Most of the songs on Hayden's debut album were written and recorded late at night in his bedroom on a 4-track mini-studio. Though he's not the first schmo to embrace lo-fi as a means of low-rent self-expression, Hayden's music is completely the product of where it was created. Hayden, a fairly normal twenty-nothing from Toronto, is pure folk poet--a troubadour of the suburbs, a kitchen-raiding, late-night-cable-TV-watching, oversleeping product of middle class North America. To record him any other way would be like taking bacteria out of its petri dish. Over an acoustic guitar that skronks with the metallic reverberation that comes from strumming too hard, Hayden sings of everyday minutiae with a deep and raspy monotone of perpetual ennui.
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On the beautifully lumbering "Bad as They Seem," the singer pines for a neighborhood girl and her mother as someone "to share with me my midnight snack," only to conclude, "I got to get out some more." Hayden knows even the most mundane scenes can have tragic undersides. Hence, "Skates" starts off about an old department store job, but ends up about the interminable grief of a customer. And in a story ripped from the news, a child in "When This Is Over" wonders about cleaning his room and brushing his teeth while he and his baby brother are drowned in a car by their mother. The music, which mixes in electric guitars, pianos, and other random noises, is more coarse than most singer-songwriter fare, but often a lot more penetrating as well.
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