Karra Rhodes: Kiwi country-pop singer on song writing and the creation of her upcoming album

New Zealand has a knack for producing talented country-pop musicians. 

Self-taught Christchurch based musician Karra Rhodes has just released a single, ‘Why Can’t I Love You Less’, a full album on the horizon. 

Rhodes loves a challenge, juggling law exams, study, writing, and raising two young children as she pushes forward with her music career. 

Writing is a particular passion of hers, having been a ghost-writer for two years as well as writing her own debut fantasy novel. 

She told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking that music is her downtime, getting fidgety if she tries to watch TV and instead heading over to the piano or guitar. 

Currently Rhodes is writing a song a week and plans to record an entire album of work in August. 

“We still have a few songs to release before that, to tick people over, but we’re recording, myself and Greg, are recording in August.” 

Her big picture plan is to get out into the industry as a full songwriter. 

“I love making my own music, I love writing,” Rhodes told Hosking. 

“For me, it’s not so much about getting out there and, you know, internationally touring, I just, I want a reason to write." 

“I want a reason for the whole, for the songs that are right to have a home rather than, than disappear into the shadowlands of music that will never be heard.”  

Rhodes has recently gotten into toplining, which is when musicians who struggle at creating lyrics or melodies for their music hire a songwriter to create them for them. 

“it’s fantastic because you’re getting like, a whole new source of inspiration.” 

She said that being a songwriter, sometimes it's easy to get stuck in the same chords, the same thing each time, so having someone else’s musical beds is really good. 

Being self-taught, Rhodes is used to muddling through and improvising. 

“If you put a sheet of music in front of me, I’d probably struggle. If you gave me all the chords, I could just make it up.”  

The ability to improvise is a skill Rhodes values and is a gift she thinks more people have than they realise, they just lack the technical knowledge to follow through. 

“You want to be able to improvise on the spot, make it sound like something that you like, rather than somebody telling you what you should be doing.” 

“You should be able to come up with something you enjoy." 

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