Sonoma County based musician Sean Hayes is right on time with his phone call which, having interviewed countless artists over the years, is a rarity for me to witness.
Especially for one as busy as Hayes. On the very day we speak, his 10th studio album, Bright on Bright, has officially released into the world, and in about 24 hours, he’s off to Decatur, Georgia, where he will kick-off a 10-date run that will take him across the East Coast for the rest of September.
When asked how he’s doing, he cheerily and unironically says, “I’m doing alright,” which also just happens to be the opening lyrics to the opening, title track of his new album.
Said album was recorded in just two and half days at a rather top secret studio location “just outside of Petaluma,” Hayes says. While an artist knocking out an album quickly isn’t necessarily anything new, it’s still pretty impressive. Regarding that, Hayes notes, “I think I come from live performance so much more than the studio world. And studio time to me has always been really hard and precious and expensive for me, so I come in overly prepared.”
He continues, “I know people who go in and write songs in the studio, and I’m amazed by that, just to be that comfortable and have time like that in the studio. But I come in, and I’m like, OK, we’re doing every track four times, and we’re gonna find the best one. And maybe tomorrow, if I didn’t like one of them, we’ll try it again.”
Obviously there’s a lot of work that goes into crafting the songs and rehearsing them before said studio time. Hayes effuses about his longtime band, who are also all local and include: Jamie Moore on drums, John Courage on guitar, Jason Carr on bass, Jesse Lemme Adams on keys and vibes, and Robby Elfman on all the wind instruments.
After the tracks were laid down with help from notable studio genius Karl Derfler engineering the affair, Hayes worked with Petaluma neighbor Liam Nelson, himself a notable musician and producer, to mix the tracks and add vocal overdubs.
“Anytime we were mixing, I’d just walk across the street and listen to the newest mix, and it was a really fantastic way to work,” Hayes notes.
If one has not yet heard Hayes’ music, they should get thee to the record store or streaming service of their choice, as his tunes are perfect for driving in the car, hanging at the house and everything in between. As if that weren’t a wide enough space for appropriate times to groove, his music is also a bit hard to describe, as it sometimes sounds like the rhythmic syncopation of late-stage Paul Simon yet also finds more of a groove a la Jack Johnson or Jason Mraz. As if this weren’t really doing it justice enough, Hayes’ lyrics will also keep one invested and intrigued.
For instance, the aforementioned album opener, “Bright on Bright,” oozes a gentle sweetness, a loving support in These Trying Times, yet it doesn’t try to knock one over the head with some kind of poetic declaration. It’s simply more of a positive mantra type of song with the realistic yet hopeful line, “doing alright, knock on wood.”
Even though a song like that is much needed for most these days, Hayes says he doesn’t necessarily write to the moment. “Some of them are songs I wrote many years ago. I’ll have songs that kind of sit around for so long and then finally like a sentence will come in and finish the song. It’ll just kind of be like, because I have some very simple open, almost like these trance mantra songs that are just a few lines. Then they need that one extra line to finally feel like it’s something that goes round and round,” he explains.
Case in point, he mentions the lovely song “Let the Blackbird Fly,” which had been kicking around in his head for some time. “That song I’ve sung to myself probably for 20 years, and finally, the line about the persimmon tree, ‘Baby, you and me/we get to pick that persimmon tree,’ finally came together because a couple of years ago, I bought my wife a persimmon tree because she was running around the neighborhood grabbing persimmons everywhere, so I thought I better get her a tree,” he recalls. “Then for two years I was like, uh-oh, we might have a dud because it wasn’t blossoming, but it started to fruit.”
Then things really got synchronistic, as Hayes explains. “I got interested in the imagery of the blackbird and the persimmon, almost as a record cover, and I started to look it up and realized there’s a whole symbology from Buddhism and from old paintings around blackbirds and persimmon trees, so that was an accidental merger,” he notes. The rest is preserved in musical legacy.
Born in New York and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, Hayes made his way to the Bay Area on New Year’s Eve, 1992. He remembers, “So the next day was 1993, and I was in San Francisco. It was a super bohemian, Kerouac [thing]. I jumped in the back of my friend’s car, who was going back to San Francisco. I’d been out a couple of times and traveled around the country a little bit as a wandering soul out of high school and then leaving college.”
Hayes said he dabbled in film and theater before music became his creative outlet of choice, and he never really looked back, having settled in Petaluma with his wife in 2012 with six albums already under his belt. Add to that now four more albums and two teenage sons.
When asked if there was a push and pull between a working musician choosing to live somewhere like Los Angeles or New York, Hayes doesn’t shy away from that question, saying, “Choosing Petaluma was definitely kind of family over industry as well.” He harbors no regrets, noting he was never much of an industry chaser.
“I’ve always had a love hate or maybe a very coy relationship towards the music industry,” he explains. “I’m very much like, ‘I’m gonna sit over here and watch from a distance, and if you guys wanna talk to me, you know where to find me’ type vibe.”
It seems to be working quite well, as Hayes has recorded duets with Aimee Mann and Frazey Ford and toured with Charley Crockett, Allison Russel, Jolie Holland, The Wood Brothers, Ani DiFranco and The Cold War Kids, among many others. Yet for all that, the guests on Bright on Bright are also hyper-local, with artists like Ben Morrison of Brothers Comatose and Erika Tietjen of the T-Sisters lending themselves to some choruses.
Circling back to the question of living locally and raising a family while being a working musician, Hayes says it’s had its ups and downs. He credits his wife, Harmony, for being rock solid and realizing “Music is up and down, and it’s like a sweepstakes. It’s a weird profession.” Thus, he schedules shorter tours like the current one, but they’re all pretty much back-to-back, which sees him home by the end of the month. Then, another break before his local-ish record release show on Saturday, Nov. 14 at The Independent in San Francisco.
More about Sean Hayes at seanhayesmusic.com.
