Indie-folk singer Ali Whitton’s journey to his debut album has incorporated beginner bands, solo stints in London and Paris, romance and heartbreak, relocation to Aotearoa and an assignment from superstar Ed Sheeran. Kiwi music stars Reb Fountain and Dave Khan feature too, his album ‘Between the Forest and the Stars’ coloured in by each of them. He talked about the album with Richard Thorne.

Aotearoa-born before growing up in the UK, Ali Whitton’s music career has been punctuated with setbacks and re-starts – helping explain why it’s taken him until 42 to release his first solo album.

Perhaps the first setback was being told as a kid, by a school music teacher, that he couldn’t sing. It’s something Whitton mentions in explaining that he carries a lot of insecurity about his mild-mannered tenor voice.

Notable among re-starts was his decision to leave England and settle in Wellington, back in 2010.

“I’m calling this my debut album, because I suppose it’s the debut album released just under my name, but I have done a couple of records with a band, back in London. And yeah, it was a bad second album, and a breakup ­– and after a bit of a burnout I just kind of packed it all in.”

By 2015 he was performing around Pōneke as solo/duo folk act Lost Bird, but after a few years of that life things including work and fatherhood got in the way. A longtime muso mate, by the name of Ed Sheeran, gets the credit for influencing his return to songwriting, and the songs found on ‘Between the Forest and the Stars’. 

“Back when I was a muso in London, around early 2000, I used to perform on the same gig circuit as Ed. So I know him from way back. And every time he’s been in NZ I catch up with him ­- and every time he always asks, ‘Are you still writing, and still singing?’ And from time to time, I’d be like, ‘Yeah!’

“Then back in 2023 I had a bit more time with him to hang out, and when we had that conversation he asked, ‘Do you ever just write a song a week?’ And I said, ‘No, not really.’ At some point I played him Quiet My Heart, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s good, you should record it.’ And then he basically encouraged me to write one song a week for a year, and said he’d have a listen and help me choose the best ones for a record.”

Adhering to the spirit of the challenge, a year on Whitton had 52 new songs, and encouraged by his superstar mate turned his attention to recording an album. Acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Dave Khan was identified as producer of choice by Whitton researching the Kiwi folk and country artist releases found among his new partner’s record collection. 

“It was a very cool time with lots of things aligning; meeting my partner who I’ve been with for three years now, and I was getting back into songwriting. Though I’d been jaded, really, from the last 20 years I was finding my love of music again. She’s really into going to gigs, and into The Veils, Reb Fountain, Marlon Williams, and lots of NZ music. I just looked through her LP collection really, looking at the names on the back. I googled Dave Khan and found that he played pedal steel, and I love the sound of pedal steel! It was like, ‘I need to try and contact this guy.’”

At Khan’s guidance their approach towards album recording involved several months of low key song exploration, including a few trips north to Auckland to work through some of the big selection available. Soon after the first session Khan suggested Reb Fountain join the team.

“After he’d heard a few of the songs, and we demoed a bit, he spoke to Reb about me. Because I’d done 52 songs that were really quite raw, he was like, ‘Reb can help you with some songwriting tweaks. What do you think about having a co-producer?’ And I was like, ‘No brainer… of course!’”

Khan also knowingly recommended using Sublime Studios, owned by musician Steve Harrop and located on a rural lifestyle block in north Otago. Whitton describes the environment as absolutely amazing, and a perfect place for his record – especially given his very personal songwriting is heavily influenced by landscape and horizons.

“The reason for the six months kind of pre-production was because we’d booked in 10 days recording across 11 or 12 days, so with just one break day in the middle. We went down at the end of August 2024. It snowed on the first night we were there, and then sunshine by the end, so sort of winter into spring.”

Melbourne-based drummer Gus Agars (from Marlon Williams’ Yarra Benders band), had been recommended by Khan, and Steve Harrop played bass. Whitton was meeting them for the first time.

“Dave’s all about the process. So it wasn’t like we went down with 12 demos that we were simply going to recreate in the studio. We really just went down with a bunch of ideas, and the songs that we knew we were going to try. Then it was about seeing how the band worked when we were there.”

Whitton says he took his acoustic guitar and banjo south, in the event only recording with the acoustic and happily leaving the balance of the stringed instruments and piano up to Khan.

