Charting, ha! This is a somewhat long-winded and peculiar story on how my voice ended up on a chart topping album in the beautiful country of Finland.

I can’t remember the details of how it even came about. In 2009, Gabe had heard me on 95bFM and approached me via texting into the studio during one of my shows.

Gabe, a former violent bank robber with schizophrenia, heard German voices in his head. It would put him immensely at ease to have sentences he gave me translated and said out loud in German, which is where I come in.

He hardly took off his sunglasses, always in gumboots. Gabe looked strong and broad, scary maybe, until he’d open his mouth and this gentle soft, nearly shy voice would come out. He loved playing the guitar, which he did at Toi Ora, a space to be creative for people under mental distress of any kind. I started volunteering to help him feel better.

One day he suggested that he would love to jam on his guitar, while I could say whatever I wanted in German, on top of his music. Definitely a yaysayer, I agreed.

I’m not a poet or super creative like that, but I thought of a bunch of stuff I could use that was German and a bit more than me just babbling on, freestyles.

I enjoyed his company, and we often had a bit of a laugh, talked about a lot of stuff, mental health, the past.

Our plans made small rounds at Toi Ora, and at the time, they were just getting a new music studio set up, and asked us if we wanted to be their test subject. Gabe was super excited about it, and me, well, I just go with whatever. Say yes, see what’ll happen.

The resident soundie at the time, Greg was his name, got Gabe to jam his electric guitar as he usually would, and I had prepared some famous German educational poetry from the 19th century, which is quite gnarly. All Germans recognise those verses, it’s quite outrageous; Germans kinda love it, ha! Google ‘Der Struwwelpeter’.

I hadn’t practised or anything, assuming this would never see the light of day, but then Gabe loved it so much, that I asked Greg for the sound files.

When I got home that night, I used my cringey reading, and Gabe’s jamming to make lil, mildly animated Youtube videos. For us, as a memory, for him to feel proud of. He adored them.

Die Geschichte Vom Suppen-Kasper

From here onwards it got weird. This wasn’t meant to go anywhere, wasn’t meant to be heard by anyone, and if so, only by our local mates here in New Zealand, right. We didn’t promote it, it was just our fun thing we did that one time.

One day I noticed that the view count of those videos had shot up into the tens of thousands. The system at the time was such that anyone who got the views got paid, and all of a sudden Youtube asked me how to get my royalties to me. I made a few hundred dollars very quickly!

Family Guy

Where did all these people even come from? Turns out, somewhere along the way, the TV show Family Guy had linked to my video as in “LOOK! IT REAL!”

Look, let’s not lie, the comments were very clear on basically everyone just hating our version. Germans insulted me, English speakers ridiculed me, every once in a while I would comment back and say “Duh, this wasn’t meant to be the greatest thing ever, it was just a thing we did one day, unrehearsed, for ourselves!”, but the onslaught of unkind comments continued so eventually I just chilled out and into it and let it live its life online on its own.

Meh. 🤷‍♂️ I set it to Creative Commons because it wasn’t really mine anyway, and somewhat forgot about it.

I ran into Gabe on the K’Rd/Pitt St intersection usually; last time I saw him he told me he had a stroke, but recovered. “Dang, Gabe, you take care”, I said.

Pyhimys

One day, in 2018, I notice comments such as (screenshot below)

Not just one but quite a few! What the heck is Pyhimys?!

One kind viewer let me in on it, and I had some kind of wild attack of utter hysteria that night.

Pyhimys had released an album called Tapa Poika. The first song on it… started with Gabe and me! (And ended with me screaming about soup. Hilarious! Cringe!)

Further googling showed that Tapa Poika was number one of the Finnish album charts. Queue more losing my shit, laughing.

“WADE OMG MY STUPID VOICE IS NUMBER ONE IN THE FINNISH CHARTS!”

The irony isn’t lost on me how hard people work, and I mean, years or decades of hard work to be part of awesome projects that hit some sort of Zeitgeist, and make them chart, and here hapless Gabe and Silke recorded at Toi Ora, and got into the Finnish charts over it. How wonderful, really!

Gabe

Facebook, Gabe, “Yo Gabe, guess what happened!”

Nothing.

Text Gabe, “Yo Gabe, also just FB’d you, crazy shit happened, can I call real quick?”

Nothing.

It’s so weird when you’re in a crazy as, bizarre situation like this and you can’t share it. I sent Pyhimys a message saying I loved what he did there, and we had a bit of a back and forth. Seems really nice.

I kept checking for Tapa Poika’s charting position, 4 weeks on number 1 of the album charts, 62 weeks in the top 10, 122 weeks across various charts. Like, what.

For Gabe 🌿

A few weeks after finding out, and not hearing back from Gabe, I googled him. I found an obituary. He had another stroke and this time, he hadn’t made it, two years prior, and I had never known. We were unlikely buddies, no one told me, no friends in common, anyway.

It’s sad when people die, comes with the territory, but I felt it was a real tragedy that he’ll never know that he made it into the Finnish album charts with his guitar playing. He would have laughed, and gotten some real joy out of it.

I did tell Toi Ora, and the sound engineer, and then social media, but it felt like it sort of came and went, and was just another one of those things you know. One of those things that happen, and people don’t believe, but they’re true. My life has had a ton of those.