Tia Carrere’s First Love

Actress nominated for Hawaiian music Grammy

HONOLULU — Many may know Tia Carrere as a beautiful actress of Filipino-Chinese and Spanish ancestry who shared the screen with Mike Myers in Wayne’s World (1992) and Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies (1994).

But Carrere’s first love was music, and over the past few years, she has cultivated a successful career singing Hawaiian songs, culminating in a Grammy nomination in the “Best Hawaiian Music Album” category this year for her album Hawaiiana. The awards will be broadcast on Feb. 10 on CBS.

Born and raised on the island of Oahu, Carrere sang in numerous talent contests as a young girl. “Everything was music in high school and junior high,” Carrere said during a phone interview from Los Angeles.

At 17, she was discovered by the mother of a film producer in a Waikiki grocery store checkout line.  “It sounds like one of those made-up PR stories,” Carrere admitted with a laugh. With no prior acting experience and no interest in becoming an actress at the time, she was cast as a lead in 1988 independent film Aloha Summer.

Afterward, Carrere moved to Los Angeles where she got a part on ABC’s General Hospital, and launched a career in film and television that has spanned 20 years (in the past two years, she has appeared in TV shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Nip/Tuck and The O.C.).

Carrere also realized her dreams of recording music after playing rocker chick Cassandra in the 1992 smash, Wayne’s World. Carrere sang “Ballroom Blitz” and “Why You Want to Break My Heart?” on the film’s soundtrack, and shortly after, her first album was released on the Warner label. Though she is proud of that album, Carrere admitted that the “R&B tinged pop” album was “a little bit all over the place” due to her then hectic film production schedule.

“I remember [singer] Michael McDonald — the amazing voice of Michael McDonald — was singing background vocals on one of my songs, and I was so exhausted from the movies and rehearsals that I was sleeping on the couch,” Carrere said. “It was crazy.”

Carrere’s schedule seems to have settled down since those days, as has her private life, now with husband, photographer Simon Wakelin, and daughter Bianca, born a couple of years ago.

However, it took a 2006 reunion with Grammy-winning musician and producer Daniel Ho (an old friend from her time singing in a jazz orchestra in high school) to push Carrere to record a second album, after more than a decade away from the recording studio. Produced and engineered by Ho, Hawaiiana was recorded in the spring of 2007 and was released under the independent Daniel Ho Creations label in July.

Hawaiiana is an album of largely Hawaiian-language songs that includes the tunes “Aloha O’e” and “I Remember You”(written by Hawai‘i-born songwriter Kui Lee and made famous by the late Don Ho) that is intended first and foremost as a gift to her daughter, Bianca. “Hawai‘i is so important to me — it really is key to who I am and what’s kept me grounded,” Carrere said. “I don’t want to lose it, and I want Bianca to have that connection to Hawai‘i. I sort of gravitated to all the love songs and lullabies of my childhood.”

The process of recording the second album was a world away from the controlled environment of her first album. “It just felt so good to do something I love with someone I enjoy working with, and it just brings me back to home and all the things that are good,” Carrere said.

The Grammy nomination was icing on the cake. Receiving the news about her Grammy nod over the phone from Honolulu Advertiser columnist Wayne Harada while driving through L.A., “I swear I almost drove off the road, and I started crying,” Carrere recalled.

Carrere, who will collaborate with Ho to produce her third album in the near future, says the lasting lesson she has learned is to take material written from “your heart and mind, commit to it and put it out,” regardless of popular tastes.