A rainy morn gave way to an overcast afternoon and early evening, with the temperature inching up a smidgen to the mid-70s. It’s autumn in all but name, at least for today, and perfect weather for listening to Hayley Reardon’s latest long player, After Everything. Her music conjures similar afternoons from my youth, when guys and gals alike cruised the strips of their small towns in muscle cars, Pacers and even Pintos, while the poets of the people shared songs about love, heartache, and life’s ups and downs via an 8-track player embedded in the dashboard. I’m thinking Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens and James Taylor, among others. But unlike on those tapes of yore, however, loud clicks and unwanted silence never interrupt these gems of self-reflection.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, no worries—it just means you didn’t come of age in 1970s-era America, where 8-tracks were the secondary option for music on the go. (Radio, for those curious, was the first.) But either/or, it leads to this: Reardon’s expressive vocals are as warm as they are grainy, and routinely soak through the skin and into the soul. They’re tinged by a sweet melancholy, if that paradoxical phrase makes sense. Her songs are likewise direct and enigmatic, with lyrics that bore deep into the marrow of life.
The eight-track, 32-minute album opens with “Bone Dance,” a captivating ode to a fishing town that’s close to her heart, while “Good News” celebrates how love—be it platonic or romantic—can upend our lives in the best of ways: “All along/A turning point/A crossroads in some cosmic void/Branches bend/Strings come loose/You have only ever been good news.” That it was written for a friend whose name literally means “good news” only makes it that more touching.
“Until It Happens” is another evocative song. She describes it as “about grappling with the question of how to exist in the present while holding a deep awareness of the inevitability of loss. The first verses of the song came to me in a moment of homesickness while touring in Scandinavia. From there, the song unfolded into a meditation on the ache of impermanence. It captures a feeling I’ve wanted to put to words for a long time.” It reflects the existential angst that comes with aging, I think, when we become aware that our loved ones—parents, especially—may not be with us forever and a day.
Many of the album’s songs have previously been released as singles. That’s par for the course in today’s age, of course, but listening to them one after the next only increases their strength. “Karaoke,” for instance, has lit up my non-playlist life often since its release in April. It’s a moody, mid-tempo reflection on love’s oft-fleeting nature: “I was falling through the cracks of you/Nothing left to hold on to.” Positioned between “Until It Happens” and the song that follows, however, places it into a context greater than itself.
“Avalanche,” that next song, is a deluge of doubt that’s coupled with rays of hope; that it’s just an “album track” is astounding to me. “You are a window to a room I forgot about,” she sings, “and I’m staying near the light as the sun paints a pattern now.” “The Way I Am” turns the lens fully on herself, exploring not just how decisions she’s made may have cost her but also the reason behind them: “I needed all this space just to feel the ache that has always been under everything.”
The title track examines her role in what sounds like the fracturing of a friendship: “I’m still angry I don’t get to explain/But it’s probably better at the end of the day/In all my laboring/To feel understood/I’d yet to learn what it’s worth just to know how to feel good.” The album comes to a close with “Barcelona,” a love song to both the city and its people.
Reardon, who’s lived abroad for much of the past many years, has recently returned to the States and is now playing various cities across the country—click here for her itinerary. Here’s hoping she eventually makes her way to the Cat’s Cradle Back Room in Carrboro. As hypnotic as her Live at Starseed Studios was and is, something tells me she’s tenfold as mesmerizing in person.
The track list:
The Old Grey Cat 
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