Mel Parsons is a bit gobsmacked. The day after winning the annual MLT Songwriting Award for her song The Hardest Thing, she’s out at Hokonui Rūnanga’s base just outside Gore, helping some other songs to be born – and one just seems to have popped out fully formed.
Parsons is curating the Apra Amcos 321 Session, a stripped-down version of the music rights agency’s SongHub series, in which groups of three participants are given two hours to write one song. The trio of Nelson teenager Zac Griffith, Otago’s Keily Smith and Southlander Arun O’Connor have come up with a philosophical country song about weathering life’s storms. Inspired by the polar weather outside and replete with harmonies and a nimble guitar bridge, it already sounds like a winner.
“What?” she exclaims, beaming to the rest of the room after they play it.
This is Parsons’ second year at Tussock Country, the 10-day festival that encompasses the Gold Guitar Awards and the previous night’s Country Music Honours event, where her name went on an honour roll full of Australasian country music royalty. She loves the event: “The community’s amazing, quite unlike anything else in New Zealand. It’s really well professionally organised, but it’s also got a lot of heart, genuine heart.” Yet, she readily acknowledges, she’s not strictly a country artist.
“I guess I’m a bit of an outlier, but having some of those influences means I can kind of straddle that world. You just throw your hat in the ring. I quite like the concept of the [songwriting] award – there’s nothing commercial in there, it’s just whether or not the song connects with someone.”
The award is open only to songs not previously released, but, happily for Parsons, The Hardest Thing is on her new album, Sabotage, out two weeks after the awards ceremony. If it’s not a country song, it’s the one on the album that you could most easily imagine being picked up by a country singer.
Sabotage generally is a long way from the poppier parts of Parsons’ 15-year catalogue. She’s cagey about the significance of the title (“it’s suitably ambiguous”), but it’s a mature, sometimes sombre, work, suffused with the gothic folk sound we’ve come to associate with her home town of Lyttelton.
“I know!” she chuckles. “Such a cliché. I always feel like that when people say, ‘So, you’re a songwriter? Where do you live?’ And I’m like … Lyttelton. But clichés aside, there is something there. It’s not like I’m writing about the mountains or what I can see out the window, but I feel like the environment informs how you feel and that feeling is what comes out in the music. There’s enough of the grit, enough of the cold, there’s the water that you can see from everywhere. And you know, you bump into Delaney [Davidson] in the supermarket on a weekly basis. It’s kind of a creative hub.”
The album was recorded at Lyttelton’s Basement studio but was, she says, “put together in quite a different way to previous ones. It kind of had its seed in lockdown, so it wasn’t with my band. There’s just two of us piecing it together with my producer. Essentially, it’s still me writing songs, so that thread remains. But I feel like the vibe of it and the instrumentation are a bit different. I played a bit of drums on it, which was exciting for me. I love the drums. I’m not great at it, but it’s my favourite instrument.”
She’s also pleased with the album’s cover, a painting by artist Emma Hercus, who works from a studio in another seaside bohemian enclave, Paekākāriki.
“She’s an amazing painter. I’ve been a massive fan of hers and I asked her if I could use it for the cover. And she was like, sure. So we have this sort of mutual fandom going on – she sometimes paints to my work. It’s a super cool tie-in. And I’m really stoked to not have my face on the artwork for a change.”
Parsons will complete her final Tussock Country engagement that evening, playing a solo selection at Gore’s aptly-named Little Theatre, but she’s thrilled to be back with her band for an album tour. “You always hope the songs mean something to someone, that someone gets something out of them. But what I’ve always loved the most about this career is connecting with audiences live. That’s what excites me most about the whole thing.”
Sabotage is out now. Tour dates: The Piano, Christchurch, June 14; Q Theatre, Auckland, June 15; Old St Paul’s, Wellington, June 16.
