An audience with David Shanhun

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An audience with David Shanhun

David Shanhun is fast expanding his audience.

The rising young Auckland songwriter is pushing for greater exposure and getting it. His song Missing You is at No 1 on theaudience.co.nz and Shanhun is hoping fans will like the song enough to turn it into the fourth No 1 song of the month since the website was launched by Creative New Zealand. The winner gets a $10,000 recording grant.

‘‘The money would certainly help,’’ says Shanhun, who was a finalist last year for the Horizon Award at the National Country Music Awards. ‘‘More importantly though, it’s a great way to get my music out there. It’s always very humbling as a musician to know that people like what you do. And it can be personally rewarding in so many ways. I went for a run the other day and when I got home I heard the last chorus being played by my landlord upstairs.’’

Within the short space of time since Shanhun took the leap of faith to become a fulltime musician he’s been a finalist in the 2010 Singer Songwriter Syndicate's "Singer/Songwriter" competition, been a guest on TV1's The Good Morning Show, performed with Grammy Award winning artist Bryan White, been nominated for the Pat McMinn Rising Star Award and collaborated with Petra Bullock and Simon Snaize on the recently released album Live At The Lab.

‘‘That was a really cool project,’’ Shanhun says of the latter. ‘‘We’d all heard each other’s music and liked what each other did. We got together more with the idea of doing some shows together. As it turned out we managed only two gigs before Simon needed to head back overseas. We had all of these songs worked up and thought it would be nice to have a memoir of our time playing.’’

One curious aspect of the collaboration was that Bullock had attended a songwriiter workshop which Shanhun and Snaize had run.

‘‘I love working with Petra,’’ Shanhun says. ‘‘She’s so talented and we have similar musical ideas. It seems odd that when I met her I was teaching a class in songwriting and she’s now won an award as a writer. She is more qualified now than I ever was to teach! I’ll just have hope Missing You can top theaudience votes and we’ll be even!’’

ENDS

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