Hayden - Skates
Oh man. Skates. It is totally insane how influential this song was to me. You’re going to hate it at first. Hayden’s vocals can be totally annoying when he starts yelling, but that’s part of the genius. The lyrics are bordering on high school poetry, but that is also part of the genius. He just doesn’t give a fuck. It’s like folk emo. I don’t even know. It was in my head for years, I sang it everywhere I went. It had a seriously unfortunate influence on the space rock band I was in at the time, though luckily two other members were equally paradoxically obsessed with Hayden’s first album.
We discovered Hayden from Much Music, before it turned into whatever insane MTV type thing it is now, when it was just this cute little Canadian music video station. We watched a lot of Much Music - especially their video show The Wedge. We also watched a lot of MTV Latino - Ruth! - because we still loved music videos, MTV had abandoned them and YouTube wouldn’t be invented for another ten years. It was a brief blip in time and circumstances (major city cable) that obscure canadian folk artists could get played on the television in America.
Hayden’s still around, he’s still awesome, but he’s not made a record anything like this one, really, since.
I don’t know why, but this morning as I woke up on my flight from SFO to JFK upon landing, this song just popped into my head again. Poor guy. Lost his wife to the river. I always pictured the Sandy river, a relatively wild Oregonian river that ran behind my grandfather’s house when I was growing up. The kind you can’t wade in or take a boat in. That would take your wife without even giving a fuck.
