Vanisha Gould - What An Interesting Girl

VANISHA GOULD  - "I didn’t set out to write a concept album. If there’s a common thread running through these songs, it’s probably my attention span.They are the things I’ve obsessed over, laughed at, romanticized, misunderstood, fallen in love with, and eventually turned into music. A bottle of gin. A stray cat. A glance across a crowded room. A man who won’t call. A man who calls too much. Billie Holiday. Mary Lou Williams. The stories are different, but they all belong to the same curious mind.

One song compares gin to a lover. Another began with the stray cats that wandered my neighborhood and somehow grew into something far less innocent. One was born because I forgot the lyrics to a Billie Holiday song onstage and had to make up my own. Another follows a woman who knows she should move on but can’t quite resist the temptation of being fooled one more time.

One of my favorite moments on the record came from listening to Madonna’s Evita soundtrack and realizing that the ending of “Lament” felt destined to lead directly into Mary Lou Williams’ “The Devil.” About a year later, I learned that Eva Perón and Mary Lou Williams were born a day apart. Make of that what you will.

There are songs about locking eyes with someone across a crowded room and refusing to make the first move. Songs about longing. Songs about fantasy. Songs about freedom. Songs that made me laugh while writing them and songs that revealed something I didn’t know I was trying to say.

Most of these compositions lived on bandstands long before they made it into the studio. They changed shape over hundreds of performances, gathering stories and meaning along the way. By the time we recorded them, they felt less like songs I had written and more like old friends I wanted to introduce to one another.

What An Interesting Girl isn’t really a statement. It’s an observation.
These songs are a portrait of the things that captured my attention long enough to become music.
Apparently, they say quite a lot about the girl who wrote them".

Vanisha Gould - voice
Chris McCarthy - piano
Charlie Lincoln - bass
Samuel Bolduc - drums