Setting out to tour her sixth album, How Love Bends, Reb Fountain tells Tyson Beckett about the freedom, and weight, that comes with being an artist in and of the moment.
“You can tell by the look of my hair,” Reb Fountain laughs as we settle in to chat at
“I just stepped out of the sea.”
Nature is an ever-present pull for the California-born singer who whakapapas to Vancouver, grew up in Lyttelton, and has spent the better part of two decades living in Auckland.
“I’m really lucky I live by the Tamaki inlet so I can go swimming all the time, it makes me feel like I’m sane living in Auckland.”
As she does in He Commands You To Jump Into The Sea, track seven on her new album How Love Bends, Reb turns to nature for grounding, and answers. Natural resources have proven especially valuable for the artist lately.
“Here, up until recently, it’s felt like you can subsist with limited resources and you’d be okay. I used to say to my kids, if we lived over there [in North America], we’d be living in a box. Unfortunately that’s currently the state of affairs in New Zealand ...” she says.
“I feel like every creative right now is struggling, when there’s not funding from the top there’s no trickle down. It’s really hard out there.
“Smaller venues are closing, there’s not places for emerging artists to play and it’s hard to disentangle that from the perspective our Government has about what’s important and what’s not, what do we value?”
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Advertise with NZME.Reb says she’s frustrated by what she believes is the Government’s focus. “If it’s the economy? Like, hello, the music industry creates billions, creative arts create billions every year.”*
Reb believes there’s a fiscal fixation within the creative sector as well. “We have this industry that essentially is cutting the ticket at every possible level, even industry bodies that are there to ‘support the artist’, they’re clipping the ticket too.
“There’s an industry about an industry and at the bottom of that, there are creative artists who are doing the work and everyone is making the money off them and they’re not surviving.”
Tangled in this, she says, is the fact streaming figures are being used as the primary metric for success.
“If I don’t put energy into supporting my digital platforms, I may not have an audience or I may not get that festival opportunity. They look and see, oh, you don’t have very many streams, whereas I might be able to sell out the Auckland Town Hall - that’s not valued in the same way ... it’s highly problematic.”
She might find it problematic, but says it’s motivating as well. Reb has been roused into action, harnessing propulsion from her anger.
“I feel comforted and find solace in the fact that I am part of a resistance movement to the idea that everything has to be a commodity in ownership.”
More than ever she’s leaning in to her predilection to speak up and out, figuring out how to apply a political consciousness to her wider ethos, not just her lyricism. She’s thinking about “the messages that I’m passing down to other artists, to maybe more emerging artists or my peers. [About] how to run a business so that it’s respectful, so that people have value while also valuing myself?”
Questions of value seem omnipresent. She says she resonates with how she sees Greens’ leader Chloe Swarbrick and Te Pati Māori framing the political landscape.
“How do we counter the decision to impoverish people even in our country? To value defence over democracy or to feed slop to children? How do we counter these narratives that benefit so few? It’s not by becoming like your oppressor, it’s by amplifying the opposite, through love and compassion.
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Advertise with NZME.“The devaluing of domestic work, devaluing of the creative arts or devaluing of the environment or humanity, it’s the opposite of love: it’s power and greed.”
The 2021 Taite Music Prize winner says music is still the best way she’s able to beam love into the world.
“If I can in any way encourage people to amplify their own light in themselves then that’s positive, and f*** I don’t know what else to do. I go out to protests and I’ll speak up where I can, but this seems to be the greatest influence that I have.”
Reb says How Love Bends is overarchingly about the way our perspectives and world views alter over time.
“The nucleus of that is love, which to me is the most political act that you can have: to learn how to be more loving for yourself or someone else, and perhaps over time transform your fear or traumas.”
An unfiltered humanity has always shone through Reb’s works. She doesn’t shy away from it on How Love Bends, which captures the artist in the moment.
“I find that challenging ... to be alive, to be human. I’ve kind of taken on the task of self-work as a way to stay on the planet and help me become liberated from the shackles of my own stories. If I want to engage with audiences, I have to do that self work.”
How Love Bends offered a way to work through a physical trauma too. “It was born out of having a head injury,” Reb explains.
“I was trying to make sense of how I would interact with my music because I felt so disconnected physically, and I found it really hard to puzzle things together. I was kind of engaging musically in a different way, which meant that I was open to writing in different ways.
“I was having a lot of dream songs come to life, that changed the way that the album evolved. Forever came from a dream. Come Down started with a musical landscape [musician] Dave Khan sent me and then I just instinctively sang over.”
Heading out on tour, which she does this week as part of a 14-show run, is always an unknown, but this is an unknown she’s embracing rather than fighting.
“When I first started playing live, I’d have a bottle of bourbon and a cigarette and was pretty out of it. I was really terrified of being myself. Over the years, I’ve learnt how to be myself on stage, sharing what for me was the most vulnerable thing - losing my expectations of being accepted or rejected from the audience.
“I feel like teetering on that kind of precipice of the unknown is what’s exciting for us as a band, I hope it gives people in the audience the courage to do the same. You can be your truest self, or one aspect of your truest self, in a moment and that be okay.”
Reb Fountain’s How Love Bends Album Release Tour plays 14 shows around Aotearoa, starting April 10.
*A report published by Recorded Music NZ in December 2024 on the Economic Contribution of the Music Industry found that in 2023 the Aotearoa music industry directly contributed $451 million to GDP, and $901m after accounting for multiplier effects.
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