Delaney Davidson’s new album: A movie waiting to happen
Restless spirit: Delaney Davidson says his latest album comes from a need to find some mid-career clarity. Photo / supplied
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.