Reb Fountain and, left, Mel Parsons: Sharing a gift for affecting, authentic, personal songs. Photos / Kalvin Fountain-Best / Daniela Aebli

It’s not hard to find connections between Reb Fountain and Mel Parsons. The singer-songwriters both have established careers as independent artists. They both have ties to Christchurch, where Parsons lives and where US-born Fountain partly grew up. They’ve been up for some of the same awards over the years, for everything from country songwriting in the 2010s to the Taite Prize and Aotearoa Music Awards more recently. They’ve both toured as openers for Crowded House and moonlighted in other ensembles like The Eastern, Fly My Pretties and the Come Together tribute shows.

And yes, there’s also the hair. They both have a lot of it, and it can confuse people. Like the chap who went up to Parsons a few years ago at the Taite Prize to say he was a very big fan and loved the performance from earlier in the evening. Except it was Fountain, the previous year’s winner, who had played. “I very humbly accepted the praise, and inside, I said, ‘I’ll pass that on to Reb.’ But I didn’t burst his bubble, because he was so effusive and it would have ruined him to realise that it wasn’t you,” Parsons says to Fountain via Zoom from their respective homes.

Because both women have their seventh solo albums out within a week of each other, the Listener has arranged a conflab between them.

Fountain’s album is called Water for Gasoline and Parsons’ is Castle Hill, named for the Canterbury high country village where it was recorded. Both records remind that while both women and their sympathetic bands sound different – there’s barely an acoustic guitar to be heard on Fountain’s shadowy, atmospheric set, while they dominate Parsons’ warm folk-rock – they share a gift for affecting, authentic, personal songs. As Fountain says, she cried when she heard Parsons’ Don’t Leave the Light On, a track on the new album charting her time in an emotionally abusive relationship. While Parsons good-naturedly complains that Fountain’s often show-stopping lament about parental neglect, Hey Mom, isn’t on an album or available digitally.

Here’s some of what they had to talk about …

On talking about their songs

Parsons: I just want to preface it by saying I feel a bit conflicted, about deconstructing songs or talking about them in an analytical way. Maybe it’s because I’ve sort of got PTSD from my music school days, I prefer listening to songs in a feeling-the-vibe way.

Fountain: I remember I was in Dunedin at the Whare Flat Folk Festival and we got rained in, so we were all stuck there and I remember being in the kitchen and this guy said to me, “Oh, this song that you wrote, Hawks and Doves, what’s it about?” And I looked at him, I was, “What’s it about for you?” And so he told me what it was about, that it’s like a divorce song, and it meant all these things. I was like, “That sounds really great. Why would you want to know what it’s about for me?”

Parsons: Sometimes you have a song that you love, that for you it means XYZ, and you always thought this lyric was that, and then you read something, or you find out it was about that, and it’s kind of not the same any more.

Reb Fountain: Struggling to make space for herself in a busy life. Photo / Getty Images

On being productive

Fountain: How did you decide to just be relentless?

Parsons: It’s a great question and it’s so funny because that’s what I wrote down about you. I hate it when people ask me this: “You’re just prolific, how the hell do you do that?” It doesn’t always work that way for me. With kids, I have an ability to foresee what my time is going to look like, so any time I see a window, I will book it, and I will just pretty much go, “See that little window in my calendar? I’m going to make a record in there because I know that in two years’ time, I’m going to need a record to continue this kind of beautiful hamster wheel that we’re on.”

Fountain: When you make that deadline, do you maybe not have any songs? Or have one or two.

Parsons: Absolutely not. I’ve always been a very deadline-based person. I was the person at uni who would start the assignments the night before. I would never come home and do my homework straight away.

Fountain: Who does?

Parsons: Who does? Who are they? Not in our industry. I’m the same with writing. For this record, I literally had the band booked in and everything organised before I had the songs, which is fucking terrifying. But that is what I need. It’s almost like I need to scare myself into the creative corner. By nature, I’m probably quite lazy, so that’s why I have to force myself into those situations. Otherwise, there’d just be ideas swimming around forever and never coming out, because the actual getting them into song form, I find quite difficult, mostly.

Fountain: You casually said it’s because you’re lazy, which I completely disagree with. What it is for me, I find it hard to make space for myself, in general. And when you’re a person who’s quite high functioning, and you’re doing lots of things, and you’re caring for lots of people, making space can be challenging, because that’s when ideas come up. A lot of times, you’re just sitting there writing really shit songs, or waiting for something to come, and you have to go through it. For this record I was, “I know they’re there but I can’t just pull them out,” and the pressure starts compacting, and then all of a sudden something bursts through, or I’ve worked on this one song for months and it didn’t go anywhere but the research that I did for that song led to three other songs. Just weird stuff like that.

Parsons: I’m the same. It’s almost like gold panning. You’ve to stand in the river sifting through sand, rocks and all the shit and you might be there for days and get nothing, and sometimes it’s all just junk that comes out, but you’ve got to pan your way through to get the weird gems out.

