When Zane Lowe speaks into the mic, his audience outnumbers the population of his homeland.
Lowe hails from New Zealand, a 5 million-strong nation with a rugby obsession and a seriously healthy music scene. Like many of his countrymen and women, this Kiwi is well travelled. Now based in Los Angeles, Lowe has served as Apple Music’s global creative director and lead anchor of Apple Music 1 since 2015.
Prior to joining Apple in the United States — the world’s biggest company by market cap — he called London home, with stints at BBC Radio 1, XFM and presenting “Gonzo” on MTV 2.
Apple doesn’t publicly release real-time or exact daily listener numbers for Apple Music 1. The platform does, however, boast over 112 million paid subscribers globally, and the station, is known to be one of the largest continuous radio broadcast networks in the world.
With that, Lowe is a flag bearer for NZ. In the worlds of music and broadcasting, his is the most recognizable Kiwi accent on earth, and his guests are the biggest artists in the business. None of it is a fluke. The likes of Paul McCartney, Dave Grohl, RAYE and countless others have experienced Lowe’s relaxed but well-researched interview technique.
He’s the Rock Star Whisperer.
Lowe recently visited Australia, where he participated in an exclusive on-stage conversation last Sunday, May 24, with triple j Mornings host Lucy Smith at Sydney’s City Recital Hall, part of Vivid Minds’ Creative Trailblazers series. His tips for a life in music and media? “Never expect the talent to be happy to be there,” he told Smith. Also, “nerd the f*** out,” “really care,” and most importantly, “listen to the music.”
Billboard.com also caught up with the broadcaster, talent-spotter and artist, for a glimpse at a career that has taken him from the Land of the Long White Cloud to the one of the biggest gigs in music.
Billboard: Do you remember when the door opened up for you?
Zane Lowe: Yeah, very clearly. I was at working at Max TV in Auckland, and, you know, we were doing shows and having a great time making this free-to-air music channel. It was really fun. I was beginning to wonder what else there is. Is there something else I could keep doing for a long time, you know? And I got this email from a guy called Brent Hansen. An email was so new back then. It was the strangest; the way he said it was like, “saw your tape. Love, dad?” We’re good friends now. To this day I don’t know why he finished his emails “dad,” which I thought was really endearing and really cool. But it probably was an acronym for all I f—ing know. It was just funny. And I just remember thinking, “what tape, how, who? What?” It was just so short and open-ended.
That was the moment, the first time I felt that feeling of, like, the unknown and what was possible really grabbed me. Dude, this could be a life-changing moment if you let it and focus and nurture it.
Subconsciously, I think that’s where I was like, you can do it.
[Hansen went on to serve as president of MTV Europe.]
Who are the top Aussie and Kiwi bands lighting you up at the moment?
Ninajirachi. Australian is really exciting right now. I feel like for every single style of music or whatever you want to call it these days, there’s somebody who’s got a place in that room really effectively. Nina’s crushing in the dance space, I love what Genesis Owusu is doing. I love the whole coming out and taking a look at the wider world and taking his approach at it.
I love Way Dynamic. It’s a very uniquely tasteful Australian experience to me in the sense that the sound design is so impeccable. It’s got that Kevin Parker attention to detail, like it’s got to sound so authentic and rich and warm before you even get drawn into the songs, which are beautiful.
Kiwis wise, I love Mokomokai. I love what Manu and those boys are doing on a rap level. I really like the Beths, Vera Ellen, and that kind of Flying Nun-inspired, in some cases affiliated, sound. And Office Dog, a very cool kind of indie that feels familiar to me from when I grew up, but it feels very modern and very great. And I love, obviously, the Payments.
These bands mean a lot to me. I love that feeling of very tasteful looseness. So I’m really into that.
We’re really good at pop, man. We’re really good at really weird pop. I mean, there’s before-Lorde and after-Lorde. There’s pop music before Ella (Yelich-O’Connor), and pop music after Ella and Joel (Little). Since then, Benee and the Ratbags (have emerged).
We do pop music in a really unique way. It’s weird. We do good weird pop. I just went to Split Enz. They are our No. 1 pop band of all time, and they are the weirdest f—ing pop band of all time. You can’t tell me “Six Months in a Leaky Boat” is not one of the weirdest pop hits of all time. Or “Dirty Creatures,” it’s just so weird and spooky and odd. We tried growing up during a time when that’s all over the radio. You’re just instantly in Weirdland. You feel like you’re in another planet.
We do we do. I think we lean into our isolation in that regard in a cool way, and we use the space that we have away from the rest of the world and away from trends and whatnot. And we use that space wisely. We push into areas that are really weird. We just always have.
What is your tip to fellow Antipodeans who might want to follow in your path?
If there’s inspiration in that, then that’s beautiful. Grab that. My life is really only designed from the vapors of inspiration that I’ve been lucky enough to inhale? I just hyperfocus on what moves you on what is like the No. 1 thing. There’s been on my mind a lot recently. Philosophy reasons, generational reasons, my mom, and also our kids, a lot of swirling change and the order of things, right? And it’s made me really think about, like, at this point in my life, where did it start and how am I here? And in a really nice way.
And I boiled it down to something that’s like a pin prick, the smallest little dot of something that is yours. It moves you, it speaks to you more than anything else. That is the closest thing to the beginning of purpose that you can think of. And the only thing I know that works in life, and this just is, for me, to create as much space and grace to expand on that as you can, to make that dot as big as you can. That’s it.
And how does that speak to your work ethic? Do you feel that you’re a workaholic?
Yeah, well, I was a workaholic. I’m not a workaholic anymore. I try to work smart, smarter, than harder, but I work hard, you know.
But if you enjoy it and you’re not wasting time by only working hard, then it doesn’t feel like hard work.
If I’m tired or I’m over-travelling or I’ve got too many things going on in my brain, I recognize it’s a byproduct of loving what I do, not a byproduct of doing something I don’t want to do, or wasting time.
I’m also really conscious of time because, again, I’m in that really interesting transition of the changing of the guard. With my parents getting older and now in the final phases of their life, and watching our kids kind of starting to really go on their journey in earnest. Realizing the importance of acknowledging and appreciating time in a different way. And I don’t really want to be beholden to it anymore the way I used to be. But also I don’t pretend to try to control it either. So I just I’m trying to make the most of it.
You’ve made some cracking records with Breaks Co-Op and Urban Disturbance. Is there any more of that to come?
Yeah. I’ve actually made an album, man. We’ll announce it soon, my first album in 10 years. It’s not a Breaks record. It’s a me record. I won’t go into describing it too much because, in this particular case, even though I do that for a living, I think I’d better let the music speak for itself. But I’m really proud of it. I will say this just to offset any assertions that maybe I’ve decided to create kind of, you know, a big collaborative montage of relationships in music.
It’s just me. There are no guests and no one else on it at this point, on this particular album. And I’m really excited to share it. And it definitely is the best thing I’ve ever been a part of, so I’m really proud of.
I get energized creating. So, for me, I actually find that if I’ve got a few hours at the end of the night, or into the night, or in the weekend or whatever, to be able to create some music or create some space to create, that is doing the opposite of expelling energy. It’s like when you’re driving an electric car and you pump the brakes and it adds more to the battery. That is what making music is for me. It’s actually adding battery life. It may take time, but it puts all the right energy in the bank for me when I’m making music. It’s a very happy place.
Vivid Minds’ Creative Trailblazers is part of the broader Vivid Sydney festival, which runs through June 13, and is owned, managed and produced by the New South Wales government, Destination NSW and Feel New Sydney.
