Bio

COLETTE RIVERS 

Colette Rivers is a Taupō girl, originally born in the USA with a kiwi mum and american dad.
She has a deep connection to the earth and sea and has named her debut album ‘Memory Lake’ after her hometown, Lake Taupō. 
She moved to the Wairarapa 6 years ago and interestingly, discovered that she had roots with the area after looking into her Mum's family history on 'Ancestry'.
She traced her lineage back to her 5th great-grandmother, Kokoroiti Rewheunga, of Ngati Kahungunu and Rangitane heritage and 5th great-grandfather, John Stainton Workman- An early whaler from Edinborough.
"How strange and wonderful to end up coming full-circle back to where my kiwi relations were living back in the 1820s".

Her music is self-produced in her Wairarapa home. She plays and sings everything, except a hired gun on drums in a few tracks. 

Rivers unpacks a powerful voice - with a raw expressiveness akin to greats like Gillian Welch, Aimee Mann and Florence Welch.
Her vocals are incredibly diverse, sometimes thick and sliding notes, keeping lower in the register, others clear and high, yet others lilting with emotion, so each song feels like a real live performance and the listener is invested throughout. 

The genre is firstly folk and singer-songwriter, yet while the acoustic guitar is always very important to the sound, she is not averse to bringing in other instruments to create soundscapes which mean the songs are very different to each other. The anchor for the album is her wonderful vocals, which are full of depth and passion, as musically this can often lead in directions one simply does not expect. 

These are songs of places, childhood, relationships and basically life as a road to continually travel down. 

This doesn’t sound like a debut album,[Memory Lake] as it is full of confidence and assuredness, as if the person at the heart of it all had been doing this for many years. 

The arrangements are intensely complex, yet also simplistic, all designed to act for the perfect vehicle for her voice and songs, and never taking away from it. While the use of multiple instruments is an important facet of the album, Colette is content to be on stage all on her own with just an acoustic for company 

This is a very strong debut indeed, from someone who is bringing together diverse styles and textures and bringing them together in a way which definitely works. Warm and inviting while also bringing together genres in a way which may be challenging to some, here we have folk and singer-songwriter styles being mashed together with indie and alternative rock in the hands of someone who knows exactly what she wants to achieve. 

Words by Kev Rowland and Rev Orange Peel 

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