Prior to the unfortunate appropriation of the ukelele by doe-eyed saps like Zooey Deschanel and Eddie Vedder, Peter Delaney was mining his own weird vein of folk, played almost entirely on ukelele. His self-released ‘Duck Egg Blue’ cd-r was a brief but substantial collection of fragile tunes that felt more like outsider music than the twee old timey nostalgia peddled by the aforementioned artists. He recently released his second album Witch Bottle, which retains the same charm as its predecessor, but experiments with longer song lengths and some added instrumentation.
How do you feel about the apparent ukelele revival that’s been going on the last few years? Do you have a kind of a sense of ‘I got here first’ about it? Do you feel that people’s perceptions of what you do have been affected by it?
I don’t think I really felt that ‘I got there first’ thing with the ukulele, but if I did it wasn’t for very long. On the one hand it’s great to see the instrument getting so much attention and more people discovering that it really is a worthwhile instrument, but on the other it still has it’s quirky connotations and in some ways it’s even been fetishzised a bit. It’s an instrument that’s always had a lot of baggage but whereas before it was seen as a gimmick or novelty instrument, it’s now been pigeonholed with a sense of tweeness. I still squirm any time I see one pop up in an ad on TV. Unfortunately I think the notions of ukulele music do affect audience’s first impressions of me and it’s a bit frustrating but I don’t think it’s enough to make me want to stop playing it. I think when people give it some time they tend to realize there’s more to my music than the ukulele. I also think there’s a place for the ukulele in folk and traditional music and I hope to see it being used a lot more there.
So, there’s been quite a gap between Duck Egg Blue and Witch Bottle. What have you been up to in the meantime?
I’ve had a few other projects going over the last few years but one of the main reasons it took so much time to release Witch Bottle was the writing and recording of the songs. There’s a few songs on the album that took some time to write, particularly the lyrics and then I recorded the album at home which meant a lot of time procrastinating and trying to get everything perfect. I’m hoping it won’t take half as long to get my next album out.
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Do your pursuits in the areas of film and photography spring from the same creative impulse as your music?
No, I don’t think so. To me they’re very different mediums but I think that’s a good thing. It means I can explore very different ideas or try things out in one that I couldn’t do in the other. It’s the same with the band I play in, Red Eskimo. I can’t see the songs I write for myself working with the band and I wouldn’t be able to some of the things we play around with in my own music. It can be a bit hard designating time and changing your mindset back and forth between film and music and the band but it’s very fulfilling to be able to explore and develop things that come from very different places.
Sonically, both albums occupy a similar niche. What attracts you to the minimalist approach?
I never really intended to go for an exclusively minimalist or stripped back sound for the albums but because they were written like that, with no one else playing along with me, it made sense to record them that way too. Occassionally I’d get the sense that I was supposed to add some extra instrumentation, like that’s what I should do, but I feel that it’s important to justify any decision to add anything rather than just throwing something in there for the sake of it. So any extra instruments on the album are carefully chosen. As well as that, a lot of the old folk and traditional music I like is recorded that way, with one or two microphones in someone’s home and I suppose I want my albums to have the same feeling of authenticity.
Is there a unifying lyrical theme on Witch Bottle? I feel like there’s definitely a cohesiveness there in terms of atmosphere, but it’s kind of elusive and hard to grasp.
I think of Witch Bottle as a collection of songs written over a period of time rather than a concept type album where there’s a singular theme running through it so in that sense I don’t see the songs as really having much in common thematically. Maybe there’s a similarity in the sensibilities of some songs, with the music too, but I think they’re all exploring different ideas.
Witch Bottle is out now on Out on a Limb Records, and available digitally at Bandcamp.
