| Jazz |
Summary: Vanisha Gould returns with What An Interesting Girl, a witty, sophisticated and deeply personal jazz album that showcases her extraordinary voice, sharp songwriting and unique artistic vision.
Vanisha Gould’s What An Interesting Girl: A Bold New Voice in Jazz
Vanisha Gould’s second album, What An Interesting Girl, due for release in early October 2026, may surprise listeners even more than her 2024 album She’s Not Shiny, She’s Not Smooth. I have to admit from the outset that complete objectivity is difficult for me when it comes to Gould. From my perspective, she is quite simply one of the finest vocalists working in jazz today. Yet what makes her exceptional is not merely the beauty or individuality of her voice. Gould has something more difficult to define and, ultimately, much more valuable: a genuine artistic personality. She knows how to write intelligent lyrics without making them feel overly constructed, she has a sharp sense of humor without turning her songs into novelty pieces, and she possesses the rare ability to make every word sound as though it has a reason for being there.
Gould has described the songs on this new album as coming from things that obsessed her, made her laugh, things she idealized, misunderstood, loved and eventually transformed into music. The list is wonderfully revealing: a bottle of gin, a stray cat, a glance exchanged across a crowded room, a man who never calls, another man who calls far too often, Billie Holiday and Mary Lou Williams. These subjects might seem unrelated, but they make perfect sense once you understand Gould’s creative process. They are all fragments of the world around her, filtered through the same curious and observant mind. She does not need extraordinary events to inspire a song. She finds stories in ordinary situations and recognizes that what may appear insignificant at first can contain humor, desire, disappointment, tenderness or even a small piece of truth about who we are.
In that respect, Gould has something in common with a good writer or journalist, particularly one who understands that language is not simply a vehicle for information but a way of observing people and making sense of the world. She notices details. She remembers conversations, gestures, contradictions and the strange little moments that most people allow to disappear. Her achievement is to take those observations and turn them into music without losing their humanity. This is why I would argue that her greatest strength is not simply her unmistakable voice or even her writing, but the way she brings three artistic disciplines together: vocal performance, songwriting and music. Each element strengthens the others, and the result is an identity that is much larger than any one of them.
“Ginsong” illustrates this perfectly. Gould treats gin almost as a complicated romantic relationship, moving between the ideas of lover, elixir and miracle cure, with every drink promising pleasure, forgetfulness and freedom. The concept is funny, but the humor works because there is something recognizable beneath it. The song understands the mythology surrounding alcohol, the promises we attach to it and the temporary escape it can represent. Gould never needs to explain the joke because her delivery already understands the emotional contradiction at its center. She can make the listener laugh while allowing the song to retain enough ambiguity to suggest that there may be something more serious underneath the humor.
“My Sweet Kitty” takes another apparently ordinary subject and turns it into something considerably more entertaining and unexpected. The song grew out of the stray cats in Gould’s neighborhood and centers on a narrator whose relationship with a handsome but irritating man seems to have very little going for it except their shared affection for the animal that gives the song its title. As the story develops, however, Gould gradually moves the song toward what she has described as something much less innocent. The transformation is one of the album’s most delightful surprises. I found myself laughing out loud the first time I heard it, not simply because the lyrics are funny, but because Gould understands exactly how to interpret them. Her timing, phrasing and restraint are every bit as important as the words themselves.
That distinction between singing and interpreting is essential to understanding Gould. There are many technically accomplished singers who can deliver a melody beautifully, but a great interpreter does something else. A great interpreter gives the impression that the words are being discovered in the moment, that the story is unfolding in front of you rather than being recited from a page. Gould has that quality. She can make a single phrase sound intimate, mischievous or slightly dangerous simply by changing the emphasis or allowing a fraction more space between words. Her voice is therefore not merely an instrument of pitch and tone. It is part of the storytelling, and sometimes the smallest vocal gesture can communicate more than an entire verse.
This is also where the music becomes so important. What An Interesting Girl succeeds because Gould’s writing and singing are placed within a musical language that respects the history of jazz without becoming trapped by it. There is a clear connection to the tradition, but there is also a genuine sense of modernity in the writing and the way the arrangements allow the songs to breathe. Gould does not seem interested in pretending that the past never happened, nor does she appear interested in reproducing it simply because it is safe. She takes the language she has inherited and uses it to talk about her own experiences, her own observations and her own peculiar way of seeing the world.
That is one of the reasons the album feels so natural. Many of these compositions had already become part of Gould’s performing repertoire well before the January recording session, and they had evolved through hundreds of concerts. This matters more than it might seem. A song can be complete on paper and still be unfinished as a piece of music. Once a composition has been performed repeatedly in front of an audience, it begins to acquire a life of its own. The musicians discover where to stretch, where to hold back and where to leave space. The singer learns which words carry the greatest weight and which moments can be allowed to breathe. By the time these songs reached the studio, they no longer felt like experiments.
Gould has described the feeling beautifully, saying that by the time the songs were recorded they seemed less like pieces she had written and more like old friends she wanted to introduce to one another. That image captures something essential about the album. These are not songs that feel newly manufactured for a recording session. They sound lived in. They have accumulated experience. They have been tested, reshaped and given enough time to develop their own personalities. There is an ease to the performances that comes not from simplicity but from familiarity, and that familiarity gives the musicians freedom to concentrate on expression rather than merely execution.
