Eva Prowse is sassy, but not immediately so. Melody Thomas reports on the hidden complexity of the singer who’s hailed to be pretty damn good.
ON first impression musician Eva Prowse comes across as very sweet and perhaps a little shy.
Soldier on through those first moments though and you’re in for a treat. The singer, songwriter, violinist and mandolin-player who properly entered the public eye performing with Fly My Pretties in 2009 is, quite frankly, hilarious.
She’s a classic hard case; joking about how her just-released debut album I Can’t Keep Secrets, had her so excited and nervous “my eye twitched for a month before it came out”.
Her sense of humour is also evident in the lyrics of her songs. Pirie Street talks about the ever-familiar “dark world of the damp Wellington flat”, She’s out to get you tells the story of a “crazy, evil, mythological Medusa-like woman” and Sophocles Sarcophagus references an eccentric Egyptologist in Tintin’s Cigars of the Pharoah, of which Eva’s a big fan.
As well as studying classical music (or ‘Western Art Music’) at Victoria University, Eva studied classics of the Greek mythology and legend kind.
Her favourite period is “anything to do with the Trojan War”.
Her favourite characters are Hector, who’s “such a nice guy. He’s a Trojan prince – the brother of Paris who was a prick and a wet blanket. He had great morals, he was a good family guy”, and Odysseus, “the cunning thinker, although he was a bit of an arsehole too”.
Who would she chose for a date?
“Hector,” she says immediately, then, “Oh wait wait, Hector’s marriage material, but for one night?”
Another song, The Agora, refers to the Greek version of a Roman Forum, but also a place “like our Cuba Street, where people just hang out watching other people”.
“I like writing about adventurously dreamland things more than ‘the problems I had at school today,’” she says.
“I’m pretty sure it’s escapism, with classics and with music too. I spend about 20% of my life in the real world,” she laughs, before adding, “Na. Maybe 30%. But apparently everyone has conversations with themselves…”
For someone who apparently spends little time in the ‘real world’, Eva has a grounded sense of herself and her place in it.
“Sometimes the stage gets too small and we forget that the role we play isn’t as big as we think it is. You’ve got to be able to stop and reassess and if you’re sweating over silly things, just get over yourself,” she says.
I Can’t Keep Secrets is a set of lovely, country-inspired folk songs that call out for just that kind of forget-yourself adventure; a road trip in the sunshine with the windows down. It might seem cliché, but that’s just how I first heard it, and it suited perfectly.
Recorded and produced by Music Award winners Lee Prebble and The Phoenix Foundation’s Sam Scott, Eva says, “They know what they’re doing so you can just relax and trust what they do.”
The same can be said of her band, which includes members of Little Bushman, Fly My Pretties and Trinity Roots.
Eva seems as if she can’t quite believe her luck in being able to work with these musicians. When I say so, she laughs.
“I spend every day of my life pretending not to be scared and excited.”
It’s more fun creating music with people than playing by yourself.”

Eva Prowse, San Francisco Bathhouse, support from Ryan
Prebble, November 17.