Weaving Sightings into Songs - Musical Storytelling with Vanisha Gould
A vocalist and composer in NYC is making musical worlds from life’s interactions. From a person getting out of the car, hugging another person goodbye to sitting with the impact of an emotional divorce, Vanisha Gould takes these observations and writes stories to song. “Storytelling is just my... bread and butter. I just love the arc of a story. I just love telling stories. I just love it. Everything about it. There's something really nice about just the free writing, like away from the piano. And just seeing what lines you can come up with while you're walking. I really just have a crazy imagination. The ideas I come up with in terms of like the people I come across, I'm like, my goodness. None of those stories are true! You know, let me just write these stories down because I can't place that storyline on a real person. You know, if I believe that, then I'm crazy! Let me put this on pen and paper and make a song instead of putting that on an actual person and believing that that's like their life. I was just telling my mother this, like, thank God I'm an artist. Let's write a song about it instead.”
Her latest album, She’s Not Shiny, She’s Not Smooth, is an anthem for the beauty that lies in imperfection. She used this musical philosophy to fuel the release of this record of all originals: “I think albums are so scary, you know, you want to go in, and you want to create the perfect album, and you want everyone to love it, and you want it to be perfect. And I think I did a really nice cheat code of saying, like, okay, it's not going to be perfect, obviously. So let me just call it, ‘this is not going to be perfect.’ How do I call this album ‘Hey, this isn't going to be perfect?’... She's Not Shiny, She's Not Smooth.”
In 2026, she is planning on releasing her next album What an Interesting Girl. She told me it’s a collection of originals and standards that are part of her core repertoire “It's not thematic. It's just me. It's some tunes that I've been singing every day for the past year and a half with my band. What's really exciting about it is that I've been singing it in the jazz scene for the audiences that come to my shows. The people who come to my shows, they know these songs, but the world don't, the world doesn't know these songs. So, I'm just very excited to get these tunes out of my belly, out of the scene, you know, and get it to you guys.”
Her recent collaboration with Jason Marsalis is what is bringing her to Denver this week. After her manager showed her composition “Donovan” to Jason Marsalis, the pair musically hit it off and held their first concert at the Kirk Douglas Theater in California. Vanisha Gould and Jason Marsalis return to the stage this time at Dazzle on Wednesday, 03/11, at 7 p.m. MT and Thursday, 03/12, at 6:30 and 9 p.m. MT.
This week on The Morning Set’s Live and Local, I caught up with Vanisha ahead of her stop in Denver. Check out our full conversation below to dig into her songwriting process, hear stories from her latest album, as well as clue in on what she has brewing for 2026, and learn how her collaboration with Jason came to be, what she calls “a wild domino effect.”
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