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Photo Credit: Alexa Viscus

It’s easy to forget that musicians are artists. Someone says art and images of paintings come to mind, but musicians are artists. While music is its own type of art, Delaney Bailey is as much a visual artist as she is a musical artist. Art has always been a part of her life, and now that her debut album is here, she knew she needed to incorporate her love of visual art and background as a visual artist, into her music. The 24 year old singer took the time to chat with us about all things art, of course, and her debut album Concave.  

OnesToWatch: You’ve been releasing music since 2020. How does it feel to now have a debut album, and what was it about this point in time that pushed you to create an album vs an EP?

Delaney Bailey: It feels good! It feels weird. I didn’t realize how much work goes into putting out an album so, I’m tired, but I’m really excited about it. Because I’ve been releasing music for some time now I finally refined the sound that I want to continue with. I had so much music at the time that I started writing this album. I tend to write a lot, like every day, and I had like 40 voice memos of different songs to pick from. I told my manager that and he was like “We can make an album,” and I was like “That’s scary!” A lot of the music that I chose and that I wrote all felt so good together so, it just felt like it was time to write an album. Feels good. 

When you write every day, is it before bed for five minutes that sometimes turns into a longer session? How did you start doing that every day?

Basically, yeah. The way that I started writing, and I just continued doing this, I have a notes app in my phone that whenever I feel inspired by something, or a thought pops into my head, I’ll write it down in that notes app. Depending on the day, it’s usually before bed, I’ll sit down and go through it and see if there’s anything worth picking from in there. It’s so long now, and this is the second one I’ve started. It’s arguably too long now, I should start a new one.

I mean it’s basically a diary, it's just one long page of one. 

Exactly. I tried so many times to start a physical notebook of them, it never works. 

I want to throw it back for a second to “j’s lullaby.” One of the first tiktoks you posted of that song had the caption “any of yall read I’ll Give You the Sun.” in reference to the lyrics of the chorus. Art is a huge theme in that book and there’s a lot of talk about art in your artist bio. When did you first make this connection between art and music?

My degree is actually in design. In high school, and all throughout middle school, and elementary school even, I was always very much a visual artist, that’s what I considered myself growing up, even throughout college, even when my music career took off it was never the plan to do music. It just kind of happened, which is incredible, and I’m very, very thankful for it, and I’m also thankful I chose to have a degree in something unrelated, so that if this blows up some day I’ll have something to fall back on. It was never in the plan to do music. Art has always been a part of my life and it would feel so disingenuous to not include it in my career. I design all of my own cover art, I design all of my merch, I design my tour posters, everything that is visual, a piece of me is in it. It’s never felt right to not include my own art and my own view of art in my music. 

How does the connection between art and music come into play when writing your own music? Are you ever inspired by a piece of art that then creates a song? Are you thinking about art while you’re writing?

It usually comes after I make my music. I tend to write my music with nothing else in mind and then when I’m listening to it, visual pieces will come together. That happened with “Lion” actually, when I wrote it I didn’t have the intention of making a music video and then when I was listening to it over and over I was like “This would be kind of cool to put in the world of Baroque art and medieval style.” With Chiaroscuro, that EP, that is the first time where I was like let’s tie in some of my actual degree knowledge into what I’m doing. It tends to all come after but it’s nice that art can always be tied in with itself. 

I love that. We’re going to dive into the album now. You said that Concave is about learning to love getting to know yourself. Was there something that you learned about yourself that really surprised you?

The first song I wrote for the album, not knowing it was going to be an album, was “Lion.” That song is all about how, at the time that I wrote it, I really didn’t want kids, I did not want to birth my own children and I was really angry at the people in my life that were telling me I would change my mind…I changed my mind! Not necessarily saying that’s my number one goal in life but I think it would be nice to have kids one day. Throughout the process of writing and learning more about myself, and even just living life in that time and meeting new people and really taking my parents advice, I’ve opened myself up to it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I think a lot of that comes from the fact that when I wrote “Lion,” I really didn’t like myself, I didn’t like the relationship I was in, I didn’t like where I lived, I just didn’t like my life or myself at that point in time. Through the year and a half that I wrote the album, as I’ve grown older and changed my circumstances, I have grown to love myself more, and realize that having a kid that would be like me wouldn’t be such a bad thing. 

