Darren Hayman – Home Time
Fika Recordings – 22 May 2020
Home Time is an album about endings, but also about things that never end. Its songs concern the ends of relationships, a fact which might have some listeners grasping at comparisons between this album and Hayman’s early work with Hefner, particularly the wonderful, self-contained cycle of intimacy and loss that was The Fidelity Wars. It’s natural to want our favourite artists to come full circle, to return to the beloved themes of old. But Hayman, as anyone who has followed his solo career will know, is about more than just a couple of great indie records. He is one of our most restless and questing songwriters. He has recorded albums about the 17th century Essex witch trials, lidos, and the moon landings. So when he records a new collection of songs that ostensibly explore an old theme, you can be sure that he will approach it from a new angle.
In some respects, the new angle is unavoidable. Hayman is older and – perhaps – wiser. Perspectives on life shift, for singer-songwriters as well as for the rest of us. Over time we come to know ourselves better (and perhaps we come to the realisation that we don’t know other people as well as we think we do). This kind of personal change has, of course, found its way into these songs; they seem to turn their back on the outside world, for better or worse. The resigned, world-weary opener Curl Up, with its tentative piano, is a case in point. Hayman’s indie credentials (if that sort of thing is important to you) are well and truly intact: everything is acoustic, recorded on 8-track. There is a pleasing layer of dust over it all. The hushed backing vocals – the work of Hannah Winter and Laura K – only add to the closeness. Hayman, in two short minutes, draws us into a world where warmth and sadness coexist.
Those backing vocals become a kind of signature sound and guiding spirit of the album. They provide a gentle tension to second single The Joint Account, a push and pull of responsibility and inactivity, a weary battle of the sexes. On the chorus of the slow-burning Kissing A Cloud, they provide a sad, spacy echo.
There are more upbeat passages too. I Was Thinking About You trots along at a fair pace, all jolly acoustic guitar and bouncy percussion, but of course, the lyrics tell a more complicated story of separation and, perhaps, obsessive behaviour. The ideas might be complex, but one of Hayman’s gifts is his knack for getting them across in a simple manner, observational and conversational, and full of insight and humour even in the darkest moments.
We’ve come to expect a few things from Hayman’s songwriting over the years: an eye for the smallest, most important details and an ear for a self-deprecating turn of phrase that can make you laugh one minute and cry the next. This is where he comes full circle, if he does at all. We know, given the lack of a full band, the self-imposed recording constraints and the stylistic path of his career, that Hayman won’t be digging up the past too much with this record, but what we do get are some of his most honest and cutely observed songs about heartbreak since those early days. And on top of that, he has become a better singer, or at least one whose voice is more sympathetic to its subject. The cracked and careworn way he sings ‘she wasn’t equipped for me falling apart/we had the wrong sized plasters for dried up broken hearts’ on Because We Were Impossible transcends the mundanity of the image in the simplest and most beautiful way.
Pretty melodies abound, providing a bittersweet counterweight to subject-matter that might otherwise be uniformly bleak. I Am The Noise glows and sparkles with homespun charm, while I Want To Get Drunk says what everyone’s thinking to an almost swampy backdrop that is uncharacteristic but exciting. Song structures are normally simple: lists of detail accumulate, creating a surprising emotional weight, lines are repeated for emphasis and begin to reflect the repetition of days spent in the same room waiting for a lover who isn’t going to return. But there are delightful musical flourishes here and there – like the sprinkling of horns in I Love You, I Miss You, Come Back – that ensure things never get dull. As with Jonathan Richman, playfulness is often a foil for poignancy, nowhere more so than on Dinosaur Plate, a song that will have you in tears as your seven-year-old sings along.
There are lots of ways you can listen to Home Time. You may notice the relevance of its title and its themes of loneliness and apply them to the current human predicament. You may see it simply as an album about the loss of love, the work of a man of bitter experience looking back over a catalogue of failure, disillusionment and frustration, and alchemising those things into lovely, sad pop songs. But that would miss the thread of hope that runs through the album and emerges, close to the end, in A Girl That I’m Seeing, which sounds, more than anything else here, like the song of a callow but confident youth. This upswell of hope ripples into the final song, Wrap Yourself Around Me, and we see Hayman opening himself up once more to all the potential paths, good and bad, that a love affair can take.
Circularity, repetition, disappointment, hope and the occasional abrupt ending. We put up with these things in life, and we are impressed when they are reflected in art. Twenty-one years ago Hefner released one of the finest break-up and make-up albums of its era. To say that Hayman has done it again may be a bit reductive – in no sense at all is this a nostalgia trip, quite the opposite in fact – but nonetheless, this is one of the finest records of a consistently brilliant and varied solo career.
Pre-Order Home Time (out on 22 May)
https://darrenhayman.bandcamp.com/album/home-time
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