VANISHA GOULD TURNS CURIOSITY, COMEDY AND ROMANTIC MISADVENTURE INTO SONG ON WHAT AN INTERESTING GIRL
THE VOCALIST AND COMPOSER LEADS PIANIST CHRIS MCCARTHY, BASSIST CHARLIE LINCOLN AND DRUMMER SAMUEL BOLDUC
THE 10-TRACK ALBUM FOLLOWS HER NPR-HONORED 2024 RELEASE SHE’S NOT SHINY, SHE’S NOT SMOOTH
AVAILABLE OCTOBER 9 VIA CELLAR MUSIC GROUP, WITH FOUR BONUS TRACKS ON THE DIGITAL DELUXE EDITION
What An Interesting Girl is the forthcoming new album by vocalist and composer Vanisha Gould, due out October 9 via Cellar Music Group. Gould is joined by pianist Chris McCarthy, bassist Charlie Lincoln and drummer Samuel Bolduc on the 10-track album. Gould and Cory Weeds produced the session, with Weeds serving as executive producer.
“They are the things I’ve obsessed over, laughed at, romanticized, misunderstood, fallen in love with, and eventually turned into music,” Gould says. “A bottle of gin. A stray cat. A glance across a crowded room. A man who won’t call. A man who calls too much. Billie Holiday. Mary Lou Williams. The stories are different, but they all belong to the same curious mind.”
The album follows Gould’s 2024 release She’s Not Shiny, She’s Not Smooth. NPR included its single “Demure” among the Best Songs of 2024, with Nate Chinen praising Gould’s “swinging, Bob Dorough-esque deadpan” and calling the song “a clever indictment” of unsolicited advice directed at women. Chinen has also called Gould “a major talent who combines a blues cry with a storyteller’s point of view.” DownBeat praised her clarity, humor, knowledge and pathos, while JazzTimes cited her “plush contralto” and “keen emotional intelligence.”
Pianist Chris McCarthy is Gould’s closest musical collaborator. They have recorded four projects together: the duo album Life’s a Gig, Gould’s She’s Not Shiny, She’s Not Smooth and What An Interesting Girl, and McCarthy’s Too Late To Quit, due September 18 via La Reserve. Gould appears on five tracks from the latter, whose vocal music McCarthy wrote with her voice in mind. “I’ve logged more hours playing with Vanisha than anyone else on Earth,” he has said. Gould has called McCarthy her “right hand man,” adding, “He can make anything sound like a masterpiece.”
Lincoln and Bolduc complete Gould’s working quartet. The same lineup has appeared at Mezzrow, Dizzy’s Club and The Jazz Gallery, where the group presented In the Margins: The Vanisha Gould Songbook in February 2026.
Raised in Southern California, Gould earned her degree from Berklee College of Music and moved to New York in 2015. She established herself at clubs including Smalls, Mezzrow and The Jazz Gallery and went on to perform throughout Europe and Russia. In 2023, The Jazz Gallery awarded Gould its Composition Residency Commission, supporting work that integrated text, voice and visual storytelling.
Gould’s first album as a co-leader, In Her Words, arrived in 2021. Created with vocalist Lucy Yeghiazaryan and supported by the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre, the 12-track program joined original compositions with selected standards in songs centered on women’s lives. Its repertoire included Gould’s “Cute Boy” and “Gypsy Feet” alongside Billie Holiday’s “My Man.”
She returned in January 2024 with Life’s a Gig, an eight-song duo album with McCarthy. The program placed Gould’s originals alongside “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “No Moon at All,” Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Dream” and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” Later that year, Gould released She’s Not Shiny, She’s Not Smooth, a collection of original compositions written after her Jazz Gallery commission broke a period of writer’s block.
The earlier album grew from Gould’s decision to stop demanding perfection from herself. “This album was created when I realized I can’t be perfect,” she said. “And you know what? Dammit, I like that.” Its program included “Demure,” “Get Out of My Way,” “Don’t Worry Bout Me,” “Donovan” and the title track, giving Gould the release that earned her NPR recognition and led into What An Interesting Girl.
“Ginsong” addresses gin as a lover, an elixir and a “great fixer,” with each sip promising pleasure, forgetfulness and freedom. “My Sweet Kitty,” released July 10 as the first single, began with the stray cats in Gould’s neighborhood. Its narrator has little in common with the handsome but irritating man in her life, apart from his fondness for the titular animal. Eventually, the song becomes what Gould calls “something far less innocent.”
“Fool Me Twice” follows a woman who knows she should move on but remains willing to repeat an old mistake. She recognizes the pattern, disregards her better judgment and asks the man to “tell me lies just one last time.” Midway through the lyric, she corrects her own assignment of blame: “Shame on you / No / Shame on me.”
Another composition began after Gould forgot the words to a Billie Holiday song onstage and supplied lyrics of her own. “Lament/The Devil” arose while Gould listened to Madonna’s recording of the Evita soundtrack and heard a connection between the ending of “Lament” and Mary Lou Williams’ “The Devil.” About a year later, she learned that Eva Perón and Williams were born one day apart. “Make of that what you will,” she writes.
Most of the compositions entered Gould’s repertoire long before the January session and changed across hundreds of performances. “By the time we recorded them,” she says, “they felt less like songs I had written and more like old friends I wanted to introduce to one another.”
What An Interesting Girl was recorded at GB’s Juke Joint in Long Island City on January 12, 2026, the album was engineered, mixed and mastered by Colin Mohnacs.The digital deluxe edition adds four bonus tracks.
“The album isn’t really a statement,” Gould concludes. “It’s an observation. These songs are a portrait of the things that captured my attention long enough to become music. Apparently, they say quite a lot about the girl who wrote them.”
Tracklisting
- 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
Digital Deluxe Edition Bonus Tracks
- Poor Man
- Strollin’ (Nostalgia in Times Square)
- He Said
- Ghost Of Love