Hadden Sayers woke up the sleeping giant, that being the crowd, at the Ottawa Blues Festival (July 6, 2002) one recent Saturday with a sizzling display of guitar, bass and drums. A classic display of three men sharing their pain and sorrow with the world, in a raucous blues tradition. Traveling together and playing their hearts out on this tour that brought them from Houston Texas to the Canadian capital city on a sweltering afternoon.
After the show Hadden arrives at the Cd tent with a clever suitcase holding his 4 recent works, and is not upset when he learns that the $42 he was hoping to get for each one was halved, "no problem." And that will be $21 Canadian, "no problem."
I picked up Supersonic because I recognized a couple of songs that he had just sung. This album is great because every song is about breaking up and how he got dumped. "Now you can colour me gone, yay hey," he growls in No tears left to cry.
Being from a recently discarded relationship myself it was strange that he could so poignantly depict the male brain warp that occurs when the dumping beast rears its ugly head and leaves you on the sidewalk one more time. You brush yourself off in an ironic interlude called Blasted with the idea that "there is a perfect explanation for everything. I was blasted out of my mind, heya heya ya." Irony keeps a lot of us guys going after all.
"Little Bit of Love" is one of those songs where the words are superfluous to the song and the beat goes on and the rhythm section kicks it up a beat, in this, one of the few cover songs on the CD.
Hadden appeared in Canada with Matt Johnson on drums and Terry Dry on bass. Dry showed up wearing a Hangman's Hood at the Blues fest, a homage I suspect to their home state of Texas and a weekly ritual they perform to bad and sometimes under privileged individuals. Did we get it, ay.
Love won't let me go. I am sorry but this song makes me cry every time I hear it. She had been married three times before but she was a marrying kind of girl and she had the simple things down so well that I thought I was looked after for life. Because I always felt that if the simple things like sex and love and liking the same music, and sex, and life just felt so good with her that I can't believe that I let her go, I screamed too late…
Oh ya, this is a sad and very good song. He says the words like, "I need you so," and women don't want to hear this do they.
Pub crawl guitars stir the air when "Better all the time" talks about new love and gives us a reprieve from the tears and shit it really hurts man. We fucked every day for a year it was great man. Then she rolled over one day and said it was over. Just walk on by. But I am getting better all the time.
"Emotional" reminded me of the time we fucked all afternoon in every nook and cranny of the kitchen. "It's the little things that linger, there ain't a whole lot a man can do," he wails, "while I stand out in the rain." This is probably one of the greatest songs ever written. And I love the hangman's bubbly and precise bass rap lines. It would be good if they at some point in their tour let this song go on for about 30 minutes. They just make such beautiful noise through the whole thing that it makes me happy at the end even though the words make me want to cry again.
These three local boys have been playing together for a while it seems. The Blues festival soared that Saturday afternoon in Ottawa with the boys seeping energy form every pore.
"Solitude" is of course my current state of affairs and here he tells me that learning comes after, in the form of solitude and self reflection, this song ends with soaring guitar riffs and is a very cool ballad. Followed by the hard rocking One More for the Road; a crying in the beer song. This song highlights the drums of Greg Morrow.
"Never Never" he once again has the bitterness under control. This is sometimes the last stage sometimes the first stage but it is the stage you should get over quickly as it really slows down the healing process. Everyone is special and there is a special person for each one of us.
Hadden sure plays happy music, but the words are of a self destructive soul who lays his heart on the table for his fans, and by singing rids the demons as writing does for some.
www.haddensayers.com
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