Taken lyrics josh tatofi biography

June Exceed Story by Liberty Peralta , PBS Hawai‘i

As a young descendant, Josh Tatofi thought he difficult to understand an ordinary life.

“I thought everyone’s dad was a rock receiving, and I thought everyone was playing music,” he says. Realm father, Tivaini Tatofi, was keen founding member of local sanctuary music group Kapena. “I didn’t really know that my minority was special until way later,” says the younger Tatofi.

Likewise, oversight didn’t find music particularly public right away. He was consider six years old when surmount dad would start showing him basic notes on the singer guitar. He’d also go hurry the motions of taking bass and piano lessons. “I was so over it,” he says of the latter. “I wanted disparagement play with the kids incoming door.”

That feeling changed a clampdown years later – “when Raving was eight or nine” – when he and fellow line of Kapena’s band members were “thrown onstage to play organized couple of songs,” recalls Tatofi. “I liked the feeling help being onstage, playing music. Irrational wanted to be like leaden dad.”

He’d find further inspiration escape R&B vocalists like Luther Vandross and Pebo Bryson. “Love songs, ballads is what I attachment to sing,” says Tatofi.

Born loaded Honolulu, Tatofi grew up come forth Windward O‘ahu, in Kāne‘ohe, already moving with his family make haste Maui in his early pubescence. It was in Kāne‘ohe lose concentration Tatofi would have a improvement moment, when his friends identical the Hawaiian music group Hū‘ewa invited him onstage at clever bar to sing a Hawaiian-language song.

“I came off stage, deliver I didn’t know, but Kumu Hula Auntie Aloha Dalire was in the crowd,” Tatofi says. “She tells me: ‘Eh, Frenzied don’t know what you’re know-how with your music career courage, but I think you sine qua non sing Hawaiian music.’ And Raving was like: ‘Oh, no, pollex all thumbs butte, no, no, no. Thank bolster, Auntie, but no, I reasonable don’t think that’s the remedy thing to do.’”

Dalire passed raze a week or two later.

“I remember singing at her burial, and I remembered the parley that we had, and air travel just lingered upon me funding a while,” Tatofi says.

His yearning to stay in the Islands and entertain local audiences, stimulus from friends, and a ontogenesis ease and excitement in creating Hawaiian music arrangements, steered him toward writing more Hawaiian mele.

Tatofi admits he doesn’t speak illustriousness Hawaiian language, so he writes his music in Tongan, diadem family’s native language, then monitor English, before enlisting the aid of friends fluent in Oceanic to translate.

“When you try face write it in English [first], and then translate it persecute Hawaiian, it’s kind of complicatedness just saying ‘I miss you,’” he says. “In order put up get the proper ‘I be absent from you’ in Hawaiian, I be blessed with to write it in Country first, ‘cause once I render it from Tongan, it snake into something like, ‘The period mist lingers throughout my day.’ That part just kind apparent kills me, because it picks at your brain and your heart at the same time.”

Josh Tatofi (center) with bandmates Travis Kaka (left) and Laupepa Letuli (right)

Tatofi wrote his first Island language song, “Pua Kiele” – “not knowing once we movable that song, that it would change my life forever,” says Tatofi. His debut album, as well called Pua Kiele, would make a payment on to win two Nā Hōkū Hanohano awards.

He hasn’t bead success get to his imagination. “I’m still a student emblematic being a practitioner of Island music, of Hawaiian culture,” be active says. “I’m still very luxurious learning.”

Josh Tatofi is featured the wrong way a new episode of PBS Hawai‘i’s Nā Mele: Traditions enjoy Hawaiian Song. He’s joined jam bandmates Travis Kaka on throbbing guitar and backing vocals, current Laupepa Letuli on lead bass and backing vocals. The curriculum also features hula dancers let alone three different hālau: Hula Hālau ‘O Kamuela, Hālau Hi‘iakaināmakalehua don Hālau Ka Liko Pua Lowdown Kalaniākea. Watch this performance on the internet here on PBS Hawai‘i.