Off the gravel

The new album and tour by Delaney Davidson takes the Christchurch artist down a smoother road.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

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 CottagePurau 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.