***
Fuelled by reverence, integrity and a deep spiritual connection to the human experience, NZ songwriter Kerryn Fields paints timeless musical portraits that do what others rarely can: bring us home to ourselves.
With multiple awards and nominations to her name (MLT Songwriting Award, Newstead Live Troubadour Foundation Award, 2019; AFMA Contemporary Album of the Year, Music Victoria Folk Act of the Year and Amplify Award finalist, 2021), Fields’ trademark warmth of character , evident in both life and music, fuels a creative offering that expands well beyond her command of guitar, voice and audience.
It’s for good reason too, because life is something that Fields has met with open arms, no matter how significant the challenge. Growing up in Te Kūiti, a NZ farming community in which both her family and others’ worked tirelessly to make ends meet, Fields moved through a time in which family separations and chronic illness fractured her experience of childhood.
A 2007 relocation to Melbourne would inject fresh energy and vision into her songwriting. Touring extensively around Australia, NZ and Canada for the next 13 years with the help of her much-loved camper van, Fields would soon come to realise that something significant was missing. Come 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, a most extraordinary thing happened: Aotearoa called Kerryn Fields back home.
What followed was an unyielding period of radical self-acceptance - and the album to go with it. Water, Kerryn Fields’ 2021 LP details the experiences of an artist coming to terms with her youth-era trauma, Maori heritage and newly discovered Australian-NZ roots. A love story at heart, it details Fields’ journey to Australia - the homesickness, the letting-go, and the falling into love. Raw, evocative and summoning an emotional force greater than the sum of its parts, its 10 tracks were signed off just as Fields relinquished control to the will of her elders - a journey that coursed her through the rivers, mountains and valleys of the heartland. Likewise, songs such as Black Fire and St Kilda Pier narrate tales of new land across shore, shaping Fields’ growing connection to Country - and self, at that.
Ultimately, it was Kerryn Fields' early acceptance of the love and pure kindness offered to her by doctors, nurses and physiotherapists that would shape her ability to heal others with her music. It would come as no surprise, then, that the core of Fields’ enduring appeal is her ability to relate - both intensely, and authentically - to those in her presence.
Radiating warmth, humor and a depth of character that’s palpable as soon as she enters a room, Fields utilises music and storytelling as a vehicle for doing what she does best: making peace with her own human existence. It’s because of this startling ability to meet and embrace herself so willingly that others feel able to do the same.
Kerryn Fields has appeared at Port Fairy Folk Festival, Out On The Weekend, Blue Mountains Festival, Cygnet Folk Festival, Newstead Live, Seven Sisters, Artswells (CAN), and more. She has landed coveted support slots with the likes of Nashville’s Lillie-Mae and the Grammy Award-winning Cedric Burnside, and continues touring her celebrated house concert series extensively throughout Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
