DAVID ADAMS speaks to New Zealand artist Edwin Derricutt…
“For me, architecture and music are sort of intertwined together a little bit. They’re both creative passions where you dream up something that doesn’t exist and then you go about a disciplined process of making it real and sharing it with other people and having it hopefully evoke an emotional response with people.”
Such is the view of Edwin Derricutt, a New Zealand architect who has also forged a career as a musician and singer-songwriter, recently releasing his debut solo album, Symmetry, to the Australian market.
“Whether you’re standing in an amazing house or an amazing room and the architecture makes you feel a certain way or whether you’re listening to a song that you’ve created and that affects you and gives you an emotional response and helps you think about things – they’re both things that excite me and so I’ve never been able to completely put either one of them down. I think they complement each other.”
– Edwin Derricutt
He explains further: “Whether you’re standing in an amazing house or an amazing room and the architecture makes you feel a certain way or whether you’re listening to a song that you’ve created and that affects you and gives you an emotional response and helps you think about things – they’re both things that excite me and so I’ve never been able to completely put either one of them down. I think they complement each other.”
While he still works as an architect – including looking after design projects for the church he attends in Auckland known as Life – Mr Derricutt says he is these days spending more of his time working as a musician than ever before.
Recently in Australia for a week to promote Symmetry, Mr Derricutt says that the link between his architecture and his music goes even further and can be seen in some of the song lyrics on his album.
“There are certainly lyrics across the album that thread together analogies of houses and architecture,” he says.
The son of British parents (his mother was a Salvation Army musician; his father a joiner and shop-fitter – they had both emigrated separately from the UK and met in Wellington), Mr Derricutt was born in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, and says that from a very early age he set himself on a path to become an architect. It was also early on that he started to pursue his musical leanings.
“I actually started playing guitar in the last couple of years of high school and…I convinced my parents to get me a guitar for passing my school certificate exam,” says the 35-year-old. “I think I convinced them to get me the guitar before I even finished my exams and I think I spent a whole lot more time playing my guitar than I did studying, but it worked out alright and I managed to get through.”
Mr Derricutt has played in a number of bands over the years since – his first being a band he formed with other members of the Salvation Army church he was attending called the Tomato Sauce Revival Sisters. Most recently he fronted a band called Felt.
“Since then, the band (Felt) has dissolved as bands do and people go in different directions and I have continued on as a solo artist,” he says. “It was always something that was in my heart and I had a lot of songs brewing that needed to get out. So I have just continued to follow my passion and get amongst it.”
Symmetry has been out for just over a year in New Zealand and Mr Derricutt is now finishing writing material for a follow-up which he hopes to start work on next year with a release sometime in the second half of the year.
Mr Derricutt says his songs tend to be “slice of life kind of stuff” (in fact his debut album was largely written and recorded while he was driving around New Zealand in his yellow Bedford Bus).
“They’re responses to make personal take on many and varied situations that I find myself in.”
The title track Symmetry, for example, is drawn from his relationship with his wife, Debbie Clark, a freelance makeup artist.
“We often disagree about a lot of things,” he says. “We have quite opposite tendencies in the way we go about things but we’ve learnt to live together and we’ve learnt to enjoy those differences. It’s kind of a very light, summery song that has a bit of a tongue-in-cheek look at God’s little joke of making everyone attracted to people that they are completely opposite too.”
Another of the songs on the album, House To Die For, is based on a trip he made to Tonga to design a house for a government official.
“(H)e was actually dying of liver cancer and this project I was working on was the last big project for him…where he might actually spend his last days. So it was a very daunting process trying to design something; really wanting to make this building evoke a response, and a spiritual response; a spiritual sort of inquisitiveness for him, and make it a real peaceful kind of house at a time of his life that was really not going to be that peaceful.
“You can get very busy with life these days and when I get myself into a state where my head empties out and I’ve got a bit of space around me, that’s when songs tend to start flowing.”
“So House To Die For is a song about that process – of marrying together my architecture and my music and the common theme of wanting to affect people and take them on a journey.”
Mr Derricutt says he tends to write songs when he’s taken a break from the daily routine.
“I tend to write a lot of my stuff when I’ve gotten away to beaches on holiday and relaxing,” he says. “You can get very busy with life these days and when I get myself into a state where my head empties out and I’ve got a bit of space around me, that’s when songs tend to start flowing.
“I think that’s a bit of a theme that recurs through the album as well – life’s a little bit too short to spend just being busy and stressed and running around all the time. You need to take a bit of time out to spend with family and friends and enjoy the journey.”
Mr Derricutt says his songs are not meant to be overly evangelical or a “direct spiritual tool” but are rather a “reflection of who I am”.
“I see a lot of people in the Christian world that have a sense of this is what I do on Sundays and this is what I do during the week – they’re kind of two people – and one thing I want to try and be is one person no matter whether I’m playing in a church service or whether I’m playing in a pub in Melbourne. My set doesn’t change, my songs don’t change and I just want to be a musician of integrity who can be real. And I think, out of that, comes the opportunity for relationship and, ultimately, ministry.”
