For close to 15 years, Dom Buckham has lent his hands to other people's songs without quite handing over himself.
Bass in RAT!Hammock, drums in Porpoise Spit, a touring slot with Merpire, sessions with Elizabeth M Drummond and Fan Girl. He has played other people’s truths fluently while keeping his own carefully out of reach, unsure he was ready to say anything that honest in his own voice.
That readiness has a name now: d.b. longing, his solo project, and a debut EP titled Good Grief.
The songs were largely written across lockdown and the long, disoriented stretch that followed it, a period Buckham describes without flinching.
“A lot of it deals with grief and anxiety, the grief and anxiety of having to let a lot of stuff go during covid, I also left a lot of bands because I spread myself way too thin and none of it pays and there’s only so far the love of the thing will get you.”
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There is an industry myth he no longer entertains, the one insisting failure if you haven’t arrived by 30.
“Thinking of all my favourite artists ever like Sharon Bennet, The National, a lot of these people didn’t write my favourite records until they were in their late 30s. You need to live a life to be an artist.”
That recalibration is what made Good Grief possible. Buckham had spent years inside other songwriters’ sentences, lending his playing to stories that belonged to someone else, a kind of quiet erosion that comes from handing your instincts over again and again.
“I think because I’d played in so many bands that were very collaborative, lots of other lead songwriters, fantastic singers and lyricists and storytellers, so working with them was amazing but I never got to really be honest, always masked by a character which I used as a crutch to avoid how I really felt.”
Going solo meant recording unguarded, exposed to his own reflection in a way he hadn’t been before.
“It was terrifying. I haven’t released them since 2021 until now because I couldn’t, it was excruciatingly open.”
The EP’s closing track, written about his family, was the hardest to let go of. “I was scared for my family to listen to that but they thought it was amazing.”
There is a particular mercy in turning a feeling into a song, a way of setting grief down somewhere outside the body.
“I think I feel more removed from the negative feelings that I was processing by writing the songs,” he says. “Looking back I just remember those feelings that I can be distant and safe from, it’s really valuable.”
That distance comes with its own quiet dread, the fear that the honesty might not return.
“I’ve actually been really scared I’ll never be able to write anything as honest ever again.”
“I don’t remember a lot of these songs, so I don’t know how to replicate it. Sweet Boy, I really don’t remember writing that at all, just mixing it afterwards, it just happened.”
Buckham isn’t alone in that particular dread. His partner Rhi, who performs as Merpire, discovered one of her favourite authors, Trent Dalton, was a fan and it seems the feeling translates across art forms too.
“He told her every time he finishes a novel he goes, well that’s it, that’s all I’ve got, I won’t be able to do that again.”
The recording process became its own quiet resistance to polish. Bedroom demos were carried into a proper studio in Brunswick and re-recorded, then handed to his World’s Best Neighbours songwriting partner Henry, who pushed back hard.
“He had been listening to them since they were demos and he said ‘to be honest, these just don’t have it, they’re too polished, lost all its soul’.”
Buckham sat on that note for six months before conceding the point. The finished EP runs largely on second or third takes, guitar caught on an iPhone, vocals through a shoe (what he calls a terrible microphone), the grain left intact rather than smoothed away.
Singing itself took years to trust. Backing vocal sessions with Fan Girl frontperson Noah taught him to hear his own voice differently. “He said this was the most honest, the most me when he heard these demos, I owe a lot to him when it comes to my singing.”
Good Grief moves through liminal terrain, twilight, transit, the suspended interval between letting go and beginning again, alt-country and folk woven through its lofi indie pop frame. Buckham is already restless for what comes after, drawn now towards a live drummer having programmed his own beats throughout.
“I don’t want the next thing to be the same,” he says, pointing to Beck and This is Lorelai as artists who reinvent themselves record to record while remaining unmistakably their own.
He will play these songs live with a full band for the first time, joined by Rhi, Henry and Elizabeth M Drummond, at Northcote Social Club.
“It’s the most vulnerable I’ve ever been, and it really is just remarkable how that resonates. A big lesson for me, and a big step in the right direction.”
Good Grief is out now.
