Delaney Davidson has just delivered his 10th solo album. Like many of its predecessors, Out of My Head has songs that feel like film scenes. What would the movie of the album be about?
It seems Davidson has prepared an answer. “It would be a movie about the devil coming to Earth and realising what an amazingly beautiful place it is. And he knows he’s only got a certain amount of time and he has to go back. And he starts to create all these books of poems about the world and how much of a lovely place it is. And the book is called How Green the Leaves.”
Clearly, Davidson, being something of a multimedia talent, would also be the man to make that movie but music and visual arts keep him fairly busy. So does making albums with other people.
His solo albums stretch back to 2007 but in more recent years he’s made albums and toured with Warratahs singer Barry Saunders and Troy Kingi. A few years ago, there were a couple of country albums with a then unknown Marlon Williams. Elsewhere, the songs Davidson has written for and co-written with Tami Neilson – including her Beyond the Stars duet with Willie Nelson – make up a fair chunk of her past five studio albums.
He’s won recognition for things outside music, too. An Arts Foundation Laureate in 2015, he was Artist in Residence at Massey University in 2022, when he worked on two exhibitions with Tāme Iti. Last year, he had the Stoddart Cottage-Purau artist residency in Diamond Harbour, across the water from Lyttelton, delivering an exhibition of landscapes entitled Eyes for the Hills. His upcoming album release tour is being done with Chamber Music NZ , so it’s no traipse around the pubs.
He seems something of a restless creative spirit. “I don’t see it as a me thing,” he tells the Listener on a flying visit to Auckland. “I see it as a cloud up there somewhere … and you tap into it. You’re just a tube the stuff comes through. It’s not tiring to do. You don’t get worn out from being creative. It’s about how long you can maintain the connection to that world and how much of a conductor you can be.”
Davidson may have spent last year painting the Port Hills, but he’s been a decade-long fixture on the Christchurch music landscape. In that time, Christchurch has delivered Williams, Aldous Harding and, indirectly, Lyttelton-raised Reb Fountain to wider attention, as well as having an influence on the early career of Nadia Reid.
Davidson has become the scene’s wise, weird village elder. Something of a Chris Knox-like figure or the hub of a wheel where the spokes go in odd directions – he guested on last year’s album by Sundae Painters, the Christchurch supergroup featuring members of The Bats, The Clean, Tall Dwarfs and Toy Love; his new album has a song co-written by the city’s biggest-selling music star, Hayley Westenra.
Davidson returned to his hometown permanently in 2013 and post-earthquakes decided to stay. “It felt like, it’s time to be here now, be with this community, be with these people.” The community-mindedness runs in the family – his brother Reuben is now Labour MP for Christchurch East. That explains the cap with the NZ Parliament crest he’s wearing when we speak.
He went back home after musical adventures in Melbourne and Europe. “It was kind of my tertiary education,” he says of the period in which, between other jobs, he found a way to mix his country and blues leanings with Euro-arthouse cabaret ideas. All of which have made his approach to music and past solo albums an acquired taste for their offbeat, gothic, Brecht- and Tom Waits-ian charms.
But solo outing No 10 is Davidson’s most approachable yet. Much of Out of My Head is a pop-rock record where the lush synthesisers of co-producer Merk (Mark Perkins, a singer-songwriter in his own right) meets the twang of Davidson’s guitar and his baritone voice, which forgoes the gravel-gargling tricks of old.
It’s a solo album, but it’s not a lonely one. There are duets with Williams on the Freddy Fender-esque You Drive Me Wild and with Fountain on the lushly orchestrated Heaven is Falling. The latter, a brooding Nick Cave-esque ballad, is the Westenra co-write, the spontaneous result of the pop-opera singer arranging a coffee with Davidson, wanting to connect with local songwriters having come back from Los Angeles. Suitably caffeinated, they headed to Davidson’s piano and the song “just sort of came out of nowhere”.
“It was one of those things where you’re trying to write as fast as someone’s singing … you’re frantically trying to keep up with the appearance of the song.”
Westenra departed, Davidson finished the song and put it aside. When Fountain was in town, he asked her to sing on it. “Once she sang, she really brought this whole other world that she can bring … she’s permeated it with her spirit.”
As well as singing on Wild, Williams acted as vocal coach for the recording, all part of a committee approach where Davidson says he was quite happy to take the direction of others.
“His new record is a document of vulnerability and openness,” Williams tells the Listener via email about his cohort’s new set. “For years now, Delaney has been helping other artists build worlds, and this record is a calling in of favours, a musical working bee. An admission of interconnectedness, a sharing of manaaki.”
It might sound, in a way, a companion piece to Williams’ most recent bright and poppy My Boy, the demos for which Merk worked on, which Davidson says was a possible influence.
“It’s definitely got a lot less bite than previous albums of mine in the singing style, the songwriting style, the messaging and the lyrics, the production. Even the look of the album cover.”
So, you’ve sold out?
“Ha, ha. Absolutely. I don’t even know what that means. I’ve been trying to figure it out, because I read some posts about someone talking about selling out and I was like, ‘Is that even a thing?’”
The album, he says, was an exercise in finding some mid-career clarity.
“A big feature of this was a feeling of turning 50 and a combination of feeling like you’ve got somewhere in your life and this being the 10th solo album. But it’s also that classic story about trying to dismantle the wall you feel you’ve built around yourself when you reach a certain age. People talk about how you spend your life getting these bricks and stacking them up and then, when you get to an age, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done? I can’t see any more.’ They start taking all the bricks away to get that clear view again.” l
Out of My Head is out now, digitally, on vinyl and CD. Davidson is on a Chamber Music NZ tour with band and string players performing the entire album. Dates: Public Trust Hall, Wellington, April 19; Rangatira Q Theatre, Auckland, April 20; Great Hall, Christchurch, April 27.
