Uh Oh, It’s Magic

The black hole’s song is the lowest sound in the known universe. It
booms like a cannon and travels in
immense waves, vibrating
newborn stars to death. 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.” The article said 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 the easiest things for me to do

was write a song.”

So Hayes wrote “Big Black Hole and the Little Baby Star” and
recorded an album with the same name around it. That album was one of
2006’s most overlooked. Which is a word that describes Hayes’s quietly
brilliant career: He was there when the freak-folk phenomenon erupted
in 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. There’s a big reality to getting out there and getting a
machine behind you. All those people had record deals and publicists.
You’re gonna find out about them.”

Hayes is his own machine—he writes, records, and releases his
material on his own. He sells his CDs online and at shows and he books
his own tours. It sounds haphazard, but there’s strategy behind his DIY
approach.

“I sell a record for 10 bucks at a show and I make that money back,”
he says. “Somebody on a record label sells a record for 10 bucks and
they might make a dollar off it. So I have to sell a lot fewer records.
My measure of success is totally different.”

Hayes’s music—mostly acoustic, often accompanied by accordion
or tuba or oboe or marimba—is loose, dusty, alive. The worn,
soulful twang of Hayes’s voice is the byproduct of his North Carolina
upbringing; the eclectic, kitchen-sink instrumentation is the fruit of
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 would be
front-porch music—if your front porch overlooked a
paisley-printed carnival parade. Hayes’s most recent record, this
year’s Flowering Spade, is stripped down, Hayes’s weathered
voice a confidential rasp, the songwriting skeletal and haunting. Where
Big Black Hole has a jaunty sense of humor—tubas are
funny, first of all, as is Hayes’s random swearing 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.
You have an intention, and you would endow a symbol with that intention
that you wanna do in your life. All kinds of things are sigils; they’re
all around us all the time, these
magical devices, like the Nike
Swoosh. They’re really nothing—the Nike Swoosh is just this
thing, but because of all the connotation, it’s very powerful.”

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 drawing spades forever. Guys have been strumming
acoustic guitars and singing songs almost as long. Hayes imbues these
archetypes with intention and the result, you could say, is magical.