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

Listen to this track by Minneapolitan indie-rock trio Semisonic. It’s “Closing Time”, their most recognized hit song as taken from 1998’s Feeling Strangely Fine. That record was the band’s second release, with this song fueling international recognition for the band who made it. “Closing Time” appeared in several television shows and movies around the time of its release and beyond, usually in an end of an era context. It’s hard to fault the selection in this regard, with this song seeming to cry out to be shorthand for that very thing.

The origin of the song came out of forces that were far more practical than they were philosophical; the band needed a new tune to end their show. Active on the circuit that included Minneapolis’ celebrated First Avenue, their set needed a refresh. Another song “If I Run” as taken from their first album The Great Divide formally filled that end of the night anthem role. To writer Dan Wilson, the phrase closing time made a lot of sense as a starting point to crafting a new tune.

Yet the song’s lyrics still tease that there’s something more happening in it. Was this a song about mortality, for instance? That one day, we’re all going to have to face our own personal closing times? Actually, this song was inspired not by an awareness of one’s final end, but rather by something quite the opposite.

Apart from the on-the-nose role it played in live sets, at the time of its composition Semisonic singer and guitarist Dan Wilson found himself writing about his wife’s pregnancy, and the burgeoning occasion of their first child’s birth. Closing time as a phrase heard so often by bands and their audiences turned into a song about being sent out into the world after a period of waiting to be born. So, where this song is often associated with bittersweet endings to times we know we’ll consider the good old days, “Closing Time” is about the possibilities of what comes next. It’s about giving birth to new versions of the world as we ourselves become reborn as newer versions of ourselves to live in that world.

As big of a theme as that might be, this song escapes being maudlin or overly earnest. It retains its whimsy and lightheartedness, even if a drop of blue can still be heard in its sonic palette. In many ways, the feelings this song evokes seemed to mark the era out of which it came, written and released during a time of relative political and economic stability in the West. This was a period when we had every reason to think that the upcoming 21st century was going to be everything we hoped it would be, fears about Y2K notwithstanding.

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Mixed in with the humour about a baby’s eviction from the womb, Dan Wilson striking that same optimistic tone in “Closing Time” stands to reason even apart from that specific late-Nineties context. As parents, we’re eager to welcome our children into the world in any era, protecting and nurturing them, and staying connected even as they eventually forge ahead with their own lives from childhood to adulthood. In this, a common principle applies; that a new era and a new life always implies the passage of an old one.

“Closing time, every new beginning
Comes from some other beginning’s end”

-Semisonic, “Closing Time”

This is not good or bad. Even in this song, no moral judgements can be found. These things just are for creatures caught in time’s flow. It’s up to us to decide how we view each moment, and each era, as they come and go. It’s possible that this is why this song is associated with both poles on the beginnings and endings spectrum; that it is sad when it’s time to end a night (or a whole era) of good times with friends, but it is exciting to think about the good times ahead, too. Masterfully, this song becomes a soundtrack for both.

After Semisonic put out their third album All About Chemistry in 2001, they ceased touring and went on hiatus. Dan Wilson kicked off a new era of his own by then in the form of a solo career that produced a series of well-reviewed albums. In turn, that led to a career as a songwriter with other artists, including his collaboration with The Chicks on their 2006 “Not Ready to Make Nice” single among other songs, and with Adele on her 2011 smash hit single “Someone Like You”, a song he also co-produced with her.

Reconvening at the end of the 2010s with all three original members, Semisonic is an active musical entity today. You can learn about their latest releases and tour dates at semisonic.com.

Enjoy!

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#90sMusic #IndieRock #indiePop #Semisonic #songsAboutTime