She Told Us She Was Done. She Recorded an Entire Album Instead
Eighteen months of silence, one rented Wairarapa woolshed and a record nobody at her label knew existed until Friday.
By Dan Fereti · 7 September 2026 · 5 min read
The retirement post had 400,000 likes. The farewell tour sold out in eleven minutes. And all the while, according to three people close to the sessions, she was driving to a converted woolshed outside Masterton four days a week with a hard drive in the passenger seat.
The result is fourteen tracks, recorded almost entirely live, with a band assembled from musicians who were sworn to secrecy in writing.
"She wanted it to sound like a room, not a laptop," one collaborator said. "There are takes on there where you can hear rain on the roof. She kept them in on purpose."
The label found out last
Executives were reportedly played the album in a single sitting on Friday afternoon, with phones collected at the door. One attendee described the mood afterwards as "panic, then euphoria, then panic again" as the marketing calendar was torn up on the spot.
A release date has not been confirmed. What has been confirmed is a run of small-venue dates in Dunedin, Napier and New Plymouth — rooms holding under 600 people, in a country where she last played arenas.
