Hayden the shade

>> Suburban slacker Hayden takes a comic turn

by CHRIS YURKIW

Toronto's Hayden Desser can come off like the quintessence of the sensitive indie-rock guy. He gets his hair shaved at the local barber shop, calls in sick at his McJob so he can spend the day with his girlfriend, knows that he spends too much time in his apartment--and writes alarmingly moving guitar ballads about all of it. He likes Sebadoh.

But Hayden isn't all extended adolescent angst and droopy eyes--he's also a pretty funny bastard. Take "Bad As They Seem," the lead song from his gold-selling indie debut of 1995, Everything I Long For. Those titles alone set you up for Hayden's "serious" suburban soul-searching, but then he drops a line like, "My parents house I'll stay for free/Until I'm at least 43." Now that's funny. Or is it?

"I think everyone lives with their parents at one time," says Hayden, confirming his arid extra-dryness in conversation. "But I still say that I wouldn't have been able to focus so much on music if I had been living in an apartment when I was 21 and working 9-5 to pay my rent. It's something that gets talked about way too much with me in particular, but it did turn out to be an important thing in my life as to how I've ended up."

Two years ago Hayden signed a deal with the Geffen subsidiary OutPost Recordings, which got him an almost inordinate amount of press attention from American media just aching for a next-big-thing. More recently, he's had to deal with the street-cred fallout after his jump to Universal from indie Sonic Unyon as his Canadian distributor. But hopefully his second and wonderful album The Closer I Get won't get lost in the shuffle, for it's not only chock-full of brill melodies but jammed with an array of instruments and sounds heretofore not heard on a stark, Hayden recording. Piano, Mellotron, banjo, drum loops--all of this came out of him making the move from his literal bedroom recordings to state-of-the-art studios and multi-acclaimed producers in Scott Litt (R.E.M.), Steve Fisk (Screaming Trees), Daryl Smith (Change Of Heart) and John Hanlon (Neil Young). Why producers now, for the guy who describes himself as "control freaky"? Hayden takes it all in "Stride," as goes his song.

"I had an opportunity this time that I might not have again, which is having a little bit of money. It could very well happen that I'd release a record and it wouldn't sell, and then I wouldn't have any more record budgets. So then I might go back to recording at home or whatever. I just have a habit of always thinking about the worst-case scenario."

Hayden and band with Howie Beck at Cabaret next Thursday, May 21, 8:30 pm, $8