The result is an album that is seductive, funny and genuinely fascinating, but its most important quality may be its sincerity. There is a great deal of technically impressive jazz being made today, and there is certainly nothing wrong with technical excellence. The problem begins when technique becomes the destination rather than the means. A singer can have perfect pitch, enormous range and impeccable control and still leave the listener wondering what, exactly, the performance was trying to say. Gould belongs to a different category of artist because her technique serves a point of view. She is not demonstrating what she can do; she is using what she can do to tell us something.
This is where she joins a small but important group of contemporary musicians who understand that preserving jazz does not mean freezing it in place. Artists such as Janis Siegel and Kelly Green, among others, demonstrate a similar willingness to push beyond technical accomplishment and ask what their musicianship can actually express. They understand that the history of jazz is not simply a catalogue of styles to be reproduced but a tradition of individual voices finding new ways to respond to the world around them. Gould belongs in that conversation because she brings her own experiences, humor and sensibility to the music rather than trying to disappear behind the tradition.
What makes Gould particularly compelling is her willingness to take ordinary life seriously without taking herself too seriously. A bottle of gin can become a song. A stray cat can become a character. A disastrous romantic encounter can become a source of humor. A moment of attraction can become a story. None of these subjects needs to be elevated into something grand before it becomes worthy of music. Gould understands that the everyday world is already full of material if you are willing to pay attention to it. That quality of observation gives her songwriting a sense of intimacy that cannot be manufactured through technique alone.
Perhaps that is why the title What An Interesting Girl feels so appropriate. It sounds almost like an affectionate observation, as though Gould were standing just far enough outside herself to examine the collection of people, experiences, obsessions and contradictions that have gradually found their way into these songs. She has said that the album is not really a declaration. It is an observation, a record of the things that held her attention long enough to become music. On the surface, that may sound modest, but there is something much more revealing about it. What we pay attention to tells us an enormous amount about who we are.
The people we cannot stop thinking about, the things that make us laugh, the experiences we misunderstand, the relationships that refuse to make sense, the artists we return to, the animals we unexpectedly become attached to and the moments that remain in our minds long after they have passed all become part of the portrait we create of ourselves. Gould has simply found a way to turn that portrait into music. What An Interesting Girl is therefore not a manifesto and does not need to be one. It is something more intimate: a collection of observations that, taken together, reveal a personality.
That personality is what ultimately separates Gould from many technically impressive singers. She has a recognizable voice, but recognition is not the same thing as identity. Her identity comes from the way she combines her voice with her words, her sense of humor, her musical instincts and her understanding of character. You can hear the history of jazz in what she does, but you can also hear someone who is unmistakably contemporary and unmistakably herself. She does not sound as though she is trying to prove that she belongs in the tradition. She sounds as though she already understands that the tradition belongs to anyone willing to contribute something meaningful to it.
There is also a generosity in that approach. Gould does not force the listener to admire her technique before allowing them into the songs. She gives us stories first. We enter through the humor, the characters and the situations, and only gradually begin to notice how sophisticated the musicianship is underneath them. That is a difficult balance to achieve. Music can be intellectually impressive without being emotionally accessible, while accessible music can sometimes sacrifice complexity in order to reach an audience. Gould manages to avoid both traps.
By the time the album reaches its conclusion, her description of these songs as a portrait of what held her attention long enough to become music feels increasingly accurate. The songs reveal a person who is curious, observant, funny, occasionally mischievous and clearly fascinated by human behavior. They also reveal an artist who has become comfortable enough with her own voice to let imperfection, contradiction and humor remain part of the picture rather than something to be edited away.
That may be the most appealing thing about What An Interesting Girl. It does not feel like an attempt to manufacture an image of Vanisha Gould. It feels like an honest collection of the things she happened to notice and could not quite let go of. The songs have grown out of real life, passed through years of performance and been shaped by musicians who understand that the space around a note can be just as important as the note itself. The result is music that feels both deeply connected to jazz history and completely alive in the present.
In the end, I would return to Gould’s own description rather than try to impose a grander theory on the album. These songs, she suggests, are simply a portrait of what captured her attention for long enough to become music. It turns out that such a portrait says quite a lot about the woman who wrote them. It also explains why What An Interesting Girl feels like more than another impressive jazz vocal album. Vanisha Gould is not simply a remarkable singer demonstrating an extraordinary instrument. She is a storyteller, a musician and an observer of human behavior who has found a voice that belongs entirely to her. That is why this album deserves to be heard carefully, and why it may well remain with listeners long after the final song has ended.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, August 31st, 2026
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Musicians :
Vanisha Gould, composer, vocalist
Chris McCarty, pianist
Charlie Lincoln, bassist
Samuel Bolduc, drummer on 10 track album
Gould and Cory Weeds produced the session, with Weeds serving as executive producer.
Track Listing :
Go-To Girl
Ginsong
My Sweet Kitty
What An Interesting Girl
Who Knows
Look This Way
Fool Me Twice
Borough Blues
I Like A Boy
Lament/ The Devil