We really survive on the support of a community that enables us to do things.
Reb Fountain

On motherhood

Parsons: I remember before I had kids – and to be fair, I was touring a lot and I was doing a lot of international touring – I remember thinking, “Oh god, I’m so busy.” And now, I honestly just laugh out loud thinking that I was busy then. It just makes you more productive, doesn’t it? You have a short window, and so you’ll work out how to get your procrastination time down to a minimum.

Fountain: When I used to go on tour with The Eastern, I’d get picked up from the airport and I’d just burst into tears. I was so pent up, and for me, touring has always been this moment of release, because life at home has been so busy. It’s so chaotic and, as you say, it’s just a joke to think that you can’t cope. Once you’ve had children, you can do anything. And you go on the tour, and it’s like, woohoo.

Parsons: I find that I’ll go on the road and people are, “Wow, look at all those tour dates, you must be exhausted”, and I am like, “You must be joking, this is my actual holiday.” I know that I’m working, but this is my break. Honestly, being able to tour and keep working, especially with having young kids, has been really the only way that I’ve stayed sane through the whole thing, to be honest.

On the state of the industry

Fountain: How are you coping? A lot of what we do, you know, we’re applying for funding all the time, we’re hustling for sponsorship and touring has got so expensive. We’re in this creative ecosystem in our economy, which is really an underclass economy where we don’t even get paid minimum wage. How is it for you when you put on a tour and you are doing extraordinary shows – most New Zealand artists, Mel, don’t get to do the theatres that you’re doing. How does it feel for you with that financial pressure as an independent artist?

Parsons: Right back at you. You know that it’s terrifying. It’s a funny thing, because the thing that people don’t realise is that you and I have got promoters helping us, and amazing publicists, and management at various levels. But people are like, “Oh, you’re playing at the Isaac Theatre Royal, or the Opera House, or whatever, so that must mean that you’ve made it.” There’s this sort of perception that you’re doing really well. We are, compared with a lot of artists, in an extremely privileged position. Both of us have catalogues, we’ve both got an amazing fanbase and yet you still feel like you’re in the trenches a lot of the time.

Mel Parsons: In the trenches. Photo / Getty Images

Fountain: I have to really work hard not to sink into the terrifying feeling every time I do something – put out a song, or an album, or want to do a show. The financial aspect of putting oneself out there is really challenging, because people with normal jobs don’t understand what we do, how little we live on, and how we survive. And we really survive, I reckon, on the support and care of a community that enables us to do things. We help each other for free. We mentor each other for free. We record for other people, or they record for us. You know, there’s this whole economy of reciprocity we exist on, because financially, the arts are not valued. We’re very privileged because we have both got New Zealand On Air funding and touring funding, but the pot is so small, and even under those conditions, even with support, it feels untenable.

It’s not right that the government has cut a third of the Creative NZ staff, because those administrators are folks who look after the welfare of artists and creative projects. I’m scared but I’m also going to do it anyway, and I’m always going to find a way to do it, even if there are no resources, because that is what being an artist is. That’s what creating art is – it’s punk, it’s rogue, it’s real, and in this age it’s, man, this is meaningful. At least to me.

On carrying on

Parsons: Do you feel like you’re a lifer? Like, you’ll do it forever?

Fountain: I don’t know how I’d jump off this bandwagon. I don’t feel like I could ever quit, writing songs. Sure, you might go, “Well, I’m just going to write them from home, because I’m too old,” or something [Fountain is 53]. But I saw a video of me recently and I’m, like, 30, and I’m saying I want to really go hard over the next five, because then I’ll just be too old. We do have this real pressure because we’re in a really youth-orientated industry. We don’t have a lot of role models that are in our industry that are still doing it. But I would never stop. Like, why?

Parsons: Yes, why?

Fountain: And it brings me so much joy, and it also helps me make sense of the world and for whatever reason, I need to do that. I need to process things on this musical, lyrical level and I have this camaraderie with the people that I play music with that’s so precious. It’s like family to me. You wouldn’t leave your family.

Parsons: I feel lucky, too. I guess that my music and what I do has never been at the cutting-edge of hip or cool. My kind of reasoning is because I’m not in fashion, then hopefully I’m not going to go out of fashion.

Fountain: I reckon you’re slow fashion. You’re handcrafted here in New Zealand.

Mel Parsons’ Castle Hill is released on August 7; Reb Fountain’s Water for Gasoline is released on August 14.

Mel Parsons’ tour dates: Thursday, August 27, Theatre Royal, Nelson; Friday, August 28, Isaac Theatre Royal, Christchurch; Saturday, August 29, Glenroy Auditorium, Dunedin; Thursday, September 3, Clarence St Theatre, Hamilton; Friday, September 4, Rangatira Q Theatre, Auckland; Saturday, September 5, Opera House, Wellington; Sunday, September 6, Globe Theatre, Palmerston North.

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Swapping notes: Mel Parsons & Reb Fountain on their careers, the music industry and what drives them