MNZ Interview: The Broken Heartbreakers

After parenthood, ‘false starts’ and 11 years between albums, John Howell and Rachel Bailey are taking their time and their quietly enduring folk-pop band back onto the road. After more than a decade out of the full-band spotlight, The Broken Heartbreakers are getting back in the tour van – or several sensible cars. Their last album, How We Got to Now, arrived in 2015; 11 years later, Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving reunites the founding songwriters on Aotearoa’s highways. Tim Gruar caught up with John Howell about parenthood, touring again and his enduring philosophy: do what you love, and don’t stop.

Formed in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland in 2002 by Howell and singer-songwriter Rachel Bailey, The Broken Heartbreakers built their name on soulful harmonies, shimmering guitars and sharply observed folk-pop. Their catalogue runs from South Island Town, Baby Blue and Caroline to My Sense of Wonder, Swipe Card Valley, Melody in H and We’re All Looking Up. The new chapter adds How Long Is Too Long, Dangerous Age, An Ocean in the Way and Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving.

Over two decades, their story has stretched from New Zealand to Melbourne, Europe, the UK and Ireland, before Bailey and Howell settled in Ōtepoti/Dunedin in 2013. They supported Lou Barlow and The Handsome Family, became closely associated with Auckland’s Wine Cellar and repeatedly returned to Ōamaru’s Grainstore Gallery. The band’s tour announcement describes “more than two decades crafting music that sits quietly but enduringly within Aotearoa’s independent songwriting tradition”.

Howell answers from his North East Valley living room on a grey Dunedin day away from the day job. “It’s a music day,” he says – a distinction that neatly sums up a return fitted around ordinary life.

The long pause was not a backstage bust-up, but parenthood. Howell and Bailey had a daughter and decided that taking both parents on tour made little sense while she was young. They kept making music independently, but the band slipped down the priority list.

“We had a family,” Howell says. “As far as The Broken Heartbreakers were concerned, it just didn’t seem right to take both parents away from our daughter when she was little. She’s 12 now, and we’re back into it. It was really just a priority thing.”

In 2021, the band regrouped and released We’re All Looking Up, inspired by Kapukataumahaka/Mount Cargill and lockdown’s shared stillness. A tour was booked, cancelled, rescheduled and cancelled again, so they returned to recording. “The last few years have been getting an album ready,” Howell says. “Now we’re coming up for air again.”

The album title reaches back more than 20 years. Driving home from an early Helensville show, Auckland and the Sky Tower came into view. Bailey looked ahead and said: “Imagine if we could just keep driving.”

The line became an idea about keeping a relationship, band and creative life moving. Howell says it finally found the right album and moment.

The band began when Bailey guested with Howell’s instrumental group, Salon Kingsadore, while he was writing country and folk songs that did not fit there. Her voice stopped him in his tracks, but Bailey wanted demos before any vague “let’s see what happens” jam.

Howell recorded songs, burned them onto CDs and left them in her Grey Lynn letterbox. She called back. Around 2002, they rehearsed in his flat with acoustic guitars, bass, snare drum and two voices. They played together for roughly four years before becoming a couple; the music came first.

Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving carries that lived-in history through songs about relationships, family, migration, privilege and the struggle to keep creating.

Dangerous Age responds both to blatant corruption, violence and cruelty and to the vulnerability that can settle over middle age. It is not surrender; there is fight in it. The ragged backing vocals come from the grandly named James St Community Choir – friends at a house party beneath a microphone hanging from the ceiling.

Matthew (Your Whites Are So White!) grew from a schoolboy memory of a well-to-do student whose tennis whites seemed brighter than everyone else’s. The song asks what people do with good fortune: privilege can produce contempt, or gratitude and responsibility. The choice, he says, is the interesting bit.

