Asking to be found — by myself. HAINA MAIKA PUANA's 'Find Me'

In three lines

• HAINA MAIKA PUANA's 'Find Me' has arrived at NONOL LIVE.
• It's a folk song that hands over the idea of looking after yourself.
• It's the third song out of the same session as 'Coconut juice' and 'Soliloquy2'.

A third texture from the same seat

That's three songs now that this act has sung sitting at NONOL LIVE. There was a daytime song, then a night song, and today one addressed to yourself.

	Coconut juice	Soliloquy2	Find Me
Facing	Outward	Inward	Yourself
Temperature	Bright and breezy	Low and quiet	Warm and steady
What it leaves	A summer mood	Words left unsaid	Permission to be okay

That one person can sing three songs this different within a few days feels like the best record this session left behind.

Asking to be found — by whom

From the title alone it sounds like a request made to someone else. Find me. But once the song is over, you can feel that the recipient of that request isn't outside.

When you're busy, there are stretches where you forget what you used to like. Do work you don't want to do for long enough and what kind of person you originally were starts to blur. What you need then isn't for someone else to find you — it's for you to go find yourself again. This song sets that idea down quietly instead of shouting it.

How folk comforts

An acoustic guitar, a voice, and space. The materials this act keeps using are the same across all three songs. What changes is where they put them.

On this one the guitar doesn't step forward. It's closer to walking alongside, at whatever pace the voice is going. There's a trap comforting songs often fall into: comfort too loudly and the listener ends up feeling smaller. This song avoids it. Instead of telling you it's fine, it chooses to sit beside you until it is.

When the backing steps back, the small things in a voice start to come through. The place a breath is drawn, the place a note is held and then quietly let go. Not traces of trying to sing well — traces of how it was actually sung in that moment.

What it means to hear it at the playground

There's almost no editing at NONOL LIVE. So the places where a voice wavers, and the places where a breath is steadied, stay in. For a song about looking after yourself, that wavering actually suits it. Saying "take care of yourself" in a perfectly polished voice is somehow less convincing.

If today ran unusually long, put this on and make five minutes where you do nothing at all. Those five minutes might be everything the song is trying to say.

A new song has arrived at the playground today.