I’m so glad to hear that you’re in a better place now especially since there are a lot of big topics on this album: your grandma passing, the ending of a long term relationship, coming to terms with your sexuality, family medical history. Is there a song that was particularly cathartic to write?

That’s a good question. I feel like any song I write about my Wella, my grandma, any song that I write about her is cathartic. Mostly because I think it’s really nice to write about someone else in a loving way. For most of the beginning of my career it was all about breakups and the way that other people had done me wrong and how I didn’t like myself and how I didn’t like the way they treated me and it was all pretty negative. But getting to write about my Wella, she’s gone and won’t hear it, I mean maybe she does I don’t know, it’s nice being able to pour love into my art instead of digging at myself and other people. 

You mentioned that “Retainer” is a difficult song to listen back to. Do you ever have any hesitation or anxiety when releasing these deeply personal songs? 

To be honest, no. I don’t really think about it until it’s being released. I think because of my process, all the songs I write are therapy for me. Whenever I’m going through something, or thinking about something too much, or feeling something too much then I have to write about it. Writing about it and making it this piece of art where it can live, it kind of detaches me from it in a way. So when I send it off to people I’m not thinking “They’re going to judge me or think I’m weird or feel like I’m too emotional. I feel like that’s what art is supposed to be and I think if I wasn’t honest in my work it wouldn’t feel like me, it would feel like a way to make money rather than a way to make art. 

You mentioned you had 40 something voice memos that turned into an album. What was it like narrowing your list down and picking a tracklist?

It wasn’t hard. I think the hardest part was when I had picked them, it was fleshing them out into songs I was excited to play live. That was one of the goals I had when I was curating and writing the album. I’ve had a very difficult time touring in the past. Not the situations I was in but just the anxiety that I feel, so I wanted to write an album that I was excited to show people and to have a band play with me. I think that was the hardest part because I haven't really done that before, writing with the intention of playing it live for people. So narrowing down the songs wasn’t all that hard but fleshing them out was definitely a task and I could not have done without the producers I worked with Carrie K and Grayson Proctor.

You have some tour dates coming up, in November and December, before the full album is out. How do you approach these shows when some of the singles are out but not the full project? Do you like to play unreleased songs from the tracklist or focus on the ones fans already know?

A lot of what we’re playing is old music. I think we have two or three unreleased songs from the album. We’re playing 21 songs, it’s a lot of music, so it wasn’t difficult to pull stuff that I was excited to play that I knew the audience would be excited to hear while still incorporating my new sound. A lot of that credit, most of that credit, is to Grayson Proctor, he also directed this tour. There’s some old bangers on there, there’s some new ones, it’s a great show. I'm really, really excited. 

It’s also a headline tour! Does your approach change for a headline tour versus a tour where you’re an opener or for a stand alone show?

Totally. I feel like there’s more of a pressure to please the audience, at least for me. I feel the pressure that I put on myself to make sure that everyone’s having a good time, even if they just know the top five songs on my Spotify. I’ll play some of them while still trying to introduce them to my new sound. There’s definitely more of a pressure to play my older, more popular stuff. When I’m opening I tend to do exactly what I want because there’s less of a pressure. Most of the time when I’ve opened most of the audience doesn’t know me. That means that I get to introduce people to me. If they haven’t heard all my old stuff, I’ll play “j’s lullaby” so that they’re like “Oh! It’s that girl,” but then I’ll also be like here’s what I’m making now. 

The cover art is stunning. Where did the inspiration come from and what was the process to create it?

You know, I don’t really know. A lot of the art I make comes from how I feel the album feels. Even though the message behind it is overall inspiring and uplifting, there’s some really dark stuff on there and I want the album art to reflect that. When I went into the shoot for the album art I gave the direction of uncomfortable poses, face visible. You’re seeing something that’s very personal and you’re not meant to see it. The album art is me doing whatever the hell this is. The bat wings came from some creative direction from the team at AWOL I believe. They said we should try to have some kind of artifact that’s a through line in each of the releases, so we chose the bat. Bat wings are in my merch, for “Lion” we were in a cave, for “Wake Up” the cover art was me upside down. It was just picking something that could be a through line and I thought a bat was cool, cause it’s mysterious and dark. 

Who are your OnesToWatch?

Let me pull up my playlist, I have a playlist of everything I’m listening to. One of my favorite bands right now is This House is Creaking. There’s a band called Loving that I’m loving. Micah Preite and Wolf Alice.