SOUNDTRACK: HAYDEN-Live at Massey Hall (February 28, 2015).
The second season of Live at Massey Hall features ten videos from 2015.
A friend of mine from Vancouver got me into Hayden back in 1995. Back then Hayden had a rough, bassy, somewhat peculiar voice. Now, twenty years later, that rasp is almost all gone and his songs feel a bit more commercial.
He talks about the Toronto music scene and how important Massey Hall was. But also the craziness of seeing Dinosaur Jr play at Massey Hall–it was unusual to see a band tearing it up on that stage. All bands are excited to play there–the rumors of how good it sounds on stage are true. Massey Hall is a musicians dream.
“Almost Everything.” is from his 2013 album and features him on piano (and harmonica). I like the organ sound (from J.J. Ipsen) on the song and, lyrically, the song is pretty great:
But I’m recording once again
While my kid is upstairs in bed
And I’ll admit now and then
That some nights when I’m strumming
Or maybe just drumming
The music is still everything…
Well almost everything
“Bass Song” is about “self-defense using a bass guitar.” This is an earlier song and his delivery is a bit closer to that earlier style of singing. The song has a really satisfying and fine melody line and riff throughout. As the song builds to the end, Hayden himself starts playing more and more weird and dissonant chords on the piano while playing a great harmonica solo. Strangely enough the bassist Jay McCarrol plays drums for this song, while the drummer Taylor Knox switches to bass (but just for this song).
“No Happy Birthday” was written for his five-year-old daughter who is nonverbal. When he tries out new songs or “back catalog classics” with her, she gives the sign for “all done” really quickly. (Someone shouts, I love you). She loves me too, she just doesn’t love my songs. Her favorite song in the word is “Happy Birthday.” How do you compete with that? The song is just him on guitar and harmonica.
Taking a break, he says, “You always see musicians fawning over this building. I don’t really see what the big deal is. [pause] I have to say I’m kidding. I started feeling really bad there.
“Next is a song about a bar.” It’s from the soundtrack to Trees Lounge. It sounds a lot like the original because he’s singing with his bassist’s deep additions to the vocals.
“Hey Love” is a new song with wonderful harmonies. The middle section has him taking out the plug for his guitar and touching the metal part so that it buzzes rhythmically.
“Dynamite Walls” gets a big response. It’s an older song and is very catchy. There’s a lengthy cool jam session at the end. It’s nearly three minutes long and it gets really noisy and chaotic with the drummer in particular going crazy by the end. Then it settles down for the end.
It’s a really solid concert.
[READ: February 2, 2018] “People Who Are Refined”
This is a collection of four stories. I didn’t really like any of them, but I was absolutely fascinated by the way these stories were discovered. I remember hearing about this when it happened and it is still fascinating. So, far more interesting than the content is this:
By Robert Walser (translated by Susan Bernofsky), four stories from The Microscripts, to be published next month by New Directions and Christine Burgin Gallery. Written on scraps of paper in markings often only a millimeter tall, the microscripts were at first mistakenly thought to be a secret code when they were discovered after Walser’s death in 1956. Magnification of the texts revealed them to be a miniaturized form of standard German script.
The first story is about a sorrowful man who disregarded desires. He was full of loneliness and could not escape his worries. Midway through he says, “Here I would appear to have completed the first section of my essay. Now I shall turn to his son or progeny (how did a man living life in loneliness have a son? Unclear). The son did not have his father’s worry. He was happy-go-lucky. It appears that his soul was unhappy but the language kind of got away from me.
The second story is about a man given a book by a good woman who was married to bad man. She was delicate and he was trivial. While she was single she didn’t mind being a charming idealist. But her husband changed her mind and now she wanted to be bad. Being good regardless of the circumstances–oh how difficult this was proving to be. She went to what I gather is a brothel
The third is more of a statement about his will to shake a refined individual to rattle him about as if he were a scraggly tree bearing only isolated jittery leaves. But the abuse is verbal and seems to be a back and forth more than straightforward abuse.
The fourth story is about a man who numbered among the good and refined. He created an enterprise which required the support of other nice, good, devout, refined people. Surely this was reckless. Yes, they left him in the lurch and abandoned him. The rest of the story turns into a sort of color scheme. He is Mr Brown, he meets Mrs Black whom he hates because they harmonize so well. They met a rascal clad in sky blue who smiled in yellow, cast down his eyes in fiery red, and spoke a deep green.
This ends with “his is certainly a peculiar story, and in any case it has never before appeared in print.”
The same could be true of all four.
I Just Read About That... 