29 May 2025
After a busy year of recording, releasing and touring her new album How Love Bends, Reb Fountain is heading out on tour again with Come Together’s ‘Live Rust’ next month. Reb shares with us a glimpse into the constant hustle; the eclectic life of a musician and what makes it all worth it.
Reb Fountain has crammed a lot into her three decades of music making. Known for her exhilarating live performances, the singer and songwriter has also been a spokesperson and advocate for New Zealand’s music industry. Her approach goes beyond being an artist, her work encompasses mentoring, connecting and uplifting the creative landscape of Aotearoa and in the last few years she’s also tuned her skills into making music for television and film.
Sitting in her home studio, Reb’s dog, Huey Lewis, joins the room, adding more life to the space that feels warm and is filled with curios and instruments. She and producer Dave Khan have created this rehearsal and recording space, it supports their work and is becoming a place where other musicians can come and collaborate.
“We have a shitty PA, and we rehearse here now, plus we work on both our own and other people’s music, which is exciting. We had Jess Bailey from Fables over yesterday doing some vocals in here. That’s a process that’s still evolving; how we can involve and work with other artists and bring them into this space,” says Reb.
The ‘always on’ hustle of managing a band, making sure people get paid, feeding social media, and finding paid work that fits in around writing music, rehearsing and touring, means work is life, and it’s 24/7.
“In order to be a full-time artist, you are constantly supplementing with other work,” she says.
Her musician friends work as designers, manage venues, she herself does voice work.
“There is this kind of misconception or perhaps just a lack of awareness around what the life of a creative artist can entail. Being a musician is really different to any other vocation. Most other jobs have a correlation between output and income earnings.
“If you're a lawyer or an accountant, or you run a lawn mowing firm you would rarely do work and not get paid for it. But that's what happens for us a large proportion of the time; we work without remuneration. In a ‘normal’ career, you might go to school or train to learn your craft and then you start earning … but for us, we're endlessly learning, retraining and creating new content and products at our own expense, irrespective of income generated.”
That’s the continual investment, she says.
Reb mentions collaborator, producer and band member, Dave Khan’s purchase of a pedal steel – to upskill with a new instrument – and the hundreds of hours he’s spent learning it.
“That pedal steel has featured on several different artists’ tours and on their recordings. You’ve got to constantly upskill and develop for each new project. I’m continually training my voice, exploring new techniques on the guitar or piano or learning how to use new instruments, researching and writing and of course seeding and creating work for myself and my band in the future, just in order to continue my vocation. The learning and hustling never stops.” Says Reb.
Juggling projects, instigating new ones, supporting others with theirs, means there’s a constant hum to running this business.
“You can have a public profile. Hundreds of people can be turning up at your shows. You can be touring. You can be putting out albums. But what is ‘success’ for an artist?
“When the financial return doesn’t equate to the perceived ‘success’ or creative output – that's quite an interesting tension.”
She talks about the importance of the arts, all of it, and throws in the 4.2% contribution the cultural sector made to our Gross Domestic Profit in 2024, more than that of the agriculture, forestry, and fishing industry.
“If agriculture is the backbone of Aotearoa, what does that make arts and culture?” She asks.
Reb Fountain and Dave Khan were amongst the first recipients of Creative New Zealand’s Creative Fellowship Fund launched in 2024. The fund has been designed to provide financial support to artists for six to 12 months so they can make work with the security of a base income.
“How momentous it is for us to earn $300 a week? It's been life-changing for both of us. It may seem small to anyone else … but for us, that's enormous. Having essentially a weekly wage has enabled us to do more of what we do, with less stress,”
“It’s shifted our trajectory somewhat, enabled us to walk a little taller and engage with our multi-faceted jobs and our art without reservation.” She says of the support.
It’s been a busy year of recording, collaborating internationally and writing songs for TV. Through connections she met the producers of Escaping Utopia, the documentary series about Gloriavale, they liked her music and a conversation began. She ended up co-writing with acclaimed musician Andrew Keoghan.
“They used some of my existing catalogue, Andrew invited me to develop the score and we wrote the theme song, and yes, we won for 2024 NZTV Images and Sound Best Original Score.”
“That whole process was amazing for me because I'd worked on composition for TV shows and film, but only really coming in on someone else's project and bringing my voice and saying, ‘I've got this idea’ … so that was new for me and really empowering,” she says.
More connections and conversations have led to work with one of Australia’s most highly regarded and prolific rock musicians, Paul Kelly.
“There's these intersecting, interwoven and often immeasurable creative connections happening all the time.”
“One of the things that happened this year was doing a song with Paul Kelly on his new record – which came from us just hanging out in Roundhead Studios when I was recording my new album. And that led to us heading out tour with him in September this year.”
These incalculable happenings are the threads that weave this work together; recompensed or not – that‘s where the love of it comes in.
“I make music, and do all the things that entails, because I have to, I feel compelled to and I love it,” Reb shares.
“All roads lead to playing music live. It’s the pot of gold at the end of a long rainbow for my band and I – we love it.”
Reb also knows it’s a privilege, making art, and she feels the weight of that too: the impact it can have, and her responsibility to her audience.
“Irrespective of the size of an audience, we cultivate intimacy onstage; I’m all about that connection and communing with people through music. Folks come up to me afterwards and tell me some really heartfelt stuff and I feel both a reverence for music and its ability to transform the human heart, alongside a strong sense of responsibility to honour these sacred encounters.”
It is the richness of her life as an artist that makes music making for Reb a passionately political act.
“I feel that in the moment – playing live, embodying these songs and sharing them with others – that there's an opportunity for reciprocity with the audience and that perhaps I can ignite something in their own hearts about being alive… living and shining in their best light.
And that's probably the most powerful thing that I can do while I'm on this planet.”
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