Scene One: July 1996. Chart approaches Sandy Pandya of Pandyamonium management to arrange an interview with Toronto indie singer-songwriter Hayden. The interview is set for August 20th.

Scene Two: August. Ms Pandya informs Chart that Hayden's new cassette won't be available until August 19, cutting it a bit tight for pre-interview listening purposes. The interview is rescheduled for August 27.

Scene Three: Late August. Ms Pandya informs Chart that Hayden will be in New York City on August 27. (The original story deadline was the end of August.) The interview is rescheduled for September 9.

Scene Four: September. Ms Pandya informs Chart that Hayden will be back in New York City on September 9. The interview is rescheduled for September 11.

Scene Five: September 11. The interview takes place. Chart breathes a sigh of relief. And you wonder why they called the company Pandyamonium.

Hayden is friendly, polite, with a shy smile and a soft speaking voice. He looks like a typical suburban 25-year-old, sporting closely-cropped dark hair and nondescript casual garb. His music exemplifies a D.I.Y. simplicity and starkness -- crude, droning guitars and equally primitive accompaniments are the mainstay. His songs range from emotionally raw twentysomething angst to surprisingly sweet sentimentality. His roughly-hewn vocals are part lazy drawl, part primal howl. What he lacks in innovation and intricacy, he balances with conviction and integrity. But is that enough to make him interesting? Judging by his recent rapid ascent in popularity, the answer is apparently a resounding "yes." Just a few years ago, Hayden was directing music videos for the likes of Toronto locals hHead and Anhai. At the same time he was also working on his own songwriting, eventually setting aside the video camera in favor of a 4-track machine to record his own creations.

In early 1995, he released his indie debut Everything I Long For on Hardwood Records (later to be distributed by Sonic Unyon). Since then, he has garnered national acclaim and has criss-crossed the country numerous times. This past September, he was a fea tured performer at the Canadian Music Video Awards. He has also attracted the attention of U.S. record labels and mags like Rolling Stone, who both usually take little notice of Canadian indie upstarts. And most recently, he was invited to take part in Neil Young's annual benefit for The Bridge School (raising money and awareness for mentally and physically handicapped children) joining artists like David Bowie, Patti Smith, Pearl Jam and Young himself. So why Hayden? "I have no idea," Hayden modestly replies. "Basically it started when some people in America got my CD. The more people started talking about it, the more people were interested. In the end, it turned into one of those things where there are a lot of labels interested. "That's not such a big deal, because now every time a band is found by a label, ten other labels find out about it. They're all going to see the same bands. There are bidding wars every week now in America. I don't think it usually says tons about the artist." Hayden eventually chose to sign with Outpost Recordings (distributed in Canada by Geffen). "They're really good people," he enthuses. "That's one of the good things about the situation I was in with how many labels I was talk ing to in America. I was able to make a very picky decision."

However, Hayden also found that all this attention had its downsides. "Certain bad things came out of it," he says. "You go and see a movie that you haven't heard anything about and you don't have any expectations. It's interesting and nice and you say 'W ow, that's amazing," because you didn't expect much. But if you go and see a movie that's hyped to the hilt, you go in and expect to be blown away. It could be just as good as the first movie, but you come out and say 'Ahh, that wasn't so great.' "I think a lot of people listen to my record for the first time with that thought process in mind. I wouldn't get down on people for feeling that way about it, because I'm the same way. If I hear too much about something, I usually would rather not hear it." With the success of Everything I Long For, Hayden toured intensively, a process that he found interesting but at times stifling. "After a while, it became a really uncreative thing to do," he explains . "When you're playing live every night in a different place, and you're traveling during the day and doing interviews and stuff, you don't feel like doing things that you would normally do at home. It's not much fun. So I haven't really been as creative in the last two years as I would have liked." "There are definitely lots of times when I loved performing, especially when I was touring Canada. You would go out three weeks and then when you get home you could be creative again, write songs, go to shows an live a normal life. When your record comes out all over the world, you have to be all over the world to promote it. That's when it literally becomes like a job." Some of his more notable gigs included spots at Quebec City's Lollapalooza and the H.O.R.D.E. Festival, both of which were not what he expected. "I really didn't want to do Lollapalooza," he recalls, "and I really, really, really didn't want to do the H.O.R.D.E. Festival. Lollapalooza was shitty. It had such a bad vibe to it. People weren't that into it. There wasn't a spirit there amongst the bands playing."

"But the H.O.R.D.E. Festival was really nice. People were there for the music and to have fun. It was really relaxed. It wasn't an alternative crowd, but it didn't matter. It was better. I thought it would be the opposite." While touring, Hayden was astou nded by the diversity of people that respond to his music. "I'm really surprised that 14-year-olds are into my music," he admits. "And I'm really surprised that 50-year-olds are into my music. Those two groups freak me out. I would think that people my age would like my music the most. When I was 13, I don't even want to say what I was listening to. I used to love Phil Collins, stuff like that, whatever was on Top 40 radio." Since he stopped touring, Hayden has been working on his new EP, Moving Careful, released on Hardwood/Sonic Unyon.

