Interview: Delaney Davidson 'Baby Heavyweight' New Album & Tour

Multi-award-winning Ōhinehou Lyttelton songwriter Delaney Davidson is embarking on a nationwide tour of Aotearoa starting this week, joined by bandmates Heather Webb, Cass Basil, Alex Freer and Ryan Fisherman in celebration on his new album Baby Heavyweight. Featuring guest contributions from Marlon Williams, Kommi and more, Davidson unraveled multiple thematic and political threads running through his eleventh studio long player in conversation with Naarm-based UTR interviewer Lucia Taylor. Read onwards and grab a physical copy of Baby Heavyweight from good record stores and / or the merch table at the following dates...

Delaney Davidson - Baby Heavyweight Album Tour

Friday 3rd July - Wintergarden: The Civic, Auckland Live Cabaret Festival
Saturday 4th July - Wintergarden: The Civic, Auckland Live Cabaret Festival
Wednesday 8th July - Last Place, Hamilton
Thursday 9th July - 4th Wall Theatre, New Plymouth
Friday 10th July - St. Peter’s Hall, Paekākāriki
Friday 17th July - The Boathouse, Nelson
Saturday 18th July - Meow, Wellington
Sunday 19th July - War Memorial Centre Concert Chamber, Whanganui
Friday 24th July - Hanover Hall, Dunedin 
Saturday 25th July - James Hay Theatre, Christchurch
Thursday 30th July - The Small Hall Sessions, Hawkes Bay (Duo)
Friday 31st July - The Small Hall Sessions, Hawkes Bay (Duo)
Saturday 1st August - The Dome, Gisborne (Duo)
Sunday 2nd August - Ātea, Whakatāne (Duo)

Tickets from banishedmusic.com

Lucia Taylor: At the beginning of your 11th solo album, Baby Heavyweight, the tone is set for that gothic country that we know and love from you. Still, it's subverted pretty quickly with the lead titular single, which is really funky and almost disco-ish. It brings a feeling of hope to the darker themes that we know from your discography. What inspired that newer sound?

Delaney Davidson: I was hanging out in Switzerland with a friend of mine, and he's saying, “Oh man, I've got all this new recording gear.” He'd done a lot of production in the past for bands and different albums for the record label we'd worked on, Voodoo Rhythm Records. He said, “Come on over, I'm trying to learn all this new gear I've got.” So I went over, and I think I was going to record Everything Is Here with him, and I thought, “I don't want to do that.” I was just kind of strumming around something, and I came up with that, and he was like, “Oh yeah... okay.” We put it together by playing, getting a really cool rhythm, then getting a cool bassline going, and then playing guitar over that.

I've wanted to write that kind of lyric for a while. It was based on a John Lee Hooker style, just really repetitive and positive. It's got this positive repetition of saying these affirmative statements over and over again, so it almost becomes like a hypnotic kind of vibe. It's obviously about people looking each other in the eye and telling each other they're going to do right, and wherever that might lead. It's got a whole kind of weird potentiality, a latent potential feeling in it.

Yeah, for sure. I picked up on that as well in Tumbleweed, with “Always time to start again, never too late to start again.” It circles back to that repeated positive affirmation, which I think is something a lot of people are really needing at the moment — that added hope, especially in the Aotearoa music community currently. Are you able to speak a bit on staying hopeful in these times?

I think there are a lot of things in that album that talk to that idea of creating your own world. That's maybe not the right way to put it, but finding an oasis in all the complete fucking catastrophe out there, where you can at least keep yourself or your own little garden feeling okay. Every time you look out the fence of your little garden, something else has been ruined, or something else has been damaged, or somebody else has been horrifically hurt, it's so hard to maintain a feeling of being okay in that world. But somehow I think we really deserve it for our own lives.

It’s like the reverse concept of the grass is always greener, because that used to be how we summarised our own escapist tendencies. Now it's like, “The grass is black as hell everywhere out there and how dare you feel okay about the fact that you have a roof over your head and food you can eat and friends. How dare you even try and find solace for yourself when everybody else is suffering so much?” Which is classic survivor's guilt, you know.

We had a really big taste of that in Christchurch with the earthquakes, of people feeling really bad because they hadn't died, or feeling like they were lucky. Even though they had massive PTSD or suffered losses of their own, or their businesses disappeared, or, you know, thousands of hours of studio time that built up on hard drives were just buried in rubble. I still had this feeling of guilt about it. It feels like a subversive thing now to talk to some people and say, “It's okay for you to feel okay in this tidal wave of terror.”

It’s important to be able to let go of guilt and let yourself find joy.

