Girls Guns and Glory: Sweet Nothings, a review and an interview

Girls Guns and Glory play hook-filled country honk-tonk with a dose of 1950’s rock  and roll it into a style that might actually be alt-country. They wear their influences and hearts on their sleeves on Sweet Nothings (Lonesome Day Records) and it wouldn’t be a stretch to add the tracks from their latest disc to your  Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Marty Robbins, Dwight Yoakam, Chris Isaak party mixtape. Frontman Ward Hayden displays some impressive pipes as he croons and cracks his way through eleven tracks with a dose of Elvis swagger. Ward’s songwriting deals with matters of the heart, heartbreak and hard livin’ but avoids slipping into the drunk whiskey cliches that litter country music. If life was fair you’d hear these tracks on country radio (Hey, Dwight did it) but until that happens pick up a copy, make a mix tape, throw a party and wait for your friends to ask “Who is that?!”

And now for the interview with GGG’s singer and songwriterWard Hayden:

HB–Inverted Valentine,Girls Guns and Glory’s third, was one of my favorite discs of 2008. You’ve just released Sweet Nothings which is one of my favorites of 2011! Could you talk about recording the disc and working with Paul Q. Kolderie (Pixies, Radiohead, Warren Zevon and Uncle Tupelo) and Adam Taylor (Sarah Borges and Portugal the Man).

WH-Recording this disc was a long time coming. It was been almost 3 years since Inverted Valentine had first been released. I’d had in my mind for those  3 years that it would be awesome to do an album with Paul Kolderie and Adam Taylor. Adam had mixed Inverted Valentine and I’d long been a fan of Paul’s work. His discography really speaks for itself. I’d been talking with Paul and Adam about making a GGG album with them and when the time came to get back in the studio they were our first call. We actually brought them 28 new songs, but after the first, and as it turned out, only day of recording demo’s, Paul and Adam whittled that batch down to just 2 song: “Root Cellar” and “Maryanne.” They sat us down and actually gave us a homework assignment. They told us to think about exactly what kind of album we want to make, and that they felt that what they were hearing in “Root Cellar” and “Maryanne” was a sound, energy and feel that they felt we could craft a strong album around.  In the past we’d cherry picked what we felt were the best songs from the bigger batch, but with this project we refined our search to building the album around that rockabilly, Buddy Holly-esque sound that Paul and Adam felt worked best with the current line up of the band. With that in mind I actually wound up writing about half the songs that ended up on the album in the two week period between our demo session and when we returned to Camp Street to start recording. It actually felt like w’d been granted permission to break from our mold and it was fun get that high energy flowing in the studio. They had so many cool ideas, especially with the guitars. Chris was like a kid in a candy store. They kept bringing out different guitars to try, including a few oddities like a Fender Bass Six. And we liked using their echo-plex so much that I sold one of my guitars after the sessions to be able to buy one for myself.  Plus, our bass player, Paul Dilley, got to record with the vintage Epiphone Bass Jeff Tweedy had used on the Uncle Tupelo “No Depression” album, that was pretty awesome and it sounded bad ass. That thing can growl.

Video courtesy of  dschram.

HB-I love the recitation you insert into “Last Night I Dreamed”!

WH-Thank you. I’d forever wanted to put a recitation like that into a song. And and forever liked the Eddy Arnold song “Throwing Rice at the Girl I Love.” I wrote that song while I was sleeping one night on the couch in my living room. The dream was exactly as it’s told in the song and was one of those very real feeling experiences. So when I woke up I picked up my guitar and the song was already there, I just had to recall the situations from the dream of seeing someone I cared for walk downt he aisle with another man and then waking up and realizing that had actually happened and that she was married to someone else now. 

The dream immediately reminded me of that Eddy Arnold song. The recitation just felt like the right thing to put into the song, just a way to lay the experience all out and compare and contract the situation using the idea of both literal and figurative dreams and how they can intersect in real life.

Video courtesy of  dschram.

HB-The liner notes state that “This was the last project recorded at Boston’s Camp Street Studios in Cambridge, MA”.  I apologize for my ignorance: What happened to it and why is its closing significant? 

WH-The building the studio was in had been renovated within the last year or so, so once that happened the rent at the studio greatly increased. To the best of my understanding it no longer made sense to keep the studio in that space with the overhead being so high. Really a shame, that was one of the best studios we had here in Boston. 

HB– One of my favorite tracks is “1000 Times”. How did you and Sarah Borges get together to record the duet?

WH-I’d written that song a couple years back and had never done anything with it. It used to be in a different key as well and have a very different feel to it. 

But, what’s funny, is that I had always imagined someone like Sarah Borges singing on it. So, once we were a few days into the project I mentioned to Paul and Adam that I’d love to try this song I had that was written as a duet. I mentioned that to them and the idea of Sarah singing on it and instantly they were like, “let’s see if she can do it tomorrow!”

HB-One critic (okay that was me raving about “Inverted Valentine”) described your sound as “the vocals of Dwight Yoakam, Raul Malo and Chris Isaak with a touch of twang, Roy Orbison and Marty Robbins” but what do I know Ward. Could you name a few influences as a singer and a songwriter?