An Ocean in the Way is one of Howell’s favourite collaborations with Bailey. He created the music and beat; she answered with the melody and words after reading about bird migration – the instinct to rise, leave and somehow know the route. Together they turned it into a song about people leaving Aotearoa to find a life elsewhere, and perhaps one day finding the way home.

The album moves beyond folk-pop and alt-country into dream-pop, shoegaze, southern-gothic guitars and electronica. Recording without worrying about live reproduction produced dense arrangements – including a fuzzed tuba – and one practical puzzle: how to fit a large studio sound into a touring vehicle.

The refreshed line-up is Howell and Bailey with Paul McLennan-Kissel on drums, Ayumu Kobayashi on bass and Alex Gilks on keyboards. “Practices are sounding great,” the band says, “and we’re enjoying the new musical landscape these songs are carving out.” Keys add depth; the fuzzed tuba stays home. “We believe the songs are strong enough to stand up as songs,” Howell says. “We’re very close to having a representation of them that we’re really happy to present to people.”

After 11 years between albums – and five years after the aborted 2021 restart – the September run feels like a reformation, though the partnership never vanished. It is no longer one battered van, but several sensible cars with room for equipment, coffees and parents who pack properly.

“We’re really looking forward to getting out there, meeting the other musicians, meeting people in the audience and just being on the road again,” Howell says. “It’s been a really long time. We’re remembering how to be musicians and remembering how to do the whole thing again.”

The road runs from Ōamaru’s Grainstore Gallery – a venue the group has visited for almost 20 years – to Space Academy, Whammy!, Artworks Theatre, Vogelmorn Bowling Club and finally Hanover Hall. “Ōamaru is definitely on the circuit for us,” Howell says, describing organiser Donna Demente as “awesome”. He is just as enthusiastic about the support acts: Demarnia Lloyd steps into minimalist solo soundscapes as Marl in Ōamaru; Violet French & The Woolston Operatic Society join them in Ōtautahi; Ben Chavasse opens in Auckland; Mahoney Harris plays Waiheke; Eigenface supports in Wellington; and sloer closes the run with them in Ōtepoti.

The Auckland date also brings the story neatly back around. The Broken Heartbreakers played the Wine Cellar repeatedly in its earliest years, and Howell reckons they may well have been its first live act. “There is a bit of an argument between us and a couple of other groups as to who was the first band to play there,” he says. The claim is difficult to settle definitively, but the venue itself later called them “the band that made us a venue”. The old Wine Cellar performance room and neighbouring Backroom were expanded into Double Whammy! in 2024, while the original bar area became Whammy’s Public Bar – so their return to the wider Whammy complex lands on familiar ground, even if the walls and name have changed.

In 2007, the band’s advice was simple: “make your own scene”, play the music you love. After moves, parenthood, day jobs, cancelled tours and changing line-ups, I ask whether that philosophy has shifted. If anything, the years have sharpened it.

“Don’t stop,” he says. “Keep going.” He recalls Joe Strummer completing the London Marathon without training. Asked how, Strummer reportedly replied: “I didn’t stop.” Howell takes that simplicity as creative instruction: keep making things and resist the pressure to do something more sensible.

“Find a way to do it,” Howell says. “Whatever it is – that’s what makes us human.” After 24 years, that is both the old philosophy and the new one: do what you love doing. Make space for the music day. Keep the van on the road. Get back behind the wheel. Don’t stop.

The Broken Heartbreakers – September 2026 Tour

Friday 4 September @ Grainstore Gallery, Ōamaru – with Marl
Saturday 5 September @ Space Academy, Ōtautahi/Christchurch – with Violet French & The Woolston Operatic Society
Thursday 10 September @ Whammy!, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland – with Ben Chavasse
Friday 11 September @ Artworks Theatre, Waiheke Island – with Mahoney Harris
Saturday 12 September @ Vogelmorn Bowling Club, Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington – with Eigenface
Saturday 19 September @ Hanover Hall, Ōtepoti/Dunedin – with sloer

Tickets are available through UnderTheRadar.