iTunes Music Store. Erakah’s online blog HER-story features real life stories from women who have overcome the negative odds and positively stacked them in their favour.
Website: www.erakahmusic.com
Photo: © Patric Seng / Saya Design Studio / PatricSeng.com | Styling: Sammy Salsa | Makeup: Phoenix Renata / Phoenix Cosmetics | Hair: D’Lyte Hair & Beauty Salon
Interview:
Forgive AND forget? I don’t agree with this at all. I believe that I need to forgive and to mean it, not to use it against the person, but to forget? I believe that is what God does. I’m glad I haven’t forgotten what happened to me, and parts of me are remembering every week. I suppose I’ve repressed memories and thrown away the key. Maybe forgiveness is the key that’s unlocking my memories? I know the power of forgiveness and that is love, the biggest expression—to forgive someone is to give love when the situation doesn’t deserve it. I never said the person, I said the situation.
Music hasn’t always been part of my healing. It is only in the past year that I’ve realized that while it’s helping my fans to heal or reminisce, it has been healing me. I like to include an element of truth in my songs, whether literal or figurative. We’ve realized that it’s not just nice melodies, timbre, resonance, and harmonies. Music is a way to heal someone, help them to relive, or to damage someone. I’ve known people who have turned to music and not a doctor and who’ve said that the music was medicine enough to touch their heart in ways that medicine could never have.
The fact that I remember what happened to me, the punches, the poisoned words, the kicks, miscarriages, the rape, and just being forgotten by our justice system. It is enough to be deemed unforgivable by many, but I had to choose to move on, to start living and healing. It happened to me physically for three years, emotionally and mentally for six years. At times I’ve wanted to kill the dude, to make him pay slowly for what he did to me. To reopen the case and show everyone what he did to me and just make him rot in jail. Then forgiveness unlocks a memory I’ve buried deep in my brain and then love seeps through and I just have to forgive. I’m not a hero for this, I’m just doing to someone what I would want done to me. It’s simple when you cut all of the stuff out because basically love covers all. People have told me that’s not true, but then if it isn’t, then why has love worked for me all these years?
My past, present, and future is all wrapped up in my lyric writing and performing on stage. As a performer who writes from personal experience, it is hard to separate the emotion from the business, because I am the business. So I’ll just keep on doing that, just being me and who I have turned out to be. My past has definitely changed who I am. What I believe and how I now know that the human heart and brain are linked in a way that when nothing makes sense to me at all, that music is a strong tool to either heal or destroy and love STILL covers all.
“I had to choose to move on, to start living and healing.”
– Erakah, Vocalist
