Sitting at the kitchen table at Delaney Davidson’s house in Ōhinehou Lyttelton, fragments of his world surround us. His art, awards, and anecdotes from his musical career hang on the walls or decorate windowsills, and his little notebooks, filled with lyrics and ideas, are stacked in neat piles on the tabletop.
The most meaningful possession he owns, he says, is hard to say. “I have some things like the signed lyric sheet by Willie Nelson to a song I wrote with Tami [Neilson] that he sang on. I have that first pressing of “Blue Smoke” that’s very much a treasure of mine,” he says.
“I have this photo with me and Tama Iti that I’m very, very proud of,” He turns towards the front room. “I have my little shrine to my whānau over there, which is really important to me, and I spend every day talking to Dad or saying good night, or whatever.”
“And then,” he adds, pointing to a picture frame. “The APRA Best New Zealand Country Song Award for ‘You’re a Loser’, which is an award that says ‘Congratulations to Delaney Davidson, You’re a Loser’, which is hilarious.”
Davidson grew up in Lyttelton as a teenager, moving around with his dad after he and his mum split up. The port town has always had a special place in his heart.
“I love being up in this valley at this height, looking up to the hills up there, and sitting here in this window every morning to eat breakfast and just sort of look at the day and what’s happening on the water,” he reflects. “The views of Lyttelton are just often breathtaking. When you walk around, you just can’t believe that you could live in a place like this.”
Davidson has just released his 11th solo album, Baby Heavyweight. Born in a kitchen in Switzerland and brought to the studios of Mark Perkins and De Stevens, it’s a project of curiosity and collaboration. Loosely based on the fall of Lucifer and his return to the Garden of Eden, Baby Heavyweight grapples with heavy themes: trauma, loss, love, and heartache.
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“I looked at [Lucifer] like a scaffold,” Davidson explains. He didn’t want it to be an album about the devil, but rather a metaphor for a story of somebody’s journey through trauma. “I mean, we had a clock face, and we talked about all the different parts through the journey. We used this book by Joseph Campbell, ‘Hero’s Journey’, just to plot that kind of story arc. The ultimate thing is that it comes back to the beginning and the end, and you find, oh, you’re in the same place but with a different mentality.”
In Baby Heavyweight, Lucifer finds his way back into the garden, but instead of Eden, it’s the forest of Te Uruwera. He is invited back into the forest by the forest, and dies there, and that’s how he rejoins the garden, Davidson says.
“There are so many swirling high, weird concepts, and they all kind of weave around, but yeah, they’re all kind of relevant somehow. And the idea, as well, which I’m a big fan of, is that it’s loosely connected to the stuff – it’s not slavishly explaining it out dogmatically. It’s loose brushstrokes, and it’s general. It’s meant to leave a lot of space that you can put yourself into it as well, so you’re not locked out of the story by who the characters are. You feel like there’s a lot of space for you to sit in those worlds that the songs create.”
Featuring co-writes with longtime friends and fellow musicians KOMMI, Marlon Williams, Barry Saunders, Tami Neilson, Sean Wheeler, and his “European family,” Pierre Omer from Dead Brothers (to which he was a part of), Davidson’s album took him all over the world, from Aotearoa to Switzerland, Los Angeles and back again.
Working with Mark Perkins, after he produced Davidson’s previous album, Out of My Head, was only natural. Davidson felt like they both still had a lot more to explore when it came to music.
“It felt like there were a lot of things I wanted to explore with those songs with Mark’s approach, as opposed to my own approach, and I wanted it to have a really open feeling, and a really,” he pauses. “It’s hard to say, like, a general appeal, or a… not so typical me.”
Baby Heavyweight could be considered more upbeat than his previous music, which is funny, because Davidson insists this album might actually be a bit of a “downer.” Once the songs were put in order, though, he realised there was some real driving stuff going on – including his hip-hop track “Tumbleweed”.
“I mean, that’s definitely a writing approach,” he reflects. “’Tumbleweed’ was written listening to [US rapper] Tone Loc, and ‘Loc’in on the Shaw’, and going, ‘This is so minimal, this beat, it’s great.’”
“KOMMI, I asked them really last minute if they would be interested in doing a collaborative hip-hop-style thing, and they came around, and I just couldn’t believe what they’d done. They became the feature, and I became the backup person, which made so much more sense.”
“Even the kaupapa of what KOMMI was rhyming about, you know, the idea of being a spirit that represents the birds and the bugs in the forest singing to Lucifer to come back to the garden, that was like, whoa,” Davidson exclaims. “There were a couple of moments where things just dropped into place.”
“Holy Slave”, another track, was one he and Marlon Williams had written pre-pandemic; another approach found Davidson picking Sean Wheeler up in Palm Springs and driving out to Wheeler’s family ranch in the high desert of Morongo Valley.
“There was a lot of luck and a lot of specifically going after something,” he explains. “But so much of it was serendipity, things magically falling into place.”
In production, working with De Stevens on the mix for the first time also opened his mind to new possibilities. “It was amazing to see Mark’s respect for De,” Davidson reveals. “Because I thought Mark was amazing at laying out sound, but him saying, ‘No, we need to go one better, we need to go to this guy to do the mix’… I was really unsure, but then he started sending these mixes back, and I was just like, ‘Oh my god. This is such a great step to be taken.’
“It’s again that thing of thinking you know what you want, and you trust, and you go out into the unknown, and you’re like, ‘This is better than I could have ever dreamed of,’ you know?”
His attitude to life, he says, is to be the “dumbest person in the room.”
“Or [to] be the most useless musician in the band,” he adds. “I mean, those are extreme versions, but the other thing is just trust people to go where they’re gonna go. I think that’s a huge part of it for me, the discovery.”
When asked which song he holds most close to his heart, Davidson replies with “Hello Heartache”.
“’Hello Heartache’ got me for a really long time. It was like I could hardly listen to it without choking up, or falling apart, because it just felt like the sorrow and saying goodbye to heartache, you know, as some little friend who you’ve held onto for so long, and you’ve really grown accustomed to them, and what are they going to do without you once you watch them go and wave goodbye?
“It’s such a twisted concept, but at the same time, it’s the thing of saying goodbye, no matter what you’re saying goodbye to, is always going to be hard.”
Davidson is now on a nationwide tour with his band, featuring Heather Webb, Cass Basil, Alex Freer, and Ryan Fisherman, which he couldn’t be more excited about it.
“Performing live, going on the road, it’s great,” he says. In this climate, however, it doesn’t come without its challenges. He admits it’s definitely a weird time for live music. “It’s nerve-wracking, especially these days… people wait to the last moment to buy tickets.”
“It seems like it’s separating out, that there’s even more support governmentally for big acts to come and play, and people will just want to go to that. Where’s that support for small venues, for small acts?
“I think it’s a conscious time – time to be conscious of where we put our thoughts and where we put our support and where we put our vote.”
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One thing people can expect on his tour is the return of the ‘Lucky Dip’: ticket holders can choose what they want to pay and receive a surprise handpicked by Davidson himself.
“Is it going to be a candy bar and some false teeth, or will it be a beautiful porcelain figure?” he laughs.
Delaney Davidson’s Baby Heavyweight is out now. Check out his remaining tour dates here.
Hannah Powell is a music journalist and radio host based in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
