I’m Reece — a songwriter, topliner, and producer in Aotearoa New Zealand. I work with independent artists who know what they want to say but haven’t found the clearest version of it yet. Mostly co-writing and toplining, with artist development and sync running alongside.
Where it started
I was the keyboard kid — corner of every school event, working songs out by ear until they were close enough to play. The point was never to cover them. It was to understand them: why that chord change, why the melody goes where it goes, why the chorus lands when it does. I remember playing “I Want It That Way” while the whole school sang along, and understanding for the first time what a song that holds a room can actually do.
You don’t get that from theory. You get it from watching a room respond to something you built, then working out why.
How I work
The question that stays with me is what is this song doing? Not how it feels: what’s happening in it, and where it’s going. A song that describes an emotion is a different thing from a song that creates one, and most of the work is closing that gap.
I close it by starting with the character before I touch a lyric: who’s singing, what their situation is, what they’d actually say. Once that’s clear, the song has somewhere to come from. It’s a system, not a mood: repeatable, and it travels. A supervisor casting a song is doing the same job from the other end.
Underneath the method there’s one preoccupation I keep coming back to: the distance between the self we perform and the one we are. It’s the territory my catalogue keeps returning to, and it’s the lens I bring to a session whether the brief asks for it or not. Point of view comes from having lived a particular gap, not describing one, and it’s the thing I listen for in a collaborator’s work too. The specific thing only they can say.
The same instinct ran through the years before this. A career across film and television taught me something a session never quite does. Music that holds a scene can’t explain itself: you only notice it when it fails. And years in brand and content strategy were a quieter version of the same question: why some work lands and other work doesn’t, even when it’s good. It’s almost always a framing problem, and that’s the instinct I bring to artist development now. What identity actually means in practice, not as a concept.
What I work on
Most of what I make sits in dark pop, cinematic pop, and alt-pop: emotionally specific, visual enough to travel to screen. But the session follows the song. If the character needs something else, that’s where we go.
Co-writing and toplining, artist development, sync, music marketing — on their own or in combination. The conversation usually makes clear which one a project needs first.
I’m in Aotearoa, working mostly remote. If something here connects to what you’re making, I’d like to hear about it.