Nashville’s Grammy-winning Tim O’ Brian was their first choice as producer. “There’s no separation between you and your fans, it’s quite community spirited,” says Vanessa. It also led them to feel very much accountable to the funders – in terms of hitting deadlines for example. Tattletale Saints easily reached their .nz target of $22,000 with the help of 220 people, most perfect strangers. Both seem to like the sentiment that by paying for an album in advance, you become part of the team. It didn’t feel like charity because I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of thing a number of times and I’ve loved it!” “The crowd funding personifies that idea – you do it WITH them,” she says. We briefly get into a recent TED talk held by American indie chanteuse Amanda Palmer on not making people pay for music, but allowing them to do so, and therefore to be part of the process and the journey of making an album. “This time round the idea of not being in debt was quite attractive to us.” Radio’) in 2009, which, they tell me they’re still paying back. Having supported others in it before themselves, it was Vanessa’s idea to give crowd funding a go for the Tattletale Saints’ first album. They’d had to borrow money for the last Her Make Believe Band album (‘A.M. It sits near the middle of their gorgeous 12-track album. A gentle country waltz led by Cy’s voice and O’Brien’s mandolin, they feel it paints a good picture of trying to make sense of a broken heart. The pair both like the introspective title track How Red Is the Blood from a Broken Heart best, describing it as a Jimmy Webb-style song “… with angular, straight chord changes. He wants every single word, image and melody to be meaningful, not just place holders, and he works on songs in quite a perfectionist way. “Compositionally we try to play things that aren’t so traditional, while the instrumentation and singing definitely is.”Ĭy says he hardly ever abandons song ideas. Their just-released debut album, ‘How Red Is The Blood’, is a thoughtful collection of delicate acoustic songs reminiscent in voice and arrangement of the likes of Paul Simon and Harry Nilsson. We thought it had a nice ring to it and we liked the fact that a ‘tattletale’ is someone you can’t trust and a saint is someone you ought to be able to trust – that’s quite a nice juxtaposition of these two opposing ideas, which we feel our music is, too, in a sense.” “The band’s name was plucked from a book. “We decided we needed a new name when it became more apparent to us that we’d be a duo for the long term. Moving back to NZ, they went from being an amplified four-piece to the more country and acoustic duo they are now as Tattletale Saints. Having lost contact for a while, their paths crossed again a few years later in London, starting Her Make Believe Band – which featured in NZM’s Dec/Jan 2010 issue. He’d know, because this is how he and band mate Vanessa McGowan met back in the day in their early teens actually. The high school jazz scene is a good way to bring people from different schools together, says Cy Winstanley. Silke Hartung talked with the pair about the change, tradition and juxtaposition. HMBB is now gone and in its place is an Auckland-based duo called Tattletale Saints who have just released their own debut album, ‘How Red Is the Blood’. That was 2010 and quite possibly it was that trip back home to NZ that convinced the pair to return more permanently. When NZM last talked to Vanessa McGowan and her partner-in-music, Cy Winstanley, they were London-based and busy promoting the debut (and well-reviewed) album of their Americana country-tinged outfit, Her Make Believe Band.
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