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Hayden Interview: Live With It

Photo by Christie Greyerbiehl

BY JORDAN MAINZER

For Hayden Desser, the past six years raised a lot of questions. He labored over his tenth record Are We Good (Arts & Crafts), finally out tomorrow, questioning everything from the quality of the album to the sequencing and cover art. In the meantime, he and his wife weathered the lockdown raising their two children, their son struggling with online learning and his daughter, who has developmental disabilities, unable to attend her school. As such, the phrase, “Are we good?”, whether referring to the royal we, Desser and his family, or the human race in general, became not just the title of the record, but a rallying cry whose answer was to embrace the uncertainty.

Much of Are We Good was written at home during lockdown and through various songwriting sessions with indie heavyweights like The National’s Matt Berninger and Feist. The National’s Aaron Dessner heard an early version of the title track, which made him want to work with Desser; he ended up co-producing a few tracks the tracks on the record, bringing in Big Thief drummer James Krivchenia and engineer Jonathan Low on “We Danced” and barroom piano jaunt “It’s Just Me”. Despite the many creative influences on Are We Good, it’s of course Desser’s lyrical and musical voice, his sly humor and earnest emotions that shine through. “East Coast”, “Nothing Wrong”, and “Can’t Happen Now” are familial devotionals, while the playful “On A Beach” and “Miss Fort Eerie” use clever wordplay and storytelling techniques to imagine worlds parallel to Desser’s, even if not far from the truth. And songs like “Terry Cloth Blue (Every Single Thing)” and “Window Washer Blues” offer levity in the way of a sometimes brooding record.

Nonetheless, there’s an unease behind Are We Good that makes the album immensely relatable. Speaking over the phone from his home in Toronto last month, in between dry jokes, Desser sometimes had trouble describing it. “I’m just starting to talk about this record, and I’m sort of trying to figure out how to talk about it,” he said. “I’m also trying to not be scared to say, ‘I’m not sure why this is that or if it works.’...In some ways, I was trying to finish something. It was sometimes easy and sometimes difficult. At the end, it didn’t make anything better or worse, just something I could live with.” It was that release of expectations, living with it, that ultimately gave Desser the space to reflect on the final project. “Thankfully,” he said, “I think it’s among the best things I’ve ever done.”

Read my conversation with Desser below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: This record was born out of multiple songwriting sessions, including one with Aaron Dessner. How did you whittle down the track list to form a cohesive whole from the 60 or so tracks in contention?

Hayden Desser: In some ways, for the first time in a long time, I was a bit lost during the making of the record. We’re talking about a 6-and-a-half-year period, so it was a lot of time, a lot of things going on in one’s life and in the outside world. Throughout that, I went through periods of being extremely creative and really inspired by what I was working on, and that would then turn into not really knowing what I had and what I could do with it, whether it was good or bad. It was all over the place. Things like Aaron coming on board at a certain point was helpful in many ways. Some of the new elements that came into the scene helped, and some made the record take longer. It was one of the hardest records I’ve ever made.

SILY: How would you compare writing during the pandemic to your previous writing experiences?

HD: I can’t speak for anyone else, but my particular situation, the isolation pandemic period was extremely difficult for my family. Our daughter has developmental disabilities, and it just created a situation that made it very hard to have concentrated work time. I wasn’t one of those people who started making sourdough bread and pottery. I had less spare time because my daughter wasn’t in her special school that she loves and needs so badly. My 7-year-old (at the time) son was struggling trying to do online learning while his sister was breaking things in the house. My wife and I were just losing our minds, to be honest.

SILY: On the song “Nothing Wrong”, when you sing, “There’s nothing wrong with you / You are still my favorite creature / You are my past as well as future / My sweet destroyer of car mirrors,” is that a reference to your daughter?

HD: [laughs] Every song is a reference to her since she was born.

SILY: Why did you release “East Coast” as the first taste of the album before it was even announced?

HD: “East Coast” was a song that came together later in the process in the final year of working on the record. There was something about the rhythm, lyrics, and feel of it that I felt was special, to be honest.

SILY: It’s also the opening track, and one that drops you into the world of the album without much preparation. It begins suddenly. Were you consciously thinking about that when ordering the tracks?

HD: The ordering of the tracks is an interesting one because I labored over several sequences over a three-to-four-year period, including incarnations of the record with songs no longer on it. I would go for runs in my neighborhood and listen to myself over and over again, different sequences and trying out different combinations. It was a bit of a worry at some point. Over the last 30 years, I always felt I would figure out the right way something should be, even if it was a struggle. On this record, I started doubting if I would ever find that. Finally, at the end, I got a tip that Kevin Drew from Broken Social Scene, a friend and awesome fella, has a knack for sequencing records. [laughs] So I sent him all the songs in no particular order, and he had his way with the record. What he sent back was something totally unexpected. I didn’t dwell on it. I was just so done with figuring out how the songs should be. He came up with something he was excited about, and I thought, “That’s really interesting: Let’s just do it.”

SILY: So this was his order?

HD: Yeah, this was his order.

SILY: That’s pretty cool.

HD: Yeah...if you like the order.

SILY: I do! But if anybody reading this doesn’t, they know who to complain to.

HD: I should have asked his permission to give away the fact that this is his fault or his good taste.

SILY: On “We Danced” and “Terry Cloth Blue”, the former a dedication to Leonard Cohen and the latter a first crush song, you refer to real songs by past artists. As a songwriter, how do you go about making that decision?

HD: Everyone always talks about the power of music and how it can bring you back to a particular time in your life and be a vivid memory. I have so many of those memories, listening to Phil Collins on the Lloyd’s radio cassette deck in my brother’s room. Growing up, we used to tape the Top 40 countdown and listen to it all week. Referencing [George Michael] in “Terry Cloth Blue” was a natural thing because those songs for years after made me think of that first crush. It’s nothing groundbreaking--just meaningful to me.

