Shona Laing describes herself as an observer; a person on the outside looking in.
From such a position, a perch honed by age and experience, she is thus able to document the buoyant currency of a song she penned some 37 years ago.
The track in question is 1905. Performed in 1972, at the New Zealand New Faces music competition, it propelled Laing, then a 17-year-old schoolgirl, to a major-label deal and a level of attention that prompted her to leave her homeland a few years later.
Laing, on the phone from Wellington earlier this week during a national tour with singer-songwriter Monique Rhodes, describes 1905 as a "spectre".
Yet she has discovered the career-defining song means plenty to others. It has become a highlight of her intimate shows, "the big sing-along".
She wonders if the response has as much to do with memory as it does melody.
"I think there is a real longing among people my age for the 1970s. Last night [at Plimmerton Boat Club on the Kapiti Coast] there was a slightly more middle-class audience and it was all about the '70s.
"I just think people mourn it; they grieve how simple life seemed. I guess I'm one of the few things that is still a bit the same."
With almost four decades of experience in the music industry, Laing knows what she wants from her career these days and it's largely to do with intimacy, be that via the smallish venues selected for her current tour (she and Rhodes perform at Circadian Rhythm, Dunedin, on Friday, February 13) or the largely acoustic approach taken on her most recent album, 2007's Pass The Whisper.
The title of the album describes the quiet attitude she now employs, both in her music and her marketing of it.
"The idea of the album was just to go out and do it quietly and take the time. So often an album has so much work put into it and it's over and done with after six months or something."
For Pass The Whisper Laing returned to her folk roots.
The album includes seven new songs as well as radical reworkings of Soviet Snow and (Glad I'm) Not A Kennedy.
Celtic textures (pipes, flutes and bhodran) are augmented by acoustic guitar, double bass and backing vocals featuring Mahinarangi Tocker, who died last year following a massive asthma attack.
"I just really wanted to do those songs. If you can imagine the recorded versions, they were pretty extreme. It was the production ethos of the '80s - helicopters, whales and dead presidents - but it's pretty hard to take them on the road.
"So it was really just a way of reproducing them, of reconnecting with them in a more authentic way.
"We started off going for a Celtic feel. I think that was from Mahinarangi, too," explains Laing, who produced Tocker's 1997 album, Te Ripo and performed on 2005's The Mongrel In Me, an album on which Tocker explored her Maori, Celtic and Hebrew roots.
"It was very much from the depths of her being. I guess it was a process of self-discovery [for me] in lots of ways as well, the way that Celtic music stirs me."
More recently, Laing has found inspiration in a younger generation.
Working with high school students as part of a New Zealand Music Commission mentoring programme, she believes she has learnt as much as she has taught.
"Mostly it's about song-writing, but when I went to Kelston Girls last year it was to prepare the bands for Rockquest. I sat there and told them what I thought, basically.
"If you are as positive as you can be, kids just respond amazingly.
"Listening to these kids really did refresh me. The writing skills ... when I started writing songs no-one was, but now it's something that we all do.
"The kids are so inventive; they are just so positive. They are not weighed down by all those doubts and apprehension."
Laing can recall her own youth vividly.
As a teenager she spent plenty of time developing her songcraft.
The effort paid off: following her initial success with 1905, a song inspired by screen idol Henry Fonda, she was signed to Vertigo, which released the track as a single in 1973.
The same year she released another single, Show Your Love which, like 1905, reached No 4 on the New Zealand singles chart.
She also collected two RATA awards (best new artist and recording artist of the year), won the Tokyo Song Festival with Masquerade and released debut album Whispering Afraid.
In 1975 Laing left New Zealand. ("I tried to become anonymous, tried to redefine myself. When I was a bit younger I did try to lose it.")
She headed to London, where she released a series of singles and an album through EMI, as well as recording with Manfred Mann's Earth Band before returning home in the early '80s.
Laing's next big break came in 1987, with the single (Glad I'm) Not A Kennedy.
Originally included on her 1985 album, Genre, released by New Zealand independent label Pagan Records, the track was given a major reworking and re-released on major label Virgin whereby it reached No 2 in New Zealand, No 9 in Australia and received airplay in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Fast-forward to 2009, however, and Laing is describing her career as a "cautionary tale". The early '90s, in particular, are years she'd prefer to forget.
"From Kennedy to [1992 album] New On Earth was probably the most intense time of my career, but it also turned to custard on the business side of things . . .
"I think I was just an instrument of a business struggle between the independents and the majors in the States. The '90s were tough.
"I was working in New Zealand and I suppose it just sort of seemed I was past my use-by date in lots of ways. I'm truly of the idea that you can't make people like you if they don't," she says, laughing.
"So it was better just to go away and keep working at what I do. I don't think I'd sign to a major label again, simply because it is a business.
"The music is secondary; it's a product . . . Now I do it with people I love and with friends. It's a much more joyous experience."
Laing lives in the south of the Coromandel these days, in Waihi; she has done for 15 years.
Before then, she was based in Auckland.
"I could have become an Australian and could have been an American, too, if I'd wanted to be. But I'm a Kiwi and I miss this place when I'm not here."
She's still working on songs; indeed, she sometimes has three or more on the go at the same time.
She works out a lot of it in her head.
"Quite often, I'll have something pretty well sorted before I sit down, but they don't get finished quite so readily as they used to. I might spend three months just looking for a word."
And when she's at a loss for words, Laing sometimes turns to a relatively new-found medium: painting.
"In lots of ways, it's a very personal thing. It's a lot like songwriting. I started off doing landscapes then got into quite impressionistic things.
"It's quite a therapeutic thing. My partner at the time, her teenage daughter had left some paints behind and one day I just did some stuff."
But back to the beginning . . . though Laing has been contemplating giving 1905 a fresh twist, she believes it's best she plays it straight.
"I've been thinking of doing an orchestral version, but it just is what it is. It's like it's not even mine.
"I do my very best to do it as I did. But I do say to audiences, 'I'm not 16 any more, so I need your help'.
"And they do help, which is fab. It has turned into a highlight of the entertainment.
"I guess I have a reputation as a heavy b**** but we do have a lot of fun."
