WHEN Bic Runga listens back to her 26-year-old self on her 2002 album Beautiful Collision she can't help but feel torn by her ambition.
"Eclectic is a nice way of saying it, but it's really all over the place," Runga says over Zoom from Auckland.
"It's trying to be lots of different things. I think it sort of works.
"I just realised how ambitious it was when I was trying to play it again. There's clarinets, sleigh bells and banjo. It's so all over the place that it's almost daft in its attempt to be all these things."
Runga recently completed a tour of her native New Zealand performing Beautiful Collision in full to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her second album, which topped the charts in her homeland and featured appearances from Kiwi legends Neil Finn and Dave Dobbyn.
This weekend Runga is back in Australia for the first time since 2017 to perform Beautiful Collision acoustically and other hits like ARIA top-10 single Sway.
Runga famously became one of New Zealand's biggest musical exports when Sway, and its subsequent album Drive, were released in 1997.
The single appeared on smash comedy American Pie and gave the daughter of a Chinese-Malaysian lounge singer and a Maori ex-serviceman a world-wide profile.
However, following Drive proved problematic.
"To be honest I didn't think I had a strong single on this record," Runga says.
"It wasn't that I was wilfully trying to not write a single, but I was more focused on it being a body of work.
"There was a lot of pressure on me, especially in New Zealand, and in some ways, Australia as well, where Sway had been a hit.
"For me as an artist I was in it for the long haul and I was trying to do a more serious album that sounded like a career artist."
Beautiful Collision might not have produced another Sway, but singles like the jangly rock-pop song Get Some Sleep, the Burt Bacharach-esque Listening For The Weather and the delicate folk-pop of Something Good displayed her rapid growth as a songwriter.
On top of it all was Runga's exquisitely unique voice.
"I still love the songs and being 20 years older and having more maturity, you don't have to be everything to everyone," Runga says of revisiting Beautiful Collision.
"You really just distil the essence of the song. I think the songs still stand up and I'm proud of the songwriting itself."
The New Zealand Music Hall Of Fame inductee has been relatively quiet over the past decade as she's focused on raising her three children.
The 47-year-old's last album of wholly new material, Belle, was released in 2011. In 2016 she released the covers album Close Your Eyes.
But with her youngest child, Frida, now 8, Runga says she's preparing to relaunch her career fully.
Several new songs will be road tested in Australia before she bunkers down in a studio later this year.
What fans can expect is a more mature and centred Bic Runga.
"I would love to just play music again in a more self-assured way and not feel so confused all the time," she says.
"I probably couldn't have learnt to be like that without laying low for a bit and having my family.
"There's nothing like motherhood to make you grow up and get over yourself."
Since Runga's commercial peak in the late '90s and early 2000s, New Zealand's music scene has undergone a transformation.
The likes of Lorde, Benee and Kimbra have enjoyed major international chart success, while alternative artists Marlon Williams and Aldous Harding have attracted critical acclaim.
"In the digital world now we're on the map and there's more possibility," she says.
Even with the digital world breaking down geographical boundaries, Runga is grateful and surprised that fans are still keen to listen.
"That fact that I'm here at all and able to play, I don't take it for granted," she says.
"We've sold out the Sydney and Melbourne shows and I'm so humbled because I shouldn't be here, you know.
"They don't expect you to last five years. It's a really difficult business, but it was always my intention to do this for life. I'm a lifer."
