Recent review and bio about TTATS

DarrensPassion · July 17th, 2004, 01:51 PM

Thanks for Gracie, I'm posting this here. It's one of the best reviews and nicest biographies I've read recently about Darren [img]smile.gif[/img]

Darren Hayes
The Tension and The Spark

As he recorded the vocals for his new solo album, "The Tension and The Spark", in a home studio in San Francisco, singer/songwriter Darren Hayes, who sold millions of records worldwide between 1997-2001 as one-half of the multi-platinum duo Savage Garden, began to appreciate the irony of the phrase "pop will eat itself." It was a sweltering California day in June 2003 and Darren felt a d?j? vu evoking the humble beginnings of his recording career in Australia some eight years prior.

During the summer of 1995, in the spare bedroom of producer Charles Fisher's home in Sydney, Hayes was creating the astonishing vocal tracks for "Truly Madly Deeply", a classic song that would go on to hit the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1998 and change Darren's life forever. By the time "I Knew I Loved You", from the second Savage Garden album, "Affirmation", took its own place at the top of the Hot 100, the group's eponymous debut album and subsequent sophomore release were well on their way to generating sales of more than 20 million albums around the world. To this day, "Truly Madly Deeply" and "I Knew I Loved You" still hold the records as the #1 and #2 longest running songs to sit atop the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart.

By late 2003, with one successful solo pop album - 2002's "Spin" - to his credit, Darren Hayes was reassessing his artistic goals. Having created an already enduring pop music legacy, Hayes felt ready to expand his musical palette, developing new sounds while intensifying the range of his musical and lyrical sensibility. He was, in effect, beginning anew, ready and anxious to follow his muses into bold and adventurous new territory.

Most of "The Tension and The Spark" was recorded, quite literally, in a bedroom (albeit a bedroom with state-of-the-art recording equipment). Hayes had decided to record his new album at home, under the radar, in order to fully explore, and enjoy, a level of artistic freedom he'd never granted himself previously. Keeping a low profile, Darren Hayes wrote and recorded a collection of songs bristling with candor, urgency, and authenticity.

For his new solo album, Darren worked with a team of cutting edge producers of a caliber seldom associated with the pop mainstream: Mark "Spike" Stent (Bj?rk, Massive Attack, Depeche Mode, Madonna), Marius De Vries (Bj?rk, Madonna's Ray Of Light, The Moulin Rouge) and Robert Conley , a relative newcomer, but maverick master of the contemporary electronic world.

Bravely pointing towards a new musical future, "The Tension and The Spark" crackles with 21st century experimental electronica -- with Darren's deeply confessional and often confrontational lyrics poured across an atmospheric soundscape.

While "Spin", Darren's first solo album, racked up close to two million sales and produced four singles, most noticeably the soul-drenched romantic ballad "Insatiable", and subsequent theatre shows all over the world, it is on "The Tension and The Spark" that Darren Hayes comes fully into his own as an artist.

Hayes was feeling inspired by all kinds of new music. "I'd been getting into French bands like Phoenix and Rhinoceros as well as Bj?rk, Air, Goldfrappe and the Chemical Brothers," he recalls. "I was listening to music that was to me so much more textured and interesting than anything I was hearing on current Top 40 radio."

Working, almost accidentally at first, with friend and hardcore underground electronic artist Robert Conley (www.specificus.com), Hayes began the process of writing new music without really realizing it. During a stay at Hayes' San Francisco waterside home, Conley was constantly working on new tracks for himself in the spare bedroom. "He would be tinkering away on the keyboard," Darren recalls, "and although I had told anyone who would listen that I was not interested in writing or making an album, every time I walked past his room I found myself singing along to his tracks."

What began as a few unselfconscious "collaborations" between Hayes and Conley soon became seven tracks, then twelve. Before long, Conley began recording Hayes' own self-penned songs, which were the first Darren had ever written completely alone. Suddenly, an album was emerging and Darren Hayes no longer wanted to keep it entirely under-wraps.

While still creating his new sounds on the down low, Hayes took a trip to London to work with Marius DeVries and to woo legendary mix engineer Mark "Spike" Stent. At first, the generally hard-to-impress "Spike" was difficult to pin down. "I had passed on working with him on Spin", Spike recalls. "So when it came to this record, he called me up -- and he is a bit of a persistent bugger, which is one of the things I like about him -- and I told him to come down and see me." After listening to three of Darren's new songs, Stent was hooked. "Darren had actually moved forward musically -- a lot -- and he was being brave about what he was doing and trying new ideas. I like that, and because of that, I wanted to work with him."

Apart from the album's obvious sonic departure from Darren's earlier work (comparisons have been made to music ranging from Depeche Mode to David Bowie), what stands out most on "The Tension and The Spark" is the record's psychologically complex and deeply personal subject matter. "It's an album that describes a personal journey from darkness into light," Darren explains. "From blame to forgiveness and, finally, to the acceptance that everything, even misery, happens for a reason. And at the end of the day, there is a light at the end of the tunnel."

When Hayes keens, with startling honesty, "You made me feel like my father never loved me," from the unguarded open wound that is "Unlovable," you know there has been a changing of the guard in Darren's muse-grid. The album's level of heart-wrenching vulnerability continues in "Dublin Sky," where Hayes plaintively questions the universe, "How many dreams have I left deserted? How many hopes have been diverted?" In the album's opening cut, "Darkness," Hayes ascertains, with penetrating acuity, that sometimes our greatest fear is the act of becoming the very thing we fear most. When he sings, "You discover the monster you've been running from is the monster in you," you not only believe him, you feel an undeniable identification with him in your core. For "The Tension and The Spark" is nothing more, nor less, than a manifestation of the human condition itself.

For all its unflinching honesty, "The Tension and The Spark" is hardly all doom and gloom. The album serves as Hayes's own personal reminder that, regardless of the demons of his childhood or the mishaps in his personal relationships, happiness is something that can zero in on your consciousness without you realizing it. In "Light," he sings (as if to God, or an unnamable higher power), "I have been cold I have been blind. You have come to change my mind. I can put my faith in you."

"This record is my story," Darren muses, "but it's also a human story that I think most people can relate to. Eventually, I came to realize that, even for my own Morrissey-like confessionals, life is meant to be a rollercoaster. My best friend became pregnant while I was making this record and I was reminded every day that with every sadness comes joy, with every death, there is a re-birth. For me, the album symbolizes both the end of something terribly beautiful and the beginning of something wonderful in an entirely different way. I'm terrified but I'm ready for the change. Evolve or dissolve. Or to paraphrase Rumi, the great Sufi poet, 'Our bodies are a guesthouse. We should welcome all visitors, even misery, with a smile. For even though they may bring about the destruction of your home, they clear the way for new visitors, like love and joy.'"

And love and joy, as well as the emotional truths and complexities that accompany them, are the guiding lights ignited on "The Tension and The Spark".
_________________

Janie xx

**Kattitude** · July 17th, 2004, 02:13 PM

yeah its a lovely read. Very interesting and lots of great info.

I think the reason its nice though is cause its straight off the sony UK Darren Hayes site.

wait till the real critics start writing their stuff it surely wont be nice like that lol

But I did really enjoy reading that the other day as it had some good info about new album

kat