“It was a case of focusing on doing the best vocal performances really, and if there’s people who can play better than you, let’s make it easy and let them!” he smiles.

As co-producer Reb Fountain helped him further with fine tuning aspects of the songwriting in the studio, Whitton describing her as being very details oriented, focused on the vocals and vocal takes.

“She would say to me like, ‘Where were you when you wrote this song? What was your mindset? Think about that, feel that, and then get the vocal take.’ Kind of like, getting me back to where those places were, it was quite a process.”

As his voice-centric 10-song album reveals, Fountain’s coaching was highly successful.

“There’s a moment on the song Closer, after the first chorus, I actually broke down in tears in that vocal take, and it’s in there. Nobody would really be able to tell, but it was really an emotional kind of process. It was like therapy, it was pretty crazy!”

Reb Fountain has co-writer credits on two tracks, Forever and Romance Films, and her voice is matched with his in the lovingly reflective acoustic guitar-backed duet By Your Side.

“We really weren’t sure what version that song would be, we had a really interesting piano demo from some of the workshopping of it. And it was very late at night, 12.30 in the morning I think, and we’re like, ‘Let’s just try it acoustically.’

“We did it two or three times, and I got something wrong in each of them. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s cool, I can just drop in and correct that word,’ but Dave said, ‘No, that’s not how we’re doing this. Let’s do it again.’

“So it’s a completely live take of that song, and that’s Reb singing alongside me, completely at the same time. So, yeah, it was really cool, we were almost gonna give up on that song I think.”

Forever is one of only two tracks featuring pedal steel and Whitton uses it as an example when praising Khan’s sensitivity of musicianship – there’s scant evidence of his virtuosity, rather an evident sparseness of instrumentation throughout the album,

“Yeah, that’s what’s very cool about it. There’s a riff in Forever, and a bit [of pedal steel] on the first track, She’s Only Love, but it’s kind of subtle, and I suppose that’s symptomatic of all Dave’s contributions. ‘Restrained’ is a word I hear a lot from people who’ve had a listen, he never overplays.”

Whitton says he fully entrusted the two producers to make the right decisions for his songs.

“I was very much guided by them, so I would have never gone, ‘Oh, let’s do this. Let’s do that.’ I think all of that work beforehand made us kind of know where and when things needed to be. They are both very, very good, and very experienced working together, so they just knew kind of the right fit.

“We didn’t do the old click track, and then build up, build up… so they all the songs have kind of a live feel to them underneath. We’d play it over and over again to find out what the song kind of should be like, and then as much as possible we kept to the core foundation of the song.

“And I suppose that ‘restrained’ word, again, is both of them. They definitely wanted to make sure my identity was front and center as well, so I was very privileged to work with them.”

Explaining his personal subject matter and love of wordplay, Whitton says he started writing songs as a means of figuring out his own young man’s emotions, whilst looking out over the north Yorkshire moors.

“I used to sing about the weather and the landscape – and it became a matter of which am I singing about, the internal or external weather? That’s always kind of remained true I suppose, and I’ve always tried to make it poetic.

“I sort of see the songs as landscapes really, and they’re not clustered landscapes. What I picture when I’m first writing a song is usually the coast or the country, rather than the city – and so I’m glad that there’s that space in them, really.”

He finds a uniqueness in Aotearoa’s modern folk and country music.

“Yeah, I do. There’s a rawness here that I really like. An earthiness, and sort of an every-person quality of a lot of the music – which is folk – it should represent community.

“I don’t claim to know really 1% of the history of NZ music, but I’m fascinated by the unusual paths of some of the musicians as well, people like Don McGlashan. I suppose understandably NZ musicians are always balancing music making with a number of other things, to try and make it work, and so having to find some interesting angles.

“And there’s so much inspiration here. For me a massive inspiration, in my songwriting anyway, is the natural world, and the NZ natural world is particularly evocative.”

The evocative song and album title ‘Between the Forest and the Stars’ came to him when he was cycling home one day.

“It’s about that tension between being old enough to sometimes rediscover the things that were really important to me, and my roots, and the countryside, and the places of peace – whilst also striving for something, aspiring for something like an old dream, really.

“And at times over the 20 years, that dream’s been pretty crushed. So then when you’re dealing with that, you go back to the roots, and then you heal, then you go again. So that was kind of that title – saying one way or another the song sits somewhere between aspiring to something new, or re-grounding.”