Nick Delffs

Nick Delffs is not a protest singer. He’s not a gospel singer. Still, subversiveness and spirituality permeate Transitional Phase, his long-awaited second solo album. The product of five years of musical and personal growth that coincided with widespread social upheaval and a global pandemic – just as Delffs navigated first-time fatherhood, losing friends, and approaching his 40s; all weaved these songs.

Now Boise-based, Nick Delffs has been a beloved staple of Pacific Northwest music since emerging with his Portland-based band The Shaky Hands in the mid-2000s. It was clear then, as it is now, that he possessed an authentic—maybe ancient—voice.

The songs on Transitional Phase represent some of his finest and most vulnerable work. Largely recorded in 2020 with co-producer/collaborator Eli Moore, and with key vocal contributions from Ashley Eriksson (Moore and Eriksson are co-founders of the legendary Olympia band LAKE) in Moore’s spacious and strange stripmall studio on Whidbey Island, just outside of Seattle. The sessions were interrupted by the onset of the pandemic where Delffs returned to his adopted hometown of Boise continuing to write and record, sending audio to Moore, who often took songs in unexpected new directions. “Eli added a lot,” Delffs says. “He really put himself in it. I’m not sure I’d felt that level of deep collaboration and trust since the Shaky Hands days.”

Delffs enlisted more old friends to help flesh out Transitional Phase, including drums from Joe Plummer (The Shins, Modest Mouse, Cold War Kids), Dan Galucki (Wooden Indian Burial Ground) and Graeme Gibson (Michael Nau, Fruit Bats); keys from Luke Wyland (Au, Methods Body); strings and arrangements from composer Peter Broderick (Sharon Van Etten, M. Ward); and bass by Mayhaw Hoons, his old bandmate in The Shaky Hands.

From the lush “Brave New World'' and its themes of social upheaval to emotional back-to-back closers “A Perfect Storm” and “Egomaniacs”—both of which slowly transform into chanted prayers—Transitional Phase was inspired as much by not listening to music as it was by his favorite artists like Tom Petty and Talking Heads. “That’s really helpful for me,” he says. “Because then it becomes this thing where I need music, I need songs. So I have to make them.” Delffs did spend a lot of the Transitional Phase recording process thinking about cows—yes, cows, like the John Gnorski-illustrated one on the new album’s cover. A pre-pandemic trip to India was filled with cow admiration, and Nick picked up some cow fun-facts along the way. “They just eat grass and somehow milk is created,” he marvels. “Their poo and pee is antiseptic and medicinal!”

“Transitional Phase”, the towering title track at the album’s center, is a perfect marriage of two aesthetics. Delffs brings his vulnerable, misty-eyed self-examination to the collaboration; while Moore and Eriksson bring LAKE’s exacting, literate DIY Yacht funk. The result is transcendently, sonically free, like those particularly melodic moments spent with Peter Gabriel or Kate Bush. “In-between words and dreams, there’s only a line,” Delffs sings in seeming self-interrogation, “And you’ve crossed over it so many times.”

The songs on Transitional Phase don’t just cross that line, they dance on it. If the distance between waking life and dreams was narrow on Delffs’ 2017 solo debut Redesign, it is almost imperceptible here. He sings (and speaks, and occasionally chants) about the changing tides of our shared troubled world and all the mysterious worlds within. He yearns and searches and remembers, and occasionally wishes he could forget. He finds faith and loses it. And when he
can’t find that faith again, he admits on “Absence of Love Song” that he’ll wait “on and on and on and on for another chance.” Maybe that’s foolish. Or, as Delffs sings, “Maybe it’s today.”

Nick Delffs’ Transitional Phase is due out July 26th on Mama Bird Recording Co.