WH-My biggest influences as a singer would be people that I never get any comparisons too, so I’m not sure what that says, haha. But Otis Redding was huge for me, I used to sing all his songs up in my bedroom. I loved to way his voice could carry so much power and emotion. I couldn’t hit some of his ending phrases as strong as he could, so I would break my voice into falsetto to be able to get the notes better. When I started writing my own songs, those cracks and breaks worked their way naturally into the vocal delivery. It’s really what my voice wants to do, I just let it take the path of least resistance. 

Johnny Cash also had a big impact on me as a singer and songwriter. I really appreciated how different he sounded from everything else I’d ever heard. I was 20 yrs old when I deeply immersed myself in his song catalog. I remember sitting in my car in a bus station parking lot and missing my bus because I couldn’t drag myself away from the song “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town.” I was so caught up in the story of the song and the way he was telling it. He made the song such a visual experience, he tells his songs with such conviction that you can’t help, but believe every word he has to say.

My biggest songwriting influence is Hank Williams, and also a lot of punk rock that I listened to as a teenager, especially The Ramones. The Ramones energy, melodies and primal chord progressions really resonated with me and when I started to write my own songs I found that not only did I gravitate towards those progressions as a listener, but also as a songwriter. There’s a reason the 1, 4, 5 progression has been used so often in popular songs, it’s perfect. So, once I learned some chords on the guitar I started trying to channel Hank when I’d sit in my room and start strumming. The way he could take a situation and lyrically strip it to the bone and be so openly honest with feelings that common sense or pride would typically make you keep inside. That was a barrier I realized I’d have to break through if I wanted to feel good about creating a song. I wound up accepting the  truth of my flaws and the value of truth when I wrote my first song, “Beautiful Girls,” but it took about 3-4 months before I worked up the courage to play the song for anyone. But, once I did it was all over, I’ve rarely questioned since whether to omit something because it was too soul baring. There’s beauty in the ugliness and the heartache and if you’re not singing about it, then you’re only covering half the story. 

HB-Do you have any favorite songs GGG covers in concert?

WH-One of my favorite songs lately has been Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons.” We’ve only started covering it live. It started as a song we’d all sing along with in the van, but recently at a recording session in New Hampshire at about 2 in the morning we decided to put Chris on Banjo, Mike on Guitar and Paul on his Upright Bass and cut it live in the room with Mike and I singing the lyrics. Now it’s something we’ll bring out on special occasions, something where the crowd is really listening and could get something from the depth of hope and despair in those lyrics and the beauty of that melody. 

HB-“This Old House” and “Sweet Nothings” are a little more electric and rock a little harder than the other tracks. 

WH-Both of those tracks are songs that had far less electric origins, but as we were tracking them with Paul and Adam they encouraged us to change the arrangements and amp up the energy in both tracks. “Sweet Nothings” was actually born more of a swamp rocker, something with a CCR type of sound. But, after we played around with the feel of the song it eventually found a home with that early rock ‘n’ roll, almost rockabilly sound. 

We recorded that song the same day Sarah Borges was in the studio with us, and I knew we’d found a good feel for it when she stuck around to hear it all come together. She had a lot of positive feedback on that tune for us, and when I sent her the album so she could hear “1,000 Times” she sent me a message back saying she’s had “Sweet Nothings” stuck in her head since the day we recorded it in the studio. 

HB-I know GG&G tours quite a bit. Could you share a “weirdest gig” story?

WH-We’ve had a lot of weird gigs over the past few years, but if I had to choose a weirdest gig it would probably be a show we played at the EquiBlues Festival in France. Earlier in the day I’d been punched in the eye by a now former band member, who was experiencing things that were not of this world and was believing that people were trying to kill him. After leaving the hospital with a concussion and a big black eye, I found out that he’d been taken a few hundred miles away to another hospital for psychiatric care. So, as we were sitting at a hotel table in the middle of France, more or less in disbelief of everything that had happened, the fellow next to us leans over and in English says “I could play bass for you.” Turned our he was a Fiddle player from Houston, TX named Scott Johnson, and was on tour in Europe with another band who happened to have the next 2 days off. We borrowed a bass, taught him about 18 GGG songs and an hour later we took the stage in front of 2,000 enthusiastic and curious French festival fans. The show was a blast and the experience really brought the band closer together. Helped us learn we could get through almost anything and still make a good show happen. 

My favorite part of the whole ordeal was a few months later I saw a blog online from France that included a picture of me and the caption read, “Ward Hayden & his beautiful black eye.” All I could do was laugh and think, “man, that was wild.”

HB– Thanks Ward. Best of luck to you and the band! See you in NC!

WH-Hal, much thanks for getting in touch and for the interest in GGG. I truly appreciate it. Hope to see you down in NC again soon!!

Girls Guns and Glory are:

Ward Hayden, vocal and acoustic guitar

Chris Hersch, electric guitar

Michael Calabrese, drums and vocals

Paul Zaz Dilley, upright and electric bass