Hayden’s ‘Are We Good’ was worth the wait

Even when you enjoy a career as low key as Paul Hayden Desser, eight years between albums is quite the delay.

For the artist who plies his trade by his middle name — Hayden — and will support his just-released opus “Are We Good” with a performance at Massey Hall Saturday, the reasons for the interruption are numerous.

“It’s a bit of a long-winded answer,” Desser, 52, admitted over the phone late last week. “First, I worked on an album for a year with a novelist friend who was writing a book at the same time and we were going to do a project together.”

The project, with Hong Kong-born Canadian novelist Colin McAdam, was initially going well.

“I don’t like to write about nothing, so that project at that time was amazing for me because he’s a brilliant writer. I was just going off of his beautiful poetry. That was great for a year, but he scrapped the book, unfortunately.”

The 15 songs Desser wrote for the McAdam collaboration will probably find a home someday, but Desser decided to start from scratch on his first Hayden-only effort since 2015’s “Hey Love.”

But as he progressed deeper into the album, he had doubts.

“I just went through some periods where I just didn’t know if I had anything that was great or exciting, but I just kept chipping away and accumulating, “ he explained.

And because the thought of shilling the completed music became somewhat repugnant to Desser, he further bided his time.

“I had seen my contemporaries promoting their records in the new age, and I was just so turned off about what it would be like when my record came out and I would be selling it on Instagram,” he said.

Part of the issue is that when Desser is ensconced in his home studio he doesn’t feel much like talking to anyone outside his immediate family and peers.

“When I get into a creative zone, I go through periods when I don’t want to even answer the phone,” he said.

And then, when the pandemic arrived and live music performances were suspended, “I went back to the drawing board during that period because there was no point in rushing to not tour, you know?”

Despite all the delays, here’s the good news: “Are We Good” was worth the wait.

The style doesn’t stray too far from the low-fi, grassroots charm that Hayden first established with 1996’s “Everything I Long For,” although it’s far removed from the initial impressions of slacker pop that Desser conveyed.

Packed with several gems of emotional nuance and sly wit and humour, songs like “East Coast,” the intimate “Nothing Wrong” and the ingenious “Miss Fort Erie” offer profound depth and vulnerability, especially if you’re willing to look between the lines as Desser stirs the topics of happiness with struggle, stress with relief, humour and isolation, expressed through visible bonds of unconditional love and devotion to his wife and family.

For example, “Miss Fort Erie” is a great portrait of the fallacy that life on the road is nothing but one big party, in which Desser jokes with his partner that he was busy entertaining Miss Fort Erie in his motel room to mask the reality that he had just performed to 20 people in Buffalo and was relaxing post-show in front of the TV set.

“That song, I get a chuckle out of it too and there’s a definite reality to that because my wife and I — we struggle a lot in our home life because our daughter has developmental disabilities and we live a certain kind of parenting life here, so when I do find myself out on the road there is a fine balance of me not feeling really guilty for leaving my wife with what can be a hard situation here.

“So I have a tendency to come back and be like, ‘Yes, the rooms are great. I ate a roast beef sandwich off my chest one night’ … painting a grim picture on purpose. That was the impetus of that song.”

Then there’s “We Danced,” a waltzy tribute to the late Leonard Cohen.

“Leonard Cohen is a huge influence on me,” Desser said. “He’s at the top of the heap for me. The song is about a dream I had where Leonard sort of announced he was dying. There’s a line in it that talks about his sense of timing and I think he died a week before Trump became president.

“I just felt that there was a turning point there. Something happened when he died, and there’s a theme on darkness and about the state of the world on this record as well. It’s about relationships, but there’s an impending doom about society and people in general.”

It’s obvious through the music that Desser marches to his own drummer. What has allowed his career to prosper largely unobstructed by outside interference was a huge U.S. record deal he signed in the late ’90s rumoured to be north of six figures.

“After I’d done things in a pretty grassroots way in Toronto and in Canada, there were a few American labels that became interested: one of which was Neil Young and his manager’s label (Vapor Records),” Desser said.

“In the end, I didn’t sign with them; I signed with a label called Outpost, which was three industry guys, one of whom was Scott Litt, R.E.M.’s album producer … it was a lucrative deal and it was very high on creative control for myself because of the position I was in. It was one of the last real great record deals. I’m very thankful for that. I was at the right place at the right time, for sure.”

In fact, Desser’s career has been a DIY case study, learning the ropes musically and professionally as he progressed.

“Luckily, since the very first song I’ve ever recorded, I’ve been calling the shots — for better, for worse — maybe sometimes a little push from a record company might have been helpful,” he chuckled.

“I started by myself in my parents’ basement recording and teaching myself how to record onto a cassette, four-track and most of that stuff from me learning the craft is what made up my first record. I was completely hands on … driving by myself to all my shows … designing the T-shirts and all of my artwork, with some friends along the way.

“Even when I signed this big deal in the States, I was sort of obsessed with keeping the control that I had from the start, much to the dismay of my record label, probably.

“It helped me always make records that I’m still proud of to this day and not make decisions that I was pushed into. Absolutely, that’s the bonus of the situation.”

Desser — who will be supported at Massey Hall by long-time band members Jay McCarrol and JJ Ipsen on guitar, and Dwayne Gretzky’s Adam Hindle on drums — also worked with the National’s Matt Berninger as co-writer on three songs, including the title track of “Are We Good”: an unusual move for the usually solitary writer.

“He’s the only other person I’d do that with because I am very hands on with the music and he’s the perfect guy for me to do this because I’m such a huge fan of his writing,” Desser said.

Aside from a six-day tour to promote “Are We Good” and a fall date at Massey Hall for Dream Serenade — the fundraising concert Desser and his wife hold annually for Toronto’s Beverley School, which embraces children with exceptionalities — Desser said he doesn’t like planning too far ahead.

“Unfortunately, I’m not a visionary person. I rarely look back unless I’m doing some kind of reissue thing and I have an incredible ability to not think about the future too much,” he said.

“I try to enjoy the present … which I rarely do, as well. So I’m in a weird position here: I don’t like the past, the future or the present,” he laughed.

Correction — May 26, 2023: This story has been edited from an earlier version that said the song “East Coast” features Leslie Feist. In fact, she is featured on “On a Beach.”

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