Some CDs make me want to babble on for days about how cool they are. Others just make me want to shut up and listen. This is one of the shut up and listen discs. It's tough to say exactly what it is that makes this such attractive music; there's nothing groundbreaking or radical about these songs, Annie Hayden doesn't dress up like satan's donkey or an asexual alien and no one in her band is particularly famous or notorious. Nonetheless, I keep on pushing play instead of eject when this one is in the CD player.
Hayden writes pretty, tuneful songs about everyday life, normal people and regular dreams, and she sings them in a sweet, uncontrived voice. The music, most of which she performed herself, is subtle, melodic, folk-tinged guitar-based stuff, with keyboards, bass, piano and trumpet rounding things out. The orchestrations tend to be pretty sparse affairs, although a few tracks, like "Lovely to See", manage to squeeze a remarkable lushness out of fairly limited resources.
"Alone" is a quiet acoustic guitar number with particularly nice vocals; it sounds like something a less-bitter Juliana Hatfield could have done. Two mellow, fuzzy guitars form a nice fluffy bed for Hayden's clear, simple, double-tracked vocals on "Red Lines". "Sign of Your Love" has a peppy, carefree feeling that somehow reminds me of the good parts of a 10,000 Maniacs tune. "Lovely to See" finishes the disc off with an unexpected, slightly dark, pretty, down-tempo twist.
Annie Hayden is from Jersey City, as was her little-known but much-loved former band, Spent. And although it's a pretty tenuous connection, when I listen to The Rub I can't help but think about Mr. Springsteen, another New Jersey songwriter known (with a few forgivable exceptions) more for thoughtful, touching songs about regular people than for rock and roll excess. It seems unlikely that Hayden possesses the same stadium-filling rock anthem writing gene that helped The Boss make the jump from being a good songwriter to, well, being The Boss. I doubt that Hayden is going to find herself in Madison Square Garden rocking out with Clarence Clemens any time soon, but that's probably a good thing; what she lacks in flash she more than makes up for in substance. Keep an ear on this woman -- she might just crank out her own Nebraska one of these days.
