Toby Hay: The Longest Day
The state51 Conspiracy
Displayed on the inner sleeve of The Longest Day, guitarist Toby Hay's follow-up to 2017's The Gathering, is a Pascal pensée concerning the difficulty of inhabiting the present when the past and future can be so sidetracking (“We are so unwise that we wander about in times that are not ours & blindly flee the only one that is”). It's interesting that time would be so much on Hay's mind when The Longest Day is that rare thing: authentic, genuine music that one imagines would sound just as strong 100 years from now as it does today. It is, simply put, an album to cherish, celebrate, and savour.
Recorded live over four days in Giant Wafer studios in Wales, the new release presents a more expansive sound than Hay's debut, which compared to The Longest Day seems more like a solo recording than small group effort. Joining Hay, credited with six- and twelve-string guitars and harmonium, are double bassist Aidan Thorne, drummer Mark O'Connor, saxophonist Greg Sterland, and violinist David Grubb. While Hay's undoubtedly the lead voice (his multi-layered picking in “Marvin the Mustang from Montana,” which breezily swings between pastoral folk and country, is pure pleasure), the others are critical to the presentation: Sterland and Grubb figure as prominently as the leader (Hay even largely cedes the spotlight to a deeply smoky Sterland throughout “Late Summer in Boscastle”), and Thorne and O'Connor provide a stellar and never-too-intrusive foundation for the others to play against. The music itself is fundamentally folk, though elements of country and jazz also surface during the eight performances.
If The Gathering felt rooted in the comforts of the mid-Wales town of Rhayader that Hay calls home, The Longest Day at times feels restless and even urgent, qualities reflective of the peripatetic lifestyle Hay adopted whilst touring to promote the debut. Song titles reference stops in America (“Leaving Chicago,” “Marvin the Mustang from Montana”) and Cornwall (“Late Summer in Boscastle”), and adding to the highly personalized tone of the release are track-by-track notes written by Hay (we learn, for example, that the title of “Bears Dance” refers to Hay's sheepdog). As strong a connection as Hay has to his home base, he's not incapable of forming bonds with others; he describes “Leaving Chicago,” for instance, as a “tune about falling in love with a place, then having to leave too soon,” and certainly the music he created for the song exudes equal measures of joy and melancholy.
Moving from wistful reflection to joyful animation, the title track inaugurates the album splendidly with Hay's twelve-string and Grubb's violin sharing the lead and coaxing the music to ever-greater outpourings of emotion. The latter elevates “Bears Dance” with fiddle playing that would sound right at home at a pub in some small Wales town and later deepens the heartache at the center of the two-part “Curlew” with playing that's by turns supplicating and raw. Fittingly, the album ends with Hay home again, relaxedly reposing in “At the Bright Hem of God” and appreciative of the natural abundance surrounding him.
Hay customizes his guitar sound with self-designed tunings that are so unusual his technique, he says, “would probably make a classical player wince.” I'd wager that whatever issues such a musician might have with Hay on technical grounds would be far outweighed by recognition of the music's authenticity and sincerity. In his notes for “Late Summer in Boscastle,” Hay writes of how “the rhythms of this world can seem as magic.” Much the same could be said of The Longest Day itself.June 2018