SILY: Everybody knows “Careless Whisper” and has a million different relationships to it.

HD: It has to do with my musical development. When I took saxophone as my instrument in school, I was not interested in notes or theory. The only thing I ended up doing with it was lifting that “Careless Whisper” melody off the radio. It was the only thing I ever played on the saxophone.

SILY: On “On A Beach”, what does the phrase “drinking income taxes” refer to? It reminds me of that Wilco song “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”, because that, too, refers to taxes and beaches.

HD: That’s Jeff Tweedy using magnetic poetry. I can be accused of that myself. But yeah, it has nothing to do with that. [“On A Beach”] is a weird song because it was one of the few in the last few years where 80% of the lyrics came right when I was playing the bass riff for the first time. Usually, I’ll hum something or sing fake words over whatever chord progression I think is interesting, but on the semi-rare occasion, I start singing something and end up keeping it. That line just came out. If I’m gonna talk about it now, it would just be me trying to figure out why I said it. It kind of made sense after the fact. At the end of the tax year, for how my wife and I file our taxes, we end up making money back, so we’ll go out for dinner or drinks and end up celebrating our tax return. And I actually found out later that the Income Tax is a classic 1940′s cocktail, which I haven’t tried yet. It kind of works out anyway, even though it doesn’t need to.

SILY: What’s in the cocktail?

HD: I looked it up. It didn’t sound so hot. I’m more of a straight scotch whiskey kind of a guy. There was a time when everyone was drinking Aperol Spritzes and Negronis, and I would roll my eyes. It was always some hipster cocktail that everyone said was great. I don’t think they thought it was great.

SILY: The title track and title of the record, and the refrain throughout the song, is a pretty simple and powerful question. What does “Are we good?” mean to you in context of this record, and what about when you say, “Are we good enough?”

HD: Obviously, the multiple meanings that “Are we good?” can have appealed to me when I was thinking about the title. Sometimes, over the last 6 years or so, “Are we good?” was a general question referring to individuals in society, even people we think are doing good things for the world or people that everyone look up to. It was a pretty negative thought.

SILY: It’s definitely provocative in its simplicity.

HD: On a personal level, being in a 20-year relationship with a home life that’s very stressful, a lot of the time, it’s a huge personal question that is asked a lot. It’s a meaningful title for me.

SILY: The first verse of “Window Washer Blues” describes a story where your wife’s job gave her a drone and you played with it and lost it. Is that a true story?

HD: It is true. During the early weeks of the pandemic, everybody was going crazy and there wasn’t much to do. There wasn’t much joy to be had. My wife’s film work started up after two months, and I looked up really quick instructions on how to use the drone. I took it out back in my father-in-law’s house, and it went up in the air and kept going and disappeared. It was a good representation of what was going on at the time.

SILY: Listening to it, and putting myself in that situation, as a songwriter, I would think to myself, “This is a metaphor. This is a signal.”

HD: Yeah. It was both. It happened, and it was a metaphor. Oh boy. I picture it in a field, somewhere, rusting.

SILY: There’s something kind of beautiful about that.

HD: It struck me for sure.

SILY: “Miss Fort Eerie” is a funny song. It breaks the fourth wall towards the end and plays on that rock star life cliché, which I imagine is not your experience on the road.

HD: I’ve lived a very not debaucherous road life, personally. I guess in the 90′s, it could have been, but now, things are very different on the road for the “rock star.”

SILY: What made you want to get in the headspace of the song’s character?

HD: It was something my wife said. I had a habit of downplaying when I went out with my band in 2015 on my last record. I’d be like, “Yeah, we just went back to the hotel and had to get up early.” She said, “Listen, if I’m here with the kids, and you’re out there, you don’t have to make it sound shitty. I want you to be having a nice time when you’re out there.” The song came from that real conversation. I had the habit of saying, “Yeah, it’s not so great,” so she didn’t feel like she was missing stuff.

SILY: Have you toured since the pandemic?

HD: I did a series of solo runs in November this past year.

SILY: How did you find touring had changed since you were last on the road?

HD: It changed for me, and this might sound eyeroll-y, but I felt thankful I was able to do it and that people were showing up and my music still meant something to people. That was my overwhelming feeling. In some ways, I had a better time than I’ve ever had on the road in these little runs.

SILY: Do you have upcoming tour dates with these songs?

HD: Yeah. I have a few, including my first true headlining show at Massey Hall in Toronto, which I’m very excited about. It’s a bit of a dream come true.

SILY: Are you playing with a band?

HD: I’m just in the process of putting together what I want to do. I did have fun doing these last shows solo. I always feel a great connection with the audience when I’m up there alone. I’m forced to engage, and you get down to the soul of everything. I want there to be an element of solo, but I want to put something special together for it as well.

SILY: On what instrument were these songs written?

HD: I’d say 90% of it was written on piano. Over the last 12-15 years or so, I’ve found the piano to be a more inspiring instrument for writing.

SILY: Do you find it equally as artistically fulfilling to adapt songs like this, or any song, to a live stage as writing them in the first place?

HD: The pattern for me is that when I start rehearsing new songs with a band, I’m going back to the recordings and hearing the bass line that I haven’t really played since the day I recorded it. It’s always an interesting process and fun for me to dissect songs I haven’t heard the individual instruments for. When we start playing them and they’re coming together, there’s a certain elation for me. Sometimes, I’m sitting in the practice space with a shit-eating grin on my face because I’m happy to hear it come back with real live people playing it at once.

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