‘Musicians are funny people’: Bret McKenzie has given up trying to suppress his playful side
The Academy Award-winning singer songwriter reflects on his Flight of the Conchords breakthrough, brushes with Hollywood and The Muppets, and his current solo tour with Wellington’s answer to the Wrecking Crew.
It’s not unusual for career musicians to find out their songs have soundtracked the big moments in fans’ lives. For Bret McKenzie, there’s often an extra layer of surrealism.
“I had a really funny experience in London when I had been at a theatre, and a bouncer came up to me – this big, tough guy – and he was like, ‘Oh, ‘I Can Give You What You Want’? We played that at my wedding!’”
The song in question is a catchy disco pastiche, and perfectly wedding appropriate – until you remember it was originally performed by Kermit the Frog’s evil doppelganger in a bid to seduce Miss Piggy for 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted.
“There are people that grew up with it,” McKenzie says of the soundtrack work that has kept him busy over the past decade and a half. “It’s in their tapestry, the fabric of their pop culture experience.”
McKenzie’s Oscar-winning turn as composer-of-choice for The Muppets is one example of the actor, comedian and musician’s career-making knack for turning up in unexpected places.
The turn of the millennium brought a wordless, split-second role in The Fellowship of the Ring that inspired its own online cult following. Next came his breakout success with Flight of the Conchords, the oddball musical comedy duo alongside Jemaine Clement that landed a two-season run for HBO at the height of the prestige cable network’s pre-Netflix influence.
Looking back at Flight of the Conchords’ late-2000s peak, he’s still surprised by the show’s impact – launching not only his and Clement’s Hollywood careers, but bringing fellow Kiwis Taika Waititi and Rhys Darby to international attention as well.
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“We’d been parodying pop culture, and then we were suddenly falling into it,” McKenzie reflects with warm appreciation. “There was a video of Amy Winehouse singing or listening to ‘Foux du Fafa’, and there was Snoop Dogg smoking and laughing to a little video of us singing ‘If You’re Into It’. And it’s super weird, actually, super weird.”
The weirdness hasn’t stopped since. Speaking from his home in Wellington – he and his family moved back from Los Angeles – McKenzie says his latest screen credit didn’t even feature his face, as he performed motion capture opposite Jennifer Coolidge for the 2025 blockbuster A Minecraft Movie.
"One time I got sent a toy catalogue that my agent was like, ‘Do you like these toys? You want to make a movie for any of these toys?’"
Filmed in New Zealand, McKenzie explains he had already worked with Coolidge back in 2013 on the Jane Austen-inspired Austenland (“It was kind of in the Bridgerton zone, but it was too early,” he says). That film was directed by Jerusha Hess, who also co-wrote the Conchords-adjacent cult classic Napoleon Dynamite alongside husband and director Jared Hess – the filmmaker charged with adapting the video game mega-franchise.
McKenzie says the film is an example of how creators have to find ways to slip their own voice and sensibility into Hollywood’s narrow culture of reboots, remakes, and ‘I.P.’.
“Hollywood is driven by bestselling books, toys, pre-existing franchises, reboots – and it is hard for studios, I get it,” he says. “It’s really hard now to make any impact, to get any traction with whatever you make.
“But one time I got sent a toy catalogue that my agent was like, ‘Do you like these toys? You want to make a movie for any of these toys?’”
In March McKenzie returns to Australia with a more personal project, touring his second album under his own name after years cutting tracks for the likes of The Simpsons and Spongebob Squarepants.
“It wasn’t like I’ve been waiting to do this solo work my whole life,” he says. “I thought it would be quite fun.
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“My day is spent often figuring out songs for a film, but sometimes I’m working away and I come up with an idea that isn’t right for the film.”
His first solo album, 2022’s Songs Without Jokes, came together when he tapped some of the LA session guns he knew from his day job – players like James Taylor’s longtime bassist Leland Sklar, Steely Dan alumnus Dean Parks, and Lana Del Ray collaborator Drew Erickson – to lay down these leftovers.
“At first, I was kind of obsessive that they weren’t funny, and now I don’t really mind,” he says. “Once I started touring live, I realised, you know, I can’t help myself but be quite playful on stage – it’s very much who I am.”
The result was a breezy collection of tunes steeped in the classic sounds of the 1960s and ‘70s singer-songwriter tradition. It’s a spirit carried through to his second solo album, last year’s Freak Out City, which often evokes the playful spirit and sounds of Lola-era Ray Davies and The Kinks.
The delicate crossover between music and comedy has always intrigued McKenzie, who cites Eric Idle’s Monty Python classic ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ as a formative influence.
“I really love when comedy and music combine, those worlds collide,” he says. “There are few comedy artists with songs that I really love, but ones like that are magic songs, as well as funny.”
More often, he finds himself drawn to “weird jams” that appear on records by ‘70s artists like Harry Nilsson. “A lot of gags and playfulness is tucked in – I honestly think half of those great, weird songs are just [because] they’ve been in the studio for a few weeks, they’re getting so tired that they start becoming delirious.
“Curiously, a lot of musicians are very funny people,” he says. “It’s often musicians are actually more fun, and funnier to hang out with than comedians.”
For this latest tour, McKenzie promises a mix of songs from both solo records along with material from his TV and film projects, backed by an eight-piece band he describes as “the Wellington Wrecking Crew” drafted from around his hometown.
It’s a different experience to the ‘folk parody duo’ that made him famous, but McKenzie says he and Clement are still close – they’ve been spending hours at McKenzie’s house brushing up for their first Flight of the Conchords shows in years.
“We’ve been rehearsing a little bit this last week, and it’s pretty hilarious trying to remember songs we haven’t played for eight to ten years – but the old ones like ‘Bowie’, they have this muscle memory. We’ve played them thousands of times.”
As for this writer’s own London-theatre-bouncer moment? I have to throw in ‘The Big House’, another ridiculous Muppets Most Wanted cut originally sung by Tina Fey and Josh Groban, set in a Siberian gulag.
“That’s a deep request!” McKenzie laughs. “No one’s ever requested that… I’ll have to get practicing.”
Bret McKenzie plays The Gov in Adelaide on Thursday March 19, and Brisbane’s The Tivoli on Wednesday March 25
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