Yeah, and that's become almost the new political rebellion. To say, “Hey, I'm okay,” as the basis to make change from. Instead of, “Oh, I'm suffering as much as everything else out there is falling to pieces.” It's hard to get into words because no matter what you say, there's always an angle you can attack it from. I think that's part of it too, that everything is so — everything has a target painted on it now, even feeling okay.

I guess the survivor's guilt is often put onto you by others as well, in a kind of tall poppy way at times.

Yeah, but also weirdly conversely through your imagining of what other people will think. Now we're all putting ourselves in each other's heads.

The gothic style is still very much there in the album, which obviously so many people love from you. I wanted to talk to you about your lyricism and your songwriting. There are lots of narratives, little vignettes of a feeling or a moment. I was wondering if you start with poetry, a single line or a preconceived concept, or, as you said, with Baby Heavyweight, just playing around on the guitar?

It’s a seed. I have little books I carry around, and I write down ideas in them so they might be — hang on, I'll get one. Often, I write them when I'm driving, so they're pretty illegible. It’s scratch doctors writing, but it might say [reading from his notebook], “Are you in or are you out, halfway through the door, are these people really your friends.” That's the concept that the song hangs around. Then if I find a way to build that into a chorus, if I put it into a verse, you will connect it to that concept without me even having to, then I can be a bit more open about other stuff. I could say, “She looked at me and said ‘Daddy, you'll never understand, you're just not made that way.’” You'll relate that to the idea of being halfway on or out of the door.

[Delaney turns to a new page] “Will I ever get through the dark and the blue?” If I put all of these in a song, you'll start connecting them up yourself. The fact that they're all put together in the song is just a simple little net I throw out. You can play it to someone and say, “What do you think this song's about?” and they'll go, “Oh, it's about someone who's wondering whether they should be friends with this person or not.” Someone else will go, “It's about someone who's maybe contemplating suicide” and someone else will go “It's actually about a parent and their children, and watching them leave home.”

I try to make it broad enough that you can insert yourself into the song.

Which I think is such a talent, allowing each listener to bring their own experience to their listening and their own readings of songs — that’s why people connect to it so much.

It's about leaving space in the song for people. You don't fill it all up.

Who are some of your songwriting inspirations? I know that your earlier work was inspired by Hank Williams. Who are some newer ones for this newer sound?

Baxter Dury was a big influence to listen to, just his sort of freedom and his throwaway style. Tone Loc weirdly enough, was another big influence, on Tumbleweed especially. John Lee Hooker, he’s still old but he's more recent than Hank Williams. Suicide. And then there's this kind of writing that I get into, like Barry Saunders, I find him influential on my writing. Or people I know. I'm often writing about relationships with my friends or people I know. I find that thinking about them, they inspire me to write. Some of my friends are songwriters, obviously, but some of them are just people who are my friends, and I think about them while I'm writing.

I think it's interesting when we’re asked about our inspirations, we tend to go to people who do the same thing as us; whether it's inspirations for being a musician, a painter, a writer. But it really is seeking inspiration from everything around you, not just other songwriters, inspiration from the clouds, or from your best friends.

Or just from music. You go to the radio and you hear a line in a song and you're like, “Oh my god, that's such a great line.” And it leads you to go and write about that kind of concept and find your own take on a Taylor Swift song. There are quite a few times that's happened to me with people, and I'm always like “Oh man, is someone going to spot this obvious link?” But people don't somehow. A lot of the things we're writing about are so universal anyway that it's like — whatever Beyonce sings about, it's not like it's only her experience.

You are a hugely collaborative artist; you’ve worked with Marlon Williams very early on, as well as Tami Neilson, Troy Kingi, Tame Iti and many more. How do these collaborations come about, and what do you love about them? What keeps you coming back to collaboration?

I think that the possibility of going beyond your own borders and boundaries and limitations is really appealing to me with the collaborative process, as well as getting to know somebody. I think they happen because I go and pester people and try to talk them into it basically, and if I spend long enough pestering them, they agree. There’s a lot of collaborations that don't work as well. You get, say, four or five songs with somebody and you think you're going to make an album, but then you can't get the rest over the line, so they kind of sit in this purgatory place waiting to happen. Some of those things I feel really bad about because I see the potential for them, obviously, and I would love to have the possibility of finishing them... I just have to let them go, you know.

On the third single for Baby Heavyweight, Tumbleweed, I was so taken aback and pleasantly surprised by the Kommi collaboration. Maybe this is me not being open-minded enough, but I was surprised to have a kind of rap element in one of your songs. What led to that?

I love rap, and I grew up listening to a lot of Public Enemy, N.W.A, and before that, all the crazy Beat Street movies that were coming out. These stories about breakdance culture and those slums of LA back in the '80s, that was super inspiring to me. Obviously being an eight year old kid in New Zealand, growing up in Christchurch, it was not a huge part of accessible culture. But yeah, just the rhythmic approach to the lyric writing and the simplicity of the beats was so, so great to hear. I've always had a real soft spot for that, and also the ability to not have to write a verse and then a chorus, but just really let something go and talk about something.

