Artist of the Month Interview: Toby Hay

Amid breathtaking Welsh landscape, we met up with twelve-string guitarist Toby Hay to discuss the mechanics behind his new set of acoustic instrumentals, The Longest Day.

It’s a scorching afternoon in mid-Wales and we have driven up past the Elan Valley dams and trekked down to the edge of the reservoir, a magical place where curlews call from afar, red kites glide and sheep wander past and drink from the water’s edge. This land is where much of Toby Hay’s gorgeous picking begins, but on The Longest Day, he ventures further afield before returning home, heading to Chicago and Missouri and down to Cornwall. “This album was certainly influenced by travelling and being away from here, more than the last one,” he begins. “Both with touring The Gathering, which meant I was away a lot, but also from some trips I took, like to America to visit my brother. It meant a lot of time spent driving about by myself through some pretty special places. I often find that music often comes to me when I get back from being away.”

‘Leaving Chicago’ is the track that travels furthest on the album, starting with high notes in the Windy City and heading out via rail with some nice low lines. “You get off the plane there and just merge into this incredible city,” he smiles. “I’ve never been anywhere quite like it. The weather was a real mix, there was lots of drizzle and mist and at night when you get the skyscrapers all lit up, it’s a very atmospheric place, kind of like a movie city, what you want cities to be like. But we were only there a few days and definitely felt like we hadn’t seen enough, so it was a shame to leave, but then we got a train down to Missouri to see my brother where he was living. The train journey was so long and flat, you could nod off for a while and wake up and the landscape would be the same as it was three hours before. It was on that train trip, sat down for a long time looking out of the window after leaving a city like Chicago, that the music for that piece started coming to me and it’s the idea behind the whole track really.”

One piece that stands out from the rest on the album is ‘Late Summer in Boscastle’, an unusual Hay creation, full of space, that places the guitar behind the other instruments present. “It’s certainly the most improvised track on there,” Toby says. “It very much came from a tuning on the guitar that I came up with while I was at a family wedding down in Cornwall. We took a trip to Boscastle and it was lovely early evening in September, when it’s not summer but not quite yet autumn either; it’s probably my favourite time of the year. It was quiet and the sea was lit up this amazing green colour and I came up with this tuning and then the concept of the track came to me and I knew I was going to record it with the other musicians as this loose improvised piece. The way we recorded it on the day was interesting too; I was talking about it with Mark the drummer and Aidan the bass player when Greg the saxophone player arrived, and we just recorded it straight away without even properly saying hello or having a cup of tea with him. We went back to it afterwards but realised it was done from that take. It was more of a conversation about how we wanted it to sound than a piece of written music. It’s a great feeling when you come up with a concept in your head that you have no idea will actually work and it does.”

The Longest Day sessions were the first time Toby had a set band with him on hand to accentuate his existing guitar tunes, an experience he has taken plenty from. “I’ve never done anything like this before, to be honest,” he smiles. “But again it was more a concept; I knew who I wanted to play on it and I knew why. I chose guys I had met already from Cardiff and Bristol who I knew I liked, so I could just say ‘play like you play, on this’. They were mainly jazz guys, so their ear is good and they can react and work quickly, rather than sitting down to arrange things. I wanted to record it very quickly and live with very few overdubs; it was more about trying to capture the energy rather than this idea of perfection, which you can waste a lot of time trying to achieve on record. It’s the moments in between that are the special ones and we spent very little time worrying about things during the recording. I absolutely loved it and can’t really see myself working another way now. For me, it’s the way to make albums.”

It will be a busy year for Toby, with this record now released and another two in the pipeline. “I’ll be recording a new album soon,” he explains. “It’ll be done live again, but this time solo, but still with no overdubs or cutting and pasting, just straight through live takes. I liked the idea of doing that even before doing this one, but now I know that’s how I want it. So, that one will be done on a custom twelve-string guitar made for me by Roger Bucknall up at Fylde guitars. The State51 Conspiracy label commissioned the guitar and I’ve been working away on material especially for that guitar, so it’ll be quite a different record, but I’m really looking forward to it. Also, this autumn an album I’ve done with Jim Ghedi is coming out too, six and twelve string guitar instrumentals. Again it’s all live takes with no overdubs, capturing energy instead of stressing over mistakes. That one was actually recorded before this one, so it was kind of a warm-up. But this has been the funnest music I’ve ever made; when you’re feeding off of that energy, everything else is a lot easier and more exciting.”