Reb Fountain's How Love Bends is out now and Reb and her band will be touring nationally in April and May. Photo: Chris Sisarich
Reb Fountain knows what can happen to the best laid plans.
Five years ago I was sitting at New Plymouth airport with Reb and her band. It was the Monday morning after WOMAD, where she had performed two spellbinding sets showcasing her brand new self-titled album, her first for the Flying Nun label. I was on my way back to Wellington and they were about to fly to the US to promote the album's international release.
After a decade spent honing her craft - through early solo releases, a spell with Christchurch folk-rockers The Eastern and a collaborative project with the late Sam Prebble - she had at last made an album that was distinctly her own, she was rightly proud of it and ready to take it to the world.
But Covid was on the horizon, a nationwide lockdown was only a week away, and as she sat in the airport cafeteria her phone screen began to light up with incoming messages informing her that one American gig after another had been cancelled. By the time our flights were called, Reb's tour was off.
Days later in Auckland, sitting in the home of multi-instrumentalist Dave Khan, Reb and her other bandmates, bass player Karin Canzek and drummer Earl Robertson, stared into the void.
"We were all scared, this was a new landscape and we had no idea what was going on, and I was feeling particularly thwarted in my plans. But Dave is very good at always thinking of a positive way out so he said to me, 'Why don't you do like Woody Guthrie and write a song a day?'. And when he sets me a challenge like that I've got to take it."
Reb Fountain knows what can happen to the best laid plans. Photo: Chris Sisarich
This process produced a wealth of new songs and in a short time she had a whole new album ready to go. Iris was released in October 2021 - just in time for a second lockdown. Not only that, but five days before its release Reb suffered a head injury while at home. With touring plans derailed yet again there was no longer any sense of novelty to the disruptions. Once again, Dave Khan came to the rescue.
"I was completely fragmented and felt disassociated, and Dave started sending me [musical] 'landscapes' to sing on. And in these landscapes I was free to explore and free to unravel some of the thoughts and feelings I was having, and sometimes they were nonsensical. At the same time I was dreaming like crazy. I would wake up in the middle of the night and I would have this incessant need to have to record the thing I was dreaming about."
That process was the starting point for the songs that would make up her latest album, How Love Bends, released this week. It's her strongest collection yet, showing the sophistication and confidence of a band that have now been playing as a unit for five years and a songwriter who has truly found her voice. There's a surreal, dreamlike quality to the lyrics, and yet, in what might be fragments of fables, you'll find Reb's fears and hopes for the world we are all living in.
Meanwhile, her music has moved beyond the folk roots of her early work and can be best described as simply Reb Fountain music: melodic hooks that implant themselves by stealth rather than force, rhythms that maintain a simmering dynamism, while her voice - more supple and nuanced than ever - alternately confides and declaims, hovers and soars.
Without the traumatic events of the past few years, these songs would never have emerged in the way they have, and How Love Bends would not be the album it is. And while Reb obviously wishes her head injury had never happened, she is also grateful for it.
"Of course I wish that many things traumatic had not happened but I wouldn't be who I am today without them having occurred."
Reb Fountain's How Love Bends is out now and Reb and her band will be touring nationally in April and May. Don't even think about lockdowns.
*Nick Bollinger is a Wellington-based writer, broadcaster and critic.