Me and Kommi had done quite a bit of stuff together, I asked them to come and be part of a Matariki performance I put together a few years ago and I put them really front and centre of that performance. They were the person carrying it, and I've been to all of their reo classes here in Lyttleton as well. I also did quite a bit of appearing with them when they first started to appear live, just to be a support on stage. I was always full of admiration for what they could do, so I asked them to come and be part of that song.

The story of the album is all about Lucifer finding his context and his way forward in the world, after trying to face the traumas he lived through being expelled from heaven. Kommi’s character was the birds and the bugs and the forest speaking to their wounded friend, who was Lucifer, and calling him back to the forest, which is like the Garden of Eden. Offering out some karanga, welcome, to the prodigal son kind of thing.

Me and Merk, we recorded in Auckland on K Road in Jono Pearce’s studio, we recorded in Diamond Harbour, and then I went over to LA to finish the tracking with Merk over there. Just before I left for LA, I was like, “Oh man, we've got to try and catch Kommi in this.” So they just came around, and we recorded it at the kitchen table, kind of thing. I'm always really blown away by the kupu and the kōrero that Kommi brings, because somehow it always seems to fit so perfectly — the meaning and the context. For me, with that kaupapa of the spirit of the forest, it just felt so weirdly beautiful. So in the spirit of the way I was looking at the Luciferic story about forgiveness and about continuation and about redemption and about finding the way back to the Garden of Eden.

That concept of the album is so beautiful and interesting. Are you able to speak more to that?

The concept of the album is that Lucifer is thrown out of heaven, that's The Fall in the beginning and then [he’s] this angry force in the world. He's like a train charging around, he's full of momentum. He's full of drive, anger, and then he realises this way of life is not helping and he can't keep going like this. He tries to get off the train and cuts his foot off, and that's why he ends up with that limp that Lucifer is known for. The songs on this album were very much in that theme.

This is some story I'm still trying to develop and have been trying for ages to get funding to put a stage show together of, but he then starts trying to face his own anger and trauma at being thrown out of The Garden of Eden and he talks to the Taniwha in the Ruatoki Valley and he goes to Te Urewera and he meets Tāne Mahuta in the forest and he finds some crummy old guitar and he writes these really heartbroken little ballads on it. So, Hello Heartache, that’s him facing his own pain and his own torment because up until now, he's been really just angry, and he's never really admitted to being thrown out of Eden.

In the story I'm writing, the people watch him walking around on the earth, and they're scared he's going to make them one of these deals that he's known for. They think, "Let's make him an offer before he offers us something.” So they offer him belonging because they see that's one thing he doesn't have. But if he wants to accept belonging, he has to surrender his immortality, because you can't belong anywhere — if you're immortal, you just cut through time like a knife, you’ll never connect to anything. So he agrees, and then he goes into the forest, and now that he has belonging, he can smell the flowers, and he can feel the earth, and he can sense what the physical realm is all about.

Then he meets Tane Mahuta, and they talk about the name the Lightbringer, because they're both known as this. Tane Mahuta, when he separated the heavens and the earth, and the light came in and brought light into the world. Lucifer ends up giving himself to this te ao Māori concept called Matemateāone, where he gives himself to the world, in service of the world. He just pulls all the leaves and the soil over himself, and he dies in the forest. That's how he returns to the Garden; he returns to become part of it.

That's incredible.

Also, it's such an amazing parable for Pākehā in New Zealand. Going through like they don't connect, they're trying to find their way. They're kind of angry, and covering up the past, and they don't want to face it, we don't want to face it. Then eventually, we have to reach this point where we turn around and stop and go, “Hey, we can't go on like this, we can't keep open-faced mining this country, we can't keep ignoring Te Tiriti, we can't keep doing this.”

We have to have a day where we just go, “Okay, how do we move forward together, how do we find belonging, and how do we graciously accept that from Māori, because for so long they've been putting up with this way we have.” Now, being the majority, it's such a huge obstacle to overcome. People are still ignoring it and still charging on like it doesn't matter, caught up in this capitalist system. But there’s gotta be a way where it's like, “Okay, we can't do this anymore, let's stop.”

It's obviously a huge question and that's really why I think it's important to create some artistic idea of this concept to present to people. Even if they find it too much to think about colonisation and Pākehā history, they can [engage with] a metaphor of it and go “Oh, okay, this isn't this isn't right” and then maybe they connect that somewhere to themselves. Or maybe just reconsider how we approach things here.

'Baby Heavyweight' is out now via Rough Diamond Records.

This interview has been edited for length.