Dear Internet, I know you’re overwhelmed and sometimes find it hard to focus. I know how you feel. But I just wanted to draw your attention to one extremely talented man that you have often overlooked.
His name is Dan Haywood, and he lives in Lancaster. Please don’t hold that against him. He is one of your best-kept secrets. He’s just released his new album, Ten Signs (June 22nd, Suppressed Records), and it is in collaboration with his friend Harvey Lord, who lives just across Morecambe Bay in Westmorland, Cumbria. Despite originally coming from the West Midlands, Dan is highly intelligent and funny, with an original turn of phrase- and that is amply communicated throughout his music.
His relationship to rhythm is particularly striking – it’s both languorous and uptight. He emerges from the pauses, which punctuate his songs like existential question marks, and ambushes you with the next dizzyingly poetic line. This is poignantly rendered on A Redstart. Dan observes that the cock bird has stopped singing as he approaches it. The band sink into a pregnant silence- then he and Harvey exchange a sprechgesang reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins in its urgent, hallucinatory nature-appraisal (“A poll ablaze as white as sun / the flickering firebrand flickers on”).
Dan is the self-proclaimed “Pele of Ornithology”, and spring birds can be heard twittering away in the background of most of the set’s recordings. It’s a neat approach which contributes to the casual charm that runs through the album like sweetcorn through baba.
The Harvey-led songs are more conventionally folk-inspired, but with enough idiosyncratic dial-shifting to give the rocks of pastiche a wide berth. On Fishing The Charr (penned by his fellow angler Bill Lloyd), he and the ensemble reimagine the Lake District as a dreamscape of heroic, piratical activity. Whereas Gordon is a tender, scuttling crab of a song reminiscent of Syd Barrett or Ed Askew, about “tussling with futile longing” while being assailed by midgies and ticks in the shadow of a Scottish mountain.
Another thing to note about Mr Lord and Mr Haywood, dear Internet, is that the fuckers can really play. Meshing with Paddy Steer (lap steel), Mikey Kenney (fiddle), Matt Canty (double bass) and Sam Lawrence (flutes, whistles, harmonium), their guitar work is soulful and unpredictable with instrumental breaks laddering between sections in a way that would have M.C. Escher shaking his head in baffled admiration.
And it’s an admiration that we can all share, my sweet, confused omnipotent Internet. I write to you with the utmost faith in Ten Signs as a force for good in the world and in the earnest hope that you will find a prominent place for it somewhere in the haunted galaxy of your heart.
Ten Signs (June 22nd, 2026) Suppressed Records
Order: https://danhaywood.bandcamp.com/album/ten-signs