“I say at the start of each of my shows: “My French isn’t so bad, but it’s not great. And it works !” » laughs Shaina Hayes, whose soft and clear voice transports us to the immense beauty of the Gaspé Peninsula, where she recorded the majority of the songs on her second album, Kindergarten Heart, expected on February 23. Her country, folk and indie rock songs have already been noticed outside our borders, “but I first want to find my audience here,” she says. Gaspésie is present in my music; I lived there until I was 16. When I write songs, the region is always there. My music is 100% Quebecois.”
At the age of 16, Shaina Hayes took the big leap: leaving her village of Shigawake, a small Anglo hamlet rooted on the shore of Chaleur Bay, between Carleton-sur-Mer and Percé, to study music at college Vanier, in Montreal, far from his parents’ dairy farm. “They weren’t sad that I was turning my back on the farm, on the contrary: my parents wanted me to do music,” she says. But the intellectual jazz that we were taught at CEGEP was too new for me, too intense. So I did a 180 degree towards studying agriculture. It was a path that I could well imagine myself taking, since I knew that world. »
Shaina didn’t perform on stage for almost ten years, devoting herself fully to her studies in environmental and agricultural sciences at McGill University. She managed a restaurateur’s vegetable garden before founding her own small five-acre market garden farm (Shaina Hayes Farm) located in Mont-Saint-Grégoire, east of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu; she grew organic vegetables there alone to fill 75 baskets per week. Last year was complicated “by rain, plant diseases and insects”, but she will always remember the particularly torrid 2022 season which inspired the song vague de Chaleur, “as in “heatwave”. We tried to give the impression of being in the field during this intense heat, with an effect in the voice similar to the mirages that we think we see when it is very hot.
“It’s a bit thanks to agriculture that I came back to music,” assures Shaina. Growing vegetables and writing songs are two creative gestures: I am not a landscaper, but designing the plans of a farm, drawing the rows, imagining a crop system, that’s creative. Farming gave me confidence in my abilities to create something, even though that wasn’t the goal when I started my farm. It was during the winter, in my free time, that I rediscovered the taste for writing songs. I understood that I loved creation. »
“For me, there is a link between growing vegetables and writing songs,” says the singer-songwriter and market gardener. I often bring up the idea of a transaction; with vegetables, it is obvious: I grow them, people buy them from me. With music, it happens on another level, but it’s a bit the same gesture: me trying to offer something to others. It is, in my opinion, the same nourishing approach, which gives me the same satisfaction. »
Closer to Hayes’ country and folk roots, the first album was designed with the same accomplices as the new one: his friend Francis Ledoux (collaborator of Helena Deland and Jesse Mac Cormack, among others) on drums, David Marchand (of rock group zouz) on guitars. “We then invite other musicians”, the jazz singer Thanya Iyers, the pianist Jérôme Beaulieu (from the nu-jazz trio MISC), “but the base is the three of us: I write the songs, David plays everything what I want, Frank on drums, the three of us make the album. We work really well together.”
The musical direction of the songs was done organically, without thinking too much about it, assures the musician, who tells us that she accompanied her friend David Marchand’s noise rock bibitte Zouz on stage, proof that Shaina does not fear musical adventure , outside the established ranks of his country-folk field. This is the first revelation that his new album makes to us, his calm and delicately quavering voice equally at ease in a country ballad matched with pedal steel (Sidewalk) than in pop-rock (Fun) and the indie rock song (magnificent Sun and Time).
She’s a die-hard fan of the indie folk of Andy Shauf, the work of American composer and guitarist Blake Mills — “A master of sonic textures,” Shaina says admiringly — and the brilliant alt-country/indie rock band Big Thief. “My tour manager asked me if I was free to give a concert on November 15,” there was no way she was going to miss the concert that Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker was giving at the Olympia theater.
Although guided by instinct, Kindergarten Heart still has its breadcrumbs: “We followed a concept throughout the album, that of childish joy”, as the title suggests. The lyrics of the songs do not necessarily all evoke it, shades Shaina, “but the theme appears in the choice of arrangements”, more daring than on the first album. “We were only looking to have funwithout thinking too much about the result”, which can be listened to in two stages, suggests the musician.
“A first side more dynamic, more joyful, more rock too, while the second half is more nostalgic. To compose these songs, I had to immerse myself in my childhood memories, but drawing inspiration from what we experienced coming out of the pandemic. This kind of thaw — is that the right word? This moment when we started to live in society again, but always with the fear that it was only an illusion of freedom. I had to search my memories for what it meant, to feel the true joy of being together. »