Album Notes

Bekah Hayes wrote the majority of her second album on a small Yamaha keyboard that she kept under the bed. There was a raw desperation in those songs, as she coped with her first year at Sarah Lawrence College, in an over crowded, smelly and despicable dorm room. She would play kneeling on the floor with the keyboard flopping under her hands, supported by the conveniently firm mattress the college offered. That summer she moved on to bigger and better toys-a full keyboard with a stand and a stool. During that following year she wrote prolifically, and began working closely with other musicians to help record her album Boys and Girls (2003) at the Loft Studios in Bronxville. These interactions freed her from all pre-conceived notions of what it meant to write songs, and she became aware of the freedom she had to add unconventional harmony, beautiful oddly timed beats, strings and noise effects. During this time she began perfecting the craft of performance as she not only became a recognizable and respected musician at her college, but also traveled throughout the tri-state area playing for coffee houses, and benefits. She had some previous experience with performance and recording before attending college. It was in her high school, the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, where she focused on poetry, fiction and song writing. In 2001, she released an album with songwriter Jenn Tyo, As You Stare at Your Reflection. This first album has a very young, fresh sound, but her growth between this and her more recent endeavor is enormous. Influenced by the music of The Velvet Underground, The Magnetic Fields and the Radiohead, Bekah Hayes single-handedly creates music that contains as much intensity as a full ensemble. She shies away from the title singer/songwriter, as she does to comparisons to Tori Amos and others, not out of disrespect but out of misclassification. Her music is wrenching and addictive-the kind of thing that slips into your ears at three a.m. and stays straight on for days. The amount of control her lyrics, melodies, voice and arrangements have over the listener is beyond the cliché of a woman at her piano. Her music is terrifying, gorgeous and overwhelming, something like "a kitchen dragging a village behind it". She is currently anticipating her graduation from Sarah Lawrence College with a concentration in writing and religion. She is at work, recording for her next record.