Delaney Davidson will be embarking on a domestic tour in July this year.
Delaney Davidson will be embarking on a domestic tour in July this year.
Many years ago, Delaney Davidson decided being a singer-songwriter would be his greatest priority in life.
“I made a pact with myself that if there ever was a choice and music was one of the choices, I would always choose the music,” he told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night.
It’s a choice that appears to have paid off for the Lyttelton-based artist. Davidson has now been a full-time musician for more than two decades, picking up multiple awards along the way, both home and abroad, for his genre-stretching brand of country and folk-rock.
But things could have been very different if not for a serendipitous offer back in 2003, when he was on the cusp of committing to a different career entirely.
“I’d done 10 or 12 years in kitchens, and music had always been a sideline hobby,” Davidson recounted on Real Life.
“ I was working at a cafe part-time in Switzerland, and they said, ‘We’re looking for a head chef, so if you want, you can sign up’. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll do it’. And they were like, ‘This is it though, you really have to do this if you say you will. This is a commitment now’.
“So I made the agreement, went home, and then the next morning this guy came to visit me and said, ‘You want to come and join my band?’ And I went, ‘Yep’, went straight back to the cafe and said, ‘I’m not going to do it’.”
For the next two or three years, Davidson toured with this band, based out of Geneva. It would eventually “blow to pieces”, but he says the experience was akin to a “tertiary education” in music touring.
"My songs are always about saying goodbye or wanting to be somewhere else."
“So I took it solo after that and from around 2005 until 2015, I was very itinerant. I don’t think I paid rent for about 10 years because I was either house-sitting or travelling.”
Davidson learned early on that capturing an audience’s attention as a solo artist is much harder than it is for bands, and that he needed to “find a way to pull them in”.
His solution, perhaps surprisingly, was to host mid-concert dance competitions.
“I would set up a loop and a song on stage, and then I’d just go into the audience and start dancing with people and stick them all together in pairs, and then go back and finish the songs on the stage.
“People have written to me to say ‘I ended up marrying the woman you put on my arm that night’! It’s amazing stuff.
“So, come to my show and meet your future partner – or your money back!” he laughed.
Despite his many years as an international nomad, Davidson now calls Canterbury home, having bought a 150-year-old cottage in Lyttelton with money he received for winning the New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate award in 2015.
“ Over the first couple of years [of living there], I noticed, ‘Wow, this has really changed how I am in this country’, and then I felt like I started to see things quite differently and think about things differently.”
That sense of belonging in a place is a theme that comes through in much of Davidson’s songwriting.
“ I went to live in Melbourne for a while when I was younger and really missed a lot of friends I had here, and then I came back and missed the friends I’d made in Melbourne,” he told Cowan.
“My songs are always about saying goodbye or wanting to be somewhere else. That comes from my mother coming to New Zealand as a 4-year-old; the idea of them migrating and not knowing the family apart from her parents; seeing her parents’ wedding photo, and it’s this whole family of people in England, in some church, and I’ve never met any of them.
“So there’s always that. I think we’re looking for that in this country.
“We’re looking for connection, looking for belonging. We’re still wrestling with those ideas of ‘How do we belong here?’.”
Davidson will be embarking on a domestic tour in July this year, with dates in Auckland, Wellington, Hawke’s Bay, and parts of the South Island. Full details will be released on Friday.
Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7:30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.
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