By now a two-decade veteran recording artist and undeniable figure in the Aotearoa music scene, Reb Fountain has displayed a knack for staying fresh while remaining true to her sweetly disaffected poet persona, a style which has been described as folk punk. After a slew of more produced projects in recent years Fountain’s newly released eighth album ‘Water for Gasoline,’ allows her artistry to shine unfettered. She talked about the album with Nur Peach.
Reb Fountain doesn’t like being defined by genre or sound. After experimenting with electronic instrumentation on 2026 EP ‘Smoke Signals’, she and her production team (long time collaborators Dave Kahn and Simon Gooding) decided to record her next long player entirely live.
“I’m really interested in exploring music and songwriting and different sounds and also different kinds of collaborations with people. ‘Smoke Signals’ was very much consciously more like our version of electro pop. That was really fun to do as well. I like the idea that we can just keep sharing music, sharing that art that we create, and some of it will resonate with some people and some others.
“But these songs that emerged were more lyric-based, and they needed a simpler landscape. We also got really inspired by this podcast about Mark Howard, who was talking about being an engineer and producer and recording live in the room and recording Bob Dylan, Neville Brothers and Emmylou Harris, just these amazing artists, and sitting in a room together and pressing record and playing the song through.”
With that inspiration driving the process, Fountain launched into songwriting, which was completed over a concentrated period of time.
“I knew that I wanted to make a record, but I didn’t have anything! I had other things, parts of songs that I wasn’t really enjoying. I had lots of notes; handwritten notes, notes on the computer, voice notes, you know, all manner of things. I’d been compiling those, but still I wasn’t really outputting anything that I was interested in.
“As the deadline got closer to recording, I started making more space for writing. Because I had put all that energy in beforehand songs started coming. They emerged quite quickly, in a two- or three-week period, because I already had done all that work.”
Most of the 10 tracks on ‘Water for Gasoline’ were written by Fountain alone. The exception is the rootsy resistance anthem Good People, which opens the album and itself originated from a track conjured by Kahn.
“Dave had sort of built this bed or this idea of a song, or the landscape of it, and then I went in and I wrote the melody and all the parts and all the lyrics and everything over top of that, and kind of rejigged it around to fit what my idea was.
“It’s kind of bluesy roots vibes, a little reggae, but in a kind of rock’n’roll way. That’s not a genre of music that I’ve dabbled in before, and I don’t think of it as a reggae song either. But I think, like everything else with folk music, you’re drawing from all genres, from different eras, and from different inspirations, and that’s what we did with this song.”
Appropriating the key chorus line and title of American folk legend Woody Guthrie’s Tear The Fascists Down, the song is a call to action that Fountain hopes will resonate across political boundaries.
“I wanted to write a song that was about uniting and connecting folks behind a common cause, and was really inspired by the words of Woody Guthrie.
“There’s a few places in different songs in the record where I’ve paid homage or used a line from other artists, which is something I would do normally anyway. In this case, it was to shape the way that I could bring people together, and I wanted the song to be catchy but also revolutionary.
“We all wake up in the morning and feel like we’re good people and that’s a really easy umbrella because we all feel that way. We’re not necessarily like that, but that’s how we feel. There’s a lot of different political beliefs of folks that come to see our shows, and I want to unite all of them. I have these lofty aspirations to change the world, and I know that I’m just one person, but I want to do my best to do that.
“With this song, I was sort of navigating that desire – how do I bring people together? How do we, instead of having really disparate and othering kind of conversations, unite people under this desire to reimagine our world and our future? I want us all on the same side fighting together for our shared liberation and survival.”
Good People features two NZ female heavyweights on backing vocals: Hall of Fame inductee Dianne Swann and our own country icon and serial collaborator, Tami Nielson.
“Tami and Dianne are old friends,” Fountain smiles. “I’ve known them since I first came up to Auckland, and Dave’s played with them and their respective bands as well. I have a strong sisterhood with them, and when we were listening to that mid-section of the song, just immediately their two voices and characters came to mind as being the wāhine that we’d like to sing on the record.
“I feel very fortunate that they said yes, and it was really beautiful to have them on. It feels kind of like when you get a tattoo, and you have this thing for life. It’s so special.”
The recording was done at Fountain’s home studio, in her garage, over six days with a tight team. Recording and mix engineer Simon Gooding is also credited as co-producer with Dave Kahn, as well as bass player in the band.
“Simon came over, and we set up; Earl Robertson (drums) and Dave and I, and we had Huey Lewis the dog and Taco Fuente the cat here. We set up and then just played through the songs one by one. I’d work out how the songs were going to go, and then we were like, ‘Let’s press go and record it.’
“There’s this feeling of unease about that anticipation, and you’re on the edge of your seat when you are playing like that, and it’s very much like live performance.”
Writing about the album in her newsletter Fountain extends on that idea to her fans. ‘When you listen I hope you feel like you were in the room with us, on the edge of our seats, recording a song in a single take until we got it just right. That’s the sound we were going for – real live music.’
She describes ‘Water for Gasoline’ as an album made for these crazy times the kind of music she grew up on – old school, folk, country, blues and rock. Fountain and her practiced band are excited about the next part of the process, which is taking ‘Water for Gasoline’ to the nation’s stages.
“We love to play live, and I’m really looking forward to taking these songs that were recorded in that way, and then how they’ve evolved into how we’re going to play them with folks in the room. Because the whole time we were recording them, we were thinking and imagining if someone was here. ‘Imagine if they were here in this moment in this room with us. What would that be like? How would it be to play?’”
One song sure to go down well live is the album’s title track, a seven-minute long narrative ballad that will solidify the ‘female Bob Dylan’ comments Fountain already earns. Atop a sparse, understated instrumental bed, she conversationally delivers a story of redemption and empowerment, repeatedly reworking the metaphors of water and gasoline to get to the heart of the human condition. That metaphor was inspired by the 1956 Howlin’ Wolf song I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline).
“I use that phrase throughout the song in lots of different ways, but one of the ways is to reimagine the sense of self as other than ‘I am this and you are that’, or ‘there’s one way or another way’. That everything’s binary and black and white, because that’s not the case, it’s more complex than that.
“We’re literally asking for water, for fresh water, for our rivers to be saved, and at the same time, we’re literally getting a gasoline plant. It’s infuriating what’s happening to our world, but also those elements are inside of us.
“At the end of the song I say, ‘I am the water, and I am the gasoline’, and that’s because both of those things exist within me. I am of the earth. We’re all of the same, and when you recognise that all elements exist within you, within each and every one of us, then you are able to be more conscious about what you’re choosing.
“I wanted to explore that in this song, that ability to grow your own consciousness and choose who you are and how you want to be in the world, and how you might reimagine the world that we’re living in today.”
Made with support from NZ On Air
