This song – which has been described as a New Zealand ‘Imagine’ – was produced for free by English expatriate Jaz Coleman as a thank you to local Māori for lifting the tapu on the new York Street Recording Studios and released on the Tangata label. And it saw Paki win Best Songwriter and Most Promising Female Vocalist at the 1993 NZ Music Awards.

From there, the story is convoluted and controversial. Paki signed with management who convinced her to pull the plug on her Tangata deal. The following year, Neil Finn produced the follow-up, ‘Greenstone’, which made it to No.5 on the charts. It was featured on her album Oxygen Of Love, produced by Mark Hart of Crowded House and released in 1996. However Oxygen of Love featured an inferior re-recording of ‘System Virtue’ and received mixed reviews. Nevertheless the album went gold in just a few days, and was released in several international territories, including Japan and Italy. 

Oxygen of Love gained Emma another nomination for best female vocalist, plus one for best album, in the 1997 Clear Music and Entertainment Awards. She won the Mana Māori award.

Despite this, Paki was struggling. A disappointing performance of the national anthem before a capacity rugby league crowd was a setback. “At the time, I was really damaged by it,” Paki told Tim Gruar in 2010. “I didn’t want to make any more records. And the media were quite harsh on me, you know. Even now they talk about me like I’ve died or something. This is ... something that’s hard to get over, you know? I don’t remember what happened really”.

Always a carefree, though somewhat fragile personality, Paki drifted, defeated by the industry, only returning to recording in 2003 with assistance from industry power broker Malcolm Black and some help from Bic Runga. The result was the astonishing ‘Stand Alone’, followed by an EP of remixes, Trinity, in 2010.

Most recently Paki has created a songwriting workshop in Auckland under her company Auckland Music Services, with the goal of helping young people follow their dreams. She said in an interview with te ao Maori News that her job is “... to facilitate in their learning. You know how people talk, speak or korero or converse with each other that's all it is with Music. It's the same thing really. But people need to know that they can do it, so that is my job.”

Emma Paki is still writing and recording in the second decade of the 21st Century.

--

Updated by Taya Kennedy Robbins, 2019