An old friend and roommate of mine used to turn me on to cool music and movies. Every so often he would show up at the apartment with a vhs tape of some movie which i was sure to reference for years. One night he had shown up with the movie "Trees Lounge", a downtrodden loser-chic movie with no happy ending in sight. We loved it and became first tier Steve Buscemi fans. The closing credits had a remarkable strummed bass guitar song with deep sad vocals, it kind of encapsulated the movie so I waited through the credits to find out who performed it. Turns out it was by #hayden.
I ran out and bought this, the only Hayden album I could find. It didn't have the movie's title track so I was a little nervous if the rest of the album would carry that sort of spirit. Turns out most of these songs were as if not more downtrodden than the movie. It's a disc full of sad, relatable narratives sung over sparse (for the most part) instrumentation. Hayden howls in a slacker baritone and the self-deprecating and self-pity drenched lyrics suited me just fine.
This album was definitely a bridge to my woah-is-me mid-twenties. Those years were marked by a great deal of lonely activities. Many of which probably would have made great Hayden songs. I tried myself but always shied away from the naked vulnerability of these songs and hid behind unclever turns of phrase. The albums that make our desert island lists are the ines made by an artist who can speak what we feel better than we can.
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