Nick Heyward Sings “Love is the Key By the Sea”

Listen to this track by Haircut One Hundred poster boy turned seasoned pop song conjurer Nick Heyward. It’s “Love is the Key By the Sea”, the opening cut to his 2017 release Woodland Echoes, his seventh solo record and his first all around recording project since 2006. The album finds him exploring Sixties and Seventies Maccaesque pop-psych textures and moods that helped shape him as a musician before his professional career as a pop star kicked off in the early 1980s. This song in particular is founded on a brand of summery and bucolic wonder that could be called defiant in its optimism if it wasn’t also so laid back and drowsily contented.

Sunny and upbeat music had always been Nick Heyward’s specialty. His optimistic tunes with Haircut One Hundred like “Love Plus One” and “Fantastic Day” are so lit up with youthful energy complementary to the group’s image as wholesome seagoing and sweater-wearing lads, it was easy to miss the darker angles in them. The band’s implosion after Heyward’s struggles with exhaustion and depression as fame bore down on him seemed to prove the point that what seems happy and cheerful on the surface doesn’t always tell the whole story.

After crafting some excellent and very often woefully underexposed music in his solo career from the Eighties and throughout the Nineties, it seemed like he’d figured a lot of things out for himself by the new century. For one thing, he’d reunited with his former bandmates in Haircut One Hundred, putting all the drama of the past well behind them as they rekindled their friendships. For another, he’d discovered how to connect with fans directly through online channels, bypassing the demanding mechanisms of the traditional music industry. All the while, Nick Heyward crafted a shimmering and vital pop tapestry of a sound for himself designed to catch the ear, provoke the mind, and warm the heart.

On this cut, that intention is a clear mandate to kick off the new album. “Love is the Key By the Sea” is set to a languid psych-pop waltz rhythm adorned by gently plucked acoustic guitar and ringing celesta. It’s imbued with Sixties-era sunshine and with a sense of musical timelessness all at once. The song is the sound of being transported to a sun-soaked and verdant locale next to water, overcome with ecstatic English Romantic visions of the natural world while surrounded by good people in good spirits. It’s warm and friendly, but also has something to say about what matters most in a life.

Beyond the association with the Florida Keys where Heyward spent some time making this very album, the meaning of the phrase key by the sea is otherwise non-specific in this song. It sounds like something you might hear in a dream, staying with you when you first wake up, giving the the song a kind of hazy, otherworldly aura. Heyward’s seemingly ageless voice is swathed in rich overlays of harmony that emphasizes this dreamlike reverie as he encourages listeners to both slow down to take notice of the world in the present, and to speed up to meet moments before they pass; good advice a seasoned traveler might pass on to one who’s only just embarked on their journey.

It seems to follow that Nick Heyward had the subject of time on his mind when he wrote “Love is the Key By the Sea”. The track starts with the sound of a ticking clock to suggest movement from moment to moment, gathering experiences but sometimes falling short of gaining insight. In true mystical Sixties fashion, this song feels centred in the Now; a bright point on the mobius strip of our experience of past and present as they separate but sometimes converge. We perceive the passage of time. But we’re not always good at remaining still long enough in the moments we share with each other.

Staying connected to the beauty of one’s surroundings and to those we love in the present is a thread that runs throughout the record. “Love is the Key By the Sea” is about deliberately noticing what’s good and meaningful in one’s life—which shouldn’t be as difficult as it so often is. In its lilting and languid way, this tune balances the eternal and the transient as two forces that share space with the other, lending credence to the wisdom that connecting with love in all its forms and savouring moments and simple pleasures whenever one can is the key to unlock all kinds of treasures; connection, contentment, and a profound sense of gratitude.

On its release in 2017, Heyward described the Woodland Echoes album as “accidentally autobiographical”. Where there was darkness and uncertainty in his earliest work that lurked underneath its sunny surfaces, “Love is the Key By the Sea” is an anthem to maturity and contentedness instead with all of the sunniness intact. That’s one of the underlying charms of this song. It can be easily read as an older, wiser version of himself talking to that young man in the jaunty cap on Top of the Pops who navigated a crooked path through the tangled pop music jungle with no time between the latest hit single and the next to stop and appreciate anything along the way.

This opening song to his very well-reviewed newest album after a long break from recording found him embracing a new era for himself. After coming to a place in the ensuing years where he discovered that contentment is achieved just by noticing all of the good things and good people surrounding him, it seems that Nick Heyward was right to be optimistic all along.

For more on how he made this song and others on the Woodland Echoes record, check out this 2017 interview with Nick Heyward at writewyattuk.com.

For a grand tour of Nick Heyward’s recorded output, including Woodland Echoes and two collaborative albums, check out this complete guide to Nick Heyward’s discography on Classic Pop magazine.

To continue to explore some of the darker themes Nick Heyward presented in his solo career, check out this Deeper Cuts podcast episode about Nick Heyward’s North of a Miracle, featuring your humble host.

Enjoy!

#2010sMusic #NickHeyward #PsychPop #singerSongwriters #songsAboutHealing #songsAboutTime

Happy birthday to Nick Heyward! Still making music in 2025 despite all the years of his hard-living rock n roll lifestyle as documented here.

April 1985, salad and mineral water with Strawberry Switchblade.

📸Eugene Adabari

#nickheyward #haircut100 #80smusic #music #perrier #perrierwater #StrawberrySwitchblade #popstars