“Bit Players” the debut album from Don and the Divorcees goes live online on 25 July. This follows the release of 3 singles: “Seventeen” in March, “Afterglow” in May and “Summer” in June.
Presave links for Spotify and iTunes.
About Don and the Divorcees
Don and the Divorcees is a collaboration among Te Whanganui a Tara singer-songwriters and multi-instrumentalists Don Mackay, Hollie Wright and Beans Wright (no relation). Each brings their own compositions to the table and we then work together to make the most of them.
As we each tend to write a slightly different style of song, the unifying element of our sound comes from the arrangements featuring tight vocal harmonies over multiple stringed instruments. While this gives breadth and variety to our live performances, it does make us, in marketing terms, seriously genre non-compliant.
Our approach is a bit “old school”. We see ourselves as “spiritual folkies”, writing and performing contemporary songs. The songs are strongly centred on the lyrics, which tell stories or paint pictures, and are designed to be listened to. The instrumentation is built around a variety of acoustic stringed instruments (guitars, violin, mandolin, cello and bass). The whole approach is pretty “wooden” and low tech.
About the Album
“Bit Players” was recorded over 3 days during June 2024. Recording and mixing was by Warwick Donald, and the recordings were mastered by Mike Gibson. It contains seven songs, three each by Hollie Wright and Don Mackay and one by Beans Wright.
For those old, steampunk or otherwise cool enough to have a CD player the album can be obtained on CD by emailing donandthedivorcees@gmail.com.
Upcoming gigs?
Well actually no! Life doesn’t always travel in straight lines and Hollie has had to return to England for a while for family reasons. So no big gigs are possible to support the release. However “Beans and Don” are continuing to perform around Wellington as a duo, but it is not quite Don and The Divorcees. Keep an eye on our socials for details.
Don and The Divorcees online
Previous releases can be found on Spotify here.
Video of live performances from a gig in April 2024 on Youtube here. This includes songs that are on the “Bit Players” album, and a couple of others.
And on of course Facebook