No Problems

Steph Hayes has been all over the map, but she's ready to tell the truth. Mostly.

by M.J. Fine

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Oct 8, 2008

I BEEN EVERYWHERE: Mostly True Stories is Steph Hayes' first solo album. She also plays in Shooting Ropes, Good Problems, Tourists, Slo-Mo and the recently revived Stargazer Lily. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Steph Hayes has been playing guitar for more than 20 years and singing for as long as she can remember. But she's never had this many musical outlets. "I guess right now I'm probably part of five bands," she says.

Count 'em: Shooting Ropes for her punk-rock songs and the Good Problems for her softer side. The recently revived Stargazer Lily, because she and Susan Rosetti were born to harmonize. And when she's not front and center, Hayes lends her rasp to the Tourists and Slo-Mo, because she can't get enough of singing with others.

With so many bands demanding her attention, naturally, she's releasing her first solo album. To celebrate, she and Permanent Records chief Adam Brodsky will take turns playing tunes and telling tales this weekend at the Tin Angel. On an early autumn afternoon at the Last Drop, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter was happy to talk about her unflagging drive to make music. Over coffee, of course.

To make the most of her limited resources, Hayes made Mostly True Stories the cheapest and simplest way she knew how: in front of a live studio audience. In March, she rounded up 60-odd family members, friends and fans for a quick session at Cheek's Studios in Upper Darby. One day to record, another to edit. No time, no money, no problems — good or otherwise.

"As easy as the CD was to make, the most challenging part was probably the editing," she says. She and producer Cheek Andrews cut out a bunch of crowd-pleasing covers, some old favorites and a few botched takes to whittle the show down from two and a half hours to a more CD-friendly 74 minutes. Most of all, they were careful to maintain the show's laid-back vibe. "We had to take out all of my useless babble and try to save some of the slightly more useful babble." She's not kidding. Of the album's 22 tracks, 10 could be classified as babble, with Hayes cracking jokes and explaining her inspiration.

That leaves a dozen stripped-down original songs and one unlisted John Lennon cover. Not only were they all previously unrecorded, a few had barely been tried out. Hayes had intentionally booked the show at the end of a tour, which forced her to finish things she'd hardly started. As with throwing herself into five bands or micromanaging her career, she saw the deadline as a healthy way of focusing her energies.

"It happens to a lot of recovering alcoholics where you become a workaholic instead of an alcoholic, and that's definitely true of me," says Hayes, who quit drinking a few years back. She says that instead of pouring her obsession into the "negative world of drinking" she's become "a bit of a control freak about other stuff." Like music.

Given her compressed schedule and topical bent, there's no mystery to the thread that runs through Mostly True Stories. "There's definitely a love story, an unrequited love story that hopefully is out of my system by now. Now I can move on."

The unrequited love portion of the set includes the Johnny Cash-inspired "Out of Time" and the conflicted "Ballerina," as well as the tender "Dreams," which Hayes wrote with Rosetti's voice in mind. Stargazer Lily technically broke up in 2005, but now that they're working on new material, Hayes says, they'll probably revisit that one. Though there's always a new song or three up her sleeve, she likes to dress them up in new clothes. "I figure, why not try them in different arenas, try to hash them out in different ways?"

Predictably, for a record that was written mostly on tour, the road's a major character, whether it's the sights in "On a Highway" or the impromptu stay in "Silverspur Motel." For her own amusement, Hayes wrote a verse of "Am I Moving Forward or Running Away?" about each town she played, mythologizing the people and places she got to know along the way. But it took a push from a friend in Kansas City for her to mold that song into a manageable eight minutes. She'd never even played it out before the taping, so she didn't know if it was any good. Then the crowd went wild, and it's since taken on a life of its own, with new audiences lobbying her to add a bit about their town. "Potentially, it could be a 20-minute ridiculous novel of a song," she says.

With another month of touring ahead, Hayes is certainly up for a challenge. And if her track record counts for anything, she can handle whatever she sets out to do.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

Steph Hayes plays Sat., Oct. 11, 7 p.m., $10, with Adam Brodsky and Steph Taylor, Tin Angel, 20 S. Second St., 215-928-0978, tinangel.com.

Kiss and Tell
Soundadvice
Anthony Braxton
The Dead C
Bearsuit