Hayden
Hey Love

On Hey Love, Hayden's eighth full-length record, the Toronto musician and songwriter writes the most intimate passage yet in his decades-deep story. The follow-up to 2013's Us Alone, his sonically warm and emotive debut record on Arts & Crafts, is a heartrending love letter of hope and disarray, the album's thirteen songs among Hayden Desser's most affective, tactile, rousing yet restrained work to date. The title track, a languid anthem exposed by chiming pedal steel, introduces this dialogue - about loves both comfortable and disconnected, exhilarating and naive - with Hayden's woozy pre-dawn falsetto propped up by a watchful chorus. Hayden sings plaintively: "It's been so rough, we have been through more than enough / But without this love, there would be no reason for either of us." On Hey Love's first single "Nowhere We Cannot Go", triumphant piano mingles with tattered synthesizer and electric guitar, conjuring resilience from the throes of personal reckoning. Both familiar and new, "Nowhere That We Cannot Go" places us on the rickety frontier of Hayden's home studio, where the certainty of pain and reward both figure prominently on the horizon. No clearer is this heard than on "Troubled Times", with its brilliant juxtaposition of the apocalypse-in-progress ("If it's not one thing it is another / These are sure troubled times") against a lilting backbeat and a soulful sun-soaked shuffle.