Gig Review: Kaylee Bell @ Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington – 04/11/2025

The tour might be called Cowboy Up, but it’s the cowgirls who come out to play when Kaylee Bell launches it in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. There are lots of excited mums and daughters in the audience – some of the latter waving “My First Concert” signs. The dress code is customised Stetson hats (or Kaylee Bell trucker caps) on heads, glittery Western boots on feet, and plenty of tasseled waistcoats in between. 

Aotearoa-born, Samoan smoothie TheWesternGuide AKA Aaron Pulemagafa took the stage with a smiling acoustic guitar player on his left and a red solo cup on his right, to deliver a suitably twangy set that showcases both his vocal range and his own acoustic guitar skills. It’s clear this crowd charmer is heeding the words of his 2024 single, Drive Me Crazy, transmuting its desire to pick up a bunch of girls and “give ’em the best damn night of their lives” tonight.

He introduces an unreleased track about the fictional land of Vailimaville, which joins recent single Dive Bar – which he’ll play later – exploring the ups and downs of a life lived in a bottle. So far, so country. Lovely covers of Monday Morning Merle, by Cody Johnson, and Keith Whitley’s Miami, My Amy are offered “just for the vibes”, the latter eliciting a sweet sing-along. Granting everyone honorary Hamo (Samoan) status for the last song – his excellent 2023 single A Little More Hamo Than That – seals his friendship with this crowd. TheWesternGuide’s dedication to delivering a uniquely Pasifika take on authentic country and western music is impressive. 

Kaylee Bell hits a stage bathed in red light, sporting a red sequined jacket, red satin shorts, a diamante and heart adorned belt, and glittery red cowboy boots. Her band – Corbin Kuhtze on drums, Aaron Prictor on electric guitar and backing vocals, seriously groovy bass player Trevor Warman, plus Andrew Cochrane, a damn fine multi-instrumentalist who’ll play keyboards/piano/banjo and sweet backing vocals – are dressed in white and red. They are engine-tight, absolutely locked in for the duration, and such a pleasure to witness. 

In a set that includes all but one track from Cowboy Up, Bell starts strong with Put A Ring On It, instantly establishing an easy rapport with the audience, who LOVE her.

“You’ve got one job!” she exhorts. “You can sing, you can dance, you can get on your feet.” She then proceeds to make it impossible for anyone present to do anything but exactly that.

Cowboy Up is next. Bell is such an accomplished, and easy entertainer that it’s easy to see she’s been doing this her whole life. It helps that her songs are so strong. She straps on a glittery red electric guitar for Red Dirt Rodeo, and I fall into an unavoidable Taylor Swift Red era reverie. Kaylee Bell is our Taylor Swift. 

She loses the guitar to introduce the next song as one she wrote last year when heavily pregnant. Song for Shania sounds incredibly classic, for a song that’s barely a year old. She reaches back a little further into her discography for Nights Like This from last year’s album of the same name; then further again for a valentine-laden run at her 2018 single One More Shot.

She tells us she wants to put a cover of a song by a female artist who’s inspired her on every record, to introduce her latest instance of doing this. She plays the country version of Torn, the much-recorded song Natalie Imbruglia had a huge hit with nearly 30 years ago. 

A red piano is rolled out while Kaylee tells us how she fell in love with Wellington while on tour supporting Ed Sheeran. The rest of the band leave her and her excellent pianist to take the next number. She gets personal with us about the story of her pregnancy, and how it led to her writing Heartbeat, last year. It’s astonishing to think her career trajectory has only accelerated, and that her creativity continues to run at such a high level, considering she was playing live and recording Cowboy Up while pregnant last year, then touring within six weeks of her baby boy’s birth earlier this year. This welcome but unexpected turn of events has clearly enriched her perspective, and endeared her to many.

“I am a mother,” she declares at one point. “Shout out to all the mothers here tonight. I see you. I am you.” 

A really new, as yet unrecorded song is sent out “to all the boy mums out there”. Mankind sounds like another instant classic. 

“If you raise the boy right, it makes the man kind,” she sings.

She plays us through a band break with an acoustic medley/sing-along that includes Shania Twain’s You’re Still the One, Dolly Parton’s Nine to Five, The Chicks’ Cowboy Take Me Away; and Taylor Swift’s Mean (reinforcing those Tay-Tay Red reflections).

A quick costume break sees her return in a white waistcoat, white sequined boots, white shorts, and more diamantes. The full band return, and Bell joins them on electric guitar to deliver a whomping version of Take It To The Highway. 

A couple of tracks from last year’s Night Like This see her first lose the electric guitar – for Good Things – then pick it up again for Small Town Friday Nights. We get some nice three-way guitars/bass action, and the crowd are really starting to surge forward now, with quite a bit of screaming. 

TheWesternGuide comes back on to join Bell for a rousing version of Same Songs (which she originally duetted on for James Johnston’s 2023 album Raised Like That). 

“It don’t matter where you came from / We’re all singing to the same songs,” is surely one of the country music truisms of tonight.

Bell decides to come and sing with the crowd for The Thing About Us, causing a bit of a sensation as she strides along the aisles, especially when she poses for a selfie with an eager fan. It feels like intimacy with the fans is all part of the bigger delivery she’s working towards, and she leans into it like the pro she is. She starts the “song that changed my life” seated on the edge of the stage, but no one can stay seated for Keith. 

The song climaxes with an eruption of red confetti streamers, and Bell shaking plenty of hands. An encore is essential, and she returns to tell us that her personal motto is “to always leave people better than you found them”. She then proceeds to keep on doing just that, with an acoustic cover of Maggie Rogers’ Light On (which she recorded in 2020), and a full-band blow-out version of Boots and All, that threatens to tear the place apart. Mass line dancing erupts, with barely a bum left in its seat. 

To crib an ecstatically appropriate line from the tour’s title track, “It’s yeehaw, baby!”

Photo Credit: Andy Russell for Muzic.NZ
Kaylee Bell Photo Gallery
TheWesternGuide Photo Gallery