Chaparelle

Texas-based musicians Zella Day, Jesse Woods, and Beau Bedford have come together to reveal their collaboration, “Chaparelle.” Known for their vocal strengths and work across different genres, this partnership channels the enduring appeal of Country music’s golden age, with themes of love and a Texan spirit.

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, the album was created as Delffs navigated first-time fatherhood, losing friends, and approaching his 40s.

Now Boise-based, Delffs first emerged with his Portland band The Shaky Hands in the mid-2000s. Transitional Phase is some of his finest and most vulnerable work: an album about opening oneself up to change, refusing the calcification that comes with age, and opting for wholesale transformation instead.

The album’s opening track, “Transformation,” is a looping, percussive, dub-inflected signal that the record’s themes of change will extend beyond its lyrics. Much of the new album was recorded in early 2020 at co-producer/collaborator Eli Moore’s studio on Whidbey Island, just outside Seattle. When sessions were interrupted by the pandemic, Delffs continued work in Boise: he wrote constantly during lockdown, recorded vocals in his friend Z. V. House’s Boise studio, and sent tracks back to Moore, who often took songs in unexpected directions. Delffs says, “Eli added a lot. 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.” Over time he accumulated about three albums’ worth of material to sort through.

When writing, Delffs spends as much time as possible not listening to music. “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.” He also spent a surprising amount of time thinking about cows while recording—partly inspired by a recent trip to India. “They just eat grass and somehow milk is created,” he marvels. “Their poo and pee is antiseptic and medicinal!”

Musical memories still creep into the process. Delffs found himself thinking about Tom Petty and Talking Heads; you can hear echoes of David Byrne on the angular “Power and Position,” which features accompanying vocals from LAKE’s Ashley Eriksson (whose voice is heard in Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time credit music).

Contributors on Transitional Phase include:
- 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 Peter Broderick (Sharon Van Etten, M. Ward)
- bass by Mayhaw Hoons, Delffs’ old bandmate in The Shaky Hands

The lush “Brave New World” juxtaposes a smooth groove from Galucki and Hoons with heavy themes of social upheaval, underscored by Broderick’s string arrangement. It’s one of three songs on Transitional Phase—along with the back-to-back closers “A Perfect Storm” and “Egomaniacs”—that slowly transform into a prayer. The chanted and sung lines may nod to some of Delffs’ favorite artists (including Alice Coltrane, George Harrison, Yamuna Devi), reflecting his longtime fascination with Hinduism and inspiration from his India trip. “Meditating and chanting are such constant parts of my life these days,” Delffs shares. “They came into this album like any other naturally flowing thought.”

The title track, “Transitional Phase,” is described as a marriage of two aesthetics: Delffs’ vulnerable self-examination alongside Moore and Eriksson’s literate DIY Yacht funk. The result is sonically free, with moments that recall Peter Gabriel or Kate Bush. Delffs sings, “In-between words and dreams, there’s only a line, And you’ve crossed over it so many times.”

Across the album, the songs don’t just cross that line—they dance on it. Compared with his 2017 solo debut Redesign, the distance between waking life and dreams is even narrower here. Delffs sings, speaks, and occasionally chants about the changing tides of our troubled world and the mysterious worlds within. He yearns, searches, remembers, and sometimes wishes he could forget. On “Absence of Love Song” he admits 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.”