Folk group in running for top album Tui again
Making mixtapes with his dad’s dictaphone as a teen led to Hayden Donnell fronting an award-winning folk band.
The 29-year-old sings for Great North which is nominated for the Tui Award for best folk album.
Great North won the same award in 2013 for album Halves.
Donnell grew up playing piano and began writing songs in his final year of high school.
Through weekly band practices he wooed bassist and his now-wife Rachel, and in 2009 Great North was born.
Now, after tours and critical acclaim, the band is up against tough competition from Christchurch’s Flip Grater and Palmerston North’s Rachel Dawick for best folk album.
Donnell says the band is excited about the nomination and playing the Auckland Folk Festival, where the win- ner will be announced.
Held in Kumeu on January 25, the two-day festival features a home brew session and performances from New Zealand’s folk industry.
It will top off an intrepid year for the Mt Albert resident who spent two months travelling through Europe and the United States.
Donnell and his wife busked through markets and a small church in the French countryside.
The pair ended up playing for an inebriated pizza parlour owner one night.
‘‘At the end of the night he invited us back to his parlour. I was thinking: ‘We’re probably going to get murdered or he’ll offer us drugs’,’’ Donnell says.
They survived, got free pizza and the pair even wrote a song with the owner, he says.
Soon after the couple visited Nashville in the United States before returning to New Zealand to lock in a national tour.