"In the month of April, I just hung out at my new place and wrote songs and recorded them by myself," he says. "Whatever is on that tape is whatever happened." Moving Careful continues in much of the thematic vein of Everything I Long For, mixing loss and longing with romantic bliss and wry humor . "I'll Tell Him Tonight" poignantly describes the singer's feelings for an ill sibling. "The Middle of July," about nuzzling a loved one, is perhaps his most tender ballad to date. But just try to get Hayden to talk about his material. "Not to make it difficult for you," he apologizes. "I made a conscious decision that I didn't want to say too much about the songs this time around. I found with Everything I Long For, I wanted people to know what they were about. But I had so many people come up and tell me what they thought songs were about and what they meant to them. I liked that better than people knowing why I wrote the songs. I like people to have their own ideas about a song." Musically, the recordings have a very casual homespun sound, mainly because Hayden tackled all the instrumental duties. Virtuosity was not a particular priority. "For the first time I played drums by myself," he notes, "which is a good thing and a bad thing. The drum parts aren't perfect, but I liked the fact that I played the parts."

Most songs were recorded soon after they were written, in an effort to capture their original spirit as best as possible. "I like recording that way," he says, "because I'm still in the same frame of mind as I was when I wrote the song. Whatever was making me write the song at the time, that feeling is still inside me when I'm putting it on to tape. Sometimes when you write a song and then play it with your band for three months, when you go into the studio, you sort of forget why you wrote it and you forget what you were feeling." Arrangements are usually invented on the spot, a process that Hayden finds creatively exciting. "I'm writing the song as I record it," he explains. "I'll record my acoustic guitar part and the main vocal. And then I'll play it back and I'll write a bass line to what I've recorded. Suddenly the song sounds totally different. Then I'll sing a harmony which totally changes the chorus or the verse or the tone of the song. I'll keep building it like that." Despite his somewhat extemporaneous approach to arrangements, Hayden is quick to point out that he has nothing against highly-crafted recordings. "I'm a big fan of albums that have a really great sound to them," he emphasizes. "And I'm a big fan of albums that you can tell weren't done at a really slick place. It just depends. I think Pearl Jam sound really good when they're produced well. That's the type of band they are. Whereas Sebadoh wouldn't sound good if they had really slick production." Not surprisingly, Hayden prefers spontaneity and a lack of premeditation in his writing process. "I find usually the best songs happen really quickly," he says. "It's usually the ones that happen right away, that come together with lyrics and everything that I end up keeping and being the happiest with. "The problem with writing for me is I can't just sit down and say I'm going to write. It has to just be when I'm in the mood. It can sometimes be really bad timing, like when there are people over and I feel like going into a room and ignoring everyone and writing a couple of songs."

Interestingly, Hayden cites mainstream popsters like Phil Collins as influencing his basic sense of songwriting. "I used to play 'The Roof is Leaking'," he reveals. "That's a wicked song actually. [I totally agree.] I think liking him so much and liking o ther poppy bands gave me this pop mentality that I can't really shake \emdash not that I'd want to. For me, a song isn't complete unless it has a chorus that can be sung along with. I don't sit there and think 'I've got to have a catchy chorus.' But my songs just seem to have structures that are pop structures." One distinctive aspect of Hayden's music is his use of alternate guitar tunings. "There are a lot of bands that use alternate tunings," he points out. "Sonic Youth is a classic case of that. I just started tuning the low string down to se e what kind of sounds it would make. When I wrote 'Bad As They Seem,' I just liked the sound of certain chords with that low rattling string." The media frequently refer to Beck when describing Hayden, a comparison that Hayden dislikes. "I would always say, 'You obviously haven't listened to his record and my record one after the other.' I think when people make comparisons, there's a fine line between whether they're making them as strictly a music thing or like a whole thing. Yeah, we're both in our mid-20s . We're both males. We're both solo artists doing self-made recordings. But we don't sound alike." Comparisons notwithstanding, Hayden has great admiration for Beck. "I like Beck's new album," he says. "It's like a puzzle put together from pieces from 15 different puzzle sets. It's a classic studio album. It blows your mind every time you listen to it. I think he's really amazing. "It's hard for me to follow what Beck is saying in a lot of his songs. He's more of a music artist to me. I like the sound of his voice and I love his delivery and how he sings. What he's singing isn't as important to me as everything else that's going on in his music. There are some artists that are like that for me and some whose lyrics blow me away. Joni Mitchell would be the f irst person I would say there. Tom Waits for sure, because I love how he plays different roles. Sometimes he's more of an actor than a singer."

Hayden's schedule is always a flurry of activity. At interview time, he was in the midst of doing the artwork an d getting the final order of the songs down for Moving Careful. He's also penned and recorded the title track to Steve Buscemi's film Trees Lounge. Moving Careful represents Hayden's desire to release material without having to go through the rigamarole a ssociated with a full-length CD. "I just wanted to put some music out that I was really proud of," he explains. "If I put out a whole album in America, out of my American record company, that's my album for the next year and a half. I won't get a chance t o release any other songs because I'm promoting it. I'll be going into full-scale touring mode for a long time."

That "full-scale touring mode" will likely follow the release of his next "whole album" in the spring of 1997. Hayden does not look forward to this process. "I just want it all to end," he says, "so I can get back to the task at hand, which is writing songs. Because that's the thing that I really love to do."