Artist: Darren Hayman
Title: I Was Thinking About You
Format: Digital single
Cat#: Fika079SG3
Release date: 1st May 2020
Bandcamp | Spotify
Darren Hayman returns with the new album Home Time, due out on 22nd May via Fika Recordings. An autobiographical album about break ups, the record is tender, honest and frequently funny. Darren set an 8 track, acoustic rule for the record. Everything sounds warm, close and intimate. Darren’s own love-worn, London voice is joined on every song by the sweet antipodean tones of Hannah Winter and Laura K, recording artists and songwriters themselves with Common or Garden and Fortitude Valley.
My new album ‘Hometime’ was titled before all of this hullabaloo started. My next album is provisionally title ‘The New Rules’ which also might turn out to be accidentally prophetic.
The album and this song, ‘I Was Thinking About You’ are actually about divorce and breakup but they are also about retreat and the inner space we occupy when troubled.
I use that space a lot. I have a friend Paul who calls it ‘spending time in the back office.’Also coincidentally to the lockdown and ideas of ‘home’, all three videos for this album were made inside my flat. The first two were made before we went into isolation but the video for ‘I Was Thinking About You’ was made in the first few weeks of the Covid 19 crisis in Britain.
I’ve always worked well with constraints and limitations and luckily that gives me a super power in these strange times. The six members of my band recorded their footage in their homes and sent them to me. I wanted to make it look a bit better then the divided ‘zoom’ style videos we’re getting used to now.
The band look like they’re having a lot more fun then they do when they are actually with me.
I hope you like it.
Darren
When Darren Hayman made his debut in 1997 with the acclaimed indie band Hefner his lyrical remit was the broken hearted. His early songs told the story of the lonesome and lost, and broken dreams of love on the back streets of London. After Hefner, Hayman’s palette grew to include a unique take on place and memory. In the early 2000s he wrote a trilogy of albums around the history of Essex. In 2012 he made an instrumental album describing the tranquillity of Lidos. In 2016 Darren was awarded ‘Hardest Working Musician’ by the Association of Independent Music for his epic project on Thankful Villages, the 55 villages that survived the Great War with no casualties. His most recent record, 12 Astronauts, tells the personal story of the only men to have walked on the Moon.
Darren is continually obsessed with the idea of what songs can be, and the stories they can tell. As he explains, “With projects like Thankful Villages, I became interested in what a record could be, using field recordings, interviews and songs to make sound collages. I wanted to return to the stricter art of song writing and try and make the twelve best compositions I could. I wanted to make useful songs, words that could be comfort, not just thoughts that would depress.”
The songs for Home Time were written over a three-year period but recorded quickly, and with love, in Darren’s home. Home Time is a fragile, subtle slice of prettiness. Wrap it around you.
Three digital singles will be released; ‘I Tried and I Tried and I Failed’, a song about the endless, circular nature of being human, ‘I Was Thinking About You’, a song about the uncontrollable nature of memory and how it continues to haunt us even when we consider the long buried, and ‘The Joint Account’, about how when trying to negotiate matters of the heart and mind, it is sometimes the physical objects that anchor us down in the mire.
A baby sister album I Can Travel Through Time with ten one-minute songs squeezed on a seven inch is coming out alongside it on the Formosa Punk label.
