This week's feature: Hayden

Hayden, The Places Where We Lived (Hardwood)

WHO

Toronto's finest sadsack folkie (and friends).

DISCOGRAPHY

In September (Hardwood, 1994)
Everything I Long For (Hardwood, 1995)
Moving Careful (Hardwood, 1996)
The Closer I Get (Hardwood, 1998)
Skyscraper National Park (Hardwood, 2001)
Live At Convocation Hall (Hardwood, 2002)
Elk-Lake Serenade (Hardwood, 2004)
In Field & Town (Hardwood, 2008)
The Place Where We Lived (Hardwood, 2009)

IN A NUTSHELL

The Place Where We Lived may not differ lyrically all that much from Hayden's past output, but he still manages to make sadness sound surprisingly upbeat.

THE STORY

I went into The Place Where We Lived with a little bit of trepidation. After all, I'd been warned that it was a particularly sad break-up album; given that this description could be applied to most of Hayden's previous albums, I wondered what kind of depths he was plumbing if this was the one that someone was considering a break-up album. Add to that the fact that I'm really not in a heartbroken mood right now, and I was wondering whether this might be the album -- fifteen years in -- where Hayden had finally ventured to some bleak place into which I wasn't prepared to follow.

Thankfully, these worries were for nothing. Or almost nothing. After all, The Place Where We Lived is clearly not a happy album -- despite the hilarious sense of humour Hayden always shows in concert, I don't think he has many happy songs in him -- but there's nothing on it that's as shocking as "Bass Song", or as devastatingly sad as "Skates", or as pathetic as "Bad As They Seem", or as desperate as "You Are All I Have".

There's still plenty of sadness to go around, of course. But, with Howie Beck's help, the end result is still happier than anything he's cranked out in a long time. Even as he's singing about the end of a relationship on "Let's Break Up", the melody is still as upbeat as anything he's ever done. Similarly, "Dilapidated Heart" is bouncier than any song with lines like "I've left you alone for so long / All that's there is webs and dust" has any right to be, while the same could be said for "Disappear" (which ends up with a line that sounds eerily like Hayden has just vowed to murder his wife).

You can still find the odd moment where he channels the same kind of downbeat moping that brought him so much prominence a decade and a half ago, but those feel oddly out of place. Take "Living Grows On You", for example, where he sings about how few years he has left -- even if lyrically it fits in with his usual outlook, the sparse feel of the song isn't quite what he's going for here (though it may feels out of place for a reason -- the lyrics are adapted from a Denys Arcand film). A song like "Never Lonely", on which Hayden enlists the help of a full band, is far more in tune with what he's going for on The Place Where We Lived, as he sings "I never sleep alone / sometimes I wake in the arms of those / I don't even know" over one of the fullest arrangements he's ever had.

In the end, I suspect that the only people for whom The Place Where We Lived will represent a shocking turn into darkness will be those people who came to Hayden through his recent spot as an opener for Feist. To those people, I can only offer a warning that things get a whole lot darker the further back you go, so you may want to proceed with caution. To everyone else, though, just know that The Place Where We Lived shows that fifteen years after he first started releasing albums, Hayden is still one of the finest artists and songwriters Canada has to offer (and, hopefully, that its release so soon after In Field & Town represents a new period of prolificness).

Want to win The Place Where We Lived? Thanks to Hardwood, i(heart)music has a copy to give away. To enter to win, just e-mail me your name and mailing address, and I'll pick a winner randomly!