Pickle Barrel
“OH, CAN I tell a Thornhill Rush story,
the band Rush?” asks Hayden
excitedly, the memory suddenly
returning after so much Thornhill
talk for the Post cover.
Who wouldn’t want to hear a story about the legendary prog-rock trio from a singer-songwriter 17 years their junior who creates music a fraction as loud?
“Rush used to rehearse on a street called Doncaster that has a lot of utensil stores and framing stores and kitchen supply stores,” Hayden begins, setting the scene. “Anyway, they were in a warehouse. It wasn’t in their crazy ’70s period, but I think sometime in the ’80s, and a friend of mine and I heard them rehearsing inside this concrete building, and we stood up on apple boxes and looked in the window and we saw [front man] Geddy Lee at a keyboard doing a crazy solo. My head was in the window, and I saw him look up at me and go like this [makes annoyed face], and then a security guard came running out of the building and we took off. And that’s it.”
He laughs. Though anticlimactic, clearly that is one of his cooler memories of growing up in Thornhill, an environment to which he assigns words like “safe,” “nice” and “nondescript.” His parents still live there, in the very same house in which he wrote his 1995 breakthrough album, Everything I Long For.
He now lives downtown, about as south as you can get in Toronto, where he wrote and recorded his new acoustic-based album, the terrifically downtrodden and observational In Field & Town, featuring such songs as “Lonely Security Guard,” inspired by a burly man with the dexterity to make an origami swan, and the marvellously melancholy “More Than Alive,” “Damn This Feeling” and “The Hardest Part,” not inspired by a harrowing breakup, the singer assures.
He will perform a sold-out solo show at the Music Hall on Feb. 19.
Hayden, born Paul Hayden Desser 37 years ago, to parents Sherwin and Liz, had just a “three-minute walk” to Henderson Avenue Public School, which burned to the ground in 1998 and was rebuilt. “I’ve lost the opportunity to walk through my old school now,” he says.
His siblings, older brother Lee and older sister Amanda, both played piano, and Hayden followed suit. “I took lessons, the same way they did, but I only lasted for a couple of weeks. The teacher and I didn’t get along, and I was only seven.” He laughs. “We had artistic differences.”
There were fewer “artistic differences,” as Hayden moved on to Thornlea Secondary School. He managed to find some like-minded playmates — including fellow musicians Joshua Malinksy, Noah Mintz (now a mastering engineer, who mixed In Field & Town) and Mitch Roth.
They often trekked downtown to go see bands. “Noah and I figured out a way to beat the system,” he says, without revealing their underage scam. “I don’t want to talk about illegal activity,” he says and laughs.
At about 16 or 17, Hayden and “the fellas I was just talking about” formed a band called Entangled, later called Roof Garden, which was “heavily influenced” by R.E.M. Hayden played guitar and helped write songs. Too young to play bars, they entered a High School Battle of the Bands at the Masonic Temple. “It gave us a hope of playing to an audience and something to focus our energy on and finish writing songs,” Hayden explains. The band’s drummer was Gavin Brown, now a Juno Award–winning producer (Billy Talent, Three Days Grace).
While in Roof Garden, Hayden, who still went by Paul Desser, started hosting his own Saturday evening radio show, The Independent Study, on York University’s CHRY, spinning tracks by such acts as Mudhoney, Nirvana and Galaxy 500. “I just loved giving in-depth perspectives on artists,” says Hayden, who decided to enrol in radio and television arts at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. “But it turns out that radio in the real world isn’t like college radio, and, sadly, after the first year, I knew I wasn’t into the course. But I stuck it out.”
Around that time, he started writing his own songs. “I would get other people to sing them because I’d never sung along to myself or heard myself sing,” he explains. “I played shows at the Future Bakery [on Queen West] and I would get Noah and my friend Lorraine Ursomarzo and different people to sing the songs I was playing, and then it got really hard to organize them all showing up, and then I had to sing. Anyway, it was a slow process of me actually deciding I could be the singer of my own songs.
“I still had my electric guitar from being in the band, and Noah, who was in a band called hHead, borrowed it to do a tour of Canada, and it got stolen in Gastown, and when he came back, he gave me a really cheap acoustic guitar to replace it with. It was the first time since I was 13 that I had an acoustic guitar, and I started playing it.”
“I was inspired by some of the music that was going on at the time — the Lou Barlows and the Rick Whites of the world — and I borrowed Noah’s four-track and started playing ideas into it, and I just started loving the process of hearing my voice and then singing to my own voice and hearing the harmonies, and I wrote songs around the recording of them, and that’s what ended up being most of my first record.
“A lot of the songs were about things that had happened to me in Thornhill — but I didn’t name any street signs or anything,” he quips.
That first record, Everything I Long For (1995), including the song “In September,” originally on a cassette by the same name, was released on Hayden’s own Hardwood Records, which he maintains to this day.
The album caught the attention of major record labels in the United States, as much for the music as for the melancholic subject matter. This was during the so-called “grunge” era, where sad was cool, and misery made millions.
Somewhat of a bidding war ensued (the fact that there was a bidding war at all may have received more press than Hayden’s actual music) and the comparisons, too, got out of control. “Leonard Cohen” and “Bob Dylan” were names one might have heard if one were a fly on the varnished oak wall of a major record studio boardroom.
He eventually signed a major recording contract with Outpost/Geffen, and, as record companies shifted their efforts away from rock, toward shinier pop fare, Hayden was reportedly given a huge buyout sum after 1998’s The Closer I Get, which allowed him the freedom to work independently and at his own pace, releasing a studio album every three years.
“I’m not overly prolific. I take it seriously, but I don’t really force myself to write,” Hayden says.
“Honestly, I’m not a constant diary keeper, and I’m not interested in capturing every thought and turning everything into something. I don’t care if I release an album a year, and I don’t really have a focus on keeping my name fresh in people’s ears. To me, in the 2000s, if I’ve released four albums in that time, I think that’s okay, as long as I’m proud of them.”
In Field & Town was recorded at his home studio in Parkdale. “We could say that my studio is in Thornhill. Would it be bad if we lied?” he says and chuckles.
Maybe two decades from now
some musician will be telling a story
about standing on an apple box and
peering through Hayden’s window
as he was recording? “I don’t think
so. I haven’t caught them,” he says,
laughing. 
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