The black hole’s song is the lowest sound in the known
universe. It booms like a giant cannonball and travels in immense
waves, laying waste any newborn stars in its vicinity. It’s a sonic
sweeping of stellar proportions.
Sean Hayes was reading the New York Times a few years ago
when he came across the headline: “Music of the Heavens Turns Out to
Sound a Lot like a B Flat.” It revealed that the destructive force of a
black hole—via sound waves—can span billions of miles. “The
article said this was a good thing because the black hole’s song keeps
the galaxy cleaned up, not too crowded,” says the San Francisco
singer/songwriter. “In my life at the time I was going through this
thing where someone close to me was a little baby star and another
friend of mine was definitely the big black hole. I was trying to
figure out what to do about this situation, because I was stuck right
smack in the middle of it. One of easiest things for me to do was write
a song.”
Around that song—”Big Black Hole and the Little Baby
Star”—Hayes recorded an album of the same name. That album was
one of 2006’s most overlooked. Which is a word that describes Hayes’
quietly brilliant career: He was there when the freak-folk phenomenon
erupted from the Bay Area in ’03 and ’04, and though his music could
easily be grouped with Devendra Banhart’s or Jolie Holland’s (a
longtime friend and collaborator), he was never packaged as part of
that scene.
“I’m a little bit older than those people,” he says, “and I’ve never
been too aggressive about the whole record industry and stuff like
that. I’ve always just played my music and figured hey, we’ll see what
happens.”
Hayes’ music—mostly acoustic, often accompanied by accordion
or tuba or oboe or marimba—is loose, dusty, and alive. The worn,
soulful twang of Hayes’ voice is the byproduct of his North Carolina
upbringing; the eclectic, kitchen-sink instrumentation is the fruit of
numerous friendships with a huge variety of Bay Area musicians. “I’m
not really good with accessories,” he says. “That’s why acoustic guitar
has always been good.”
Big Black Hole and the Little Baby Star is front porch music,
if your front porch were to overlook a paisley-printed carnival parade.
His most recent record, this year’s Flowering Spade, is stripped
down, Hayes’ weathered voice a confidential rasp, the songwriting
skeletal and haunting. Where Big Black Hole carried a jaunty
sense of humor—tubas are funny, first of all, as is Hayes’ random
injection of swear words in otherwise low-key songs—Flowering
Spade is confessional. Turns out its inspiration—the
hand-drawn image on the album’s cover—also came from something
Hayes read.
“That image, that song came from an article in Arthur about
sigils,” Hayes says. “People used to consider them a magical device.”
So Hayes made his own sigil and endowed it with the intention of
movement and creativity.
“That cover is what I ended up drawing,” he says. “It’s a spade, and
it occurred to me that it’s a flowering spade, and it seemed like an
archetypal image that had been around forever.”
People have been drawings spades forever. Guys have been strumming
acoustic guitars and singing songs almost as long. Hayes imbues these
archetypes with intention, and you could say the result is magical.