A new morning

After watching a record label destroy her career, Gemma Hayes decided to take matters in her own hands

JEFF INMAN

Gemma Hayes (with Joe Jackson)
Sat., Oct. 18, 8 p.m.
Ovation at Green Valley Ranch hotel-casino
547-5300
$27.50-$59.50

THE worst moment came just a few weeks into November. It was 2005. Gemma Hayes was supposed to be floating. She'd just released her second album, The Roads Don't Love You. The response was good; that was to be expected, actually. Critics already loved the Irish waif. She'd even score a Mercury Prize nod for her 2002 debut, Night on My Side. But that disc was brash and loud, saturated in the feedback of her favorite band, My Bloody Valentine. Roads was supposed to be her commercial breakthrough: clean hooks, sweet melodies, the whole works.

But then came the call. She was dropped. Her label just didn't want her anymore -- critics or not. It hurt, of course, but that was the music business. It happens to damn near everyone eventually. Hayes just wanted her record. She could press it herself; sell it on tour. The label refused. They owned the music. Hayes couldn't have it. Ever.

"That was the real punch in the gut," she says. "That was a piece of me that I'd worked on for two years and they were telling me I couldn't have it. They were my songs and they owned them. It was heartbreaking."

All Hayes wanted to do was curl up in a ball. She couldn't really tour. She didn't want to go back in the studio. She felt lost -- a feeling that was only amplified when Roads scored her Best Irish Female Artist at the 2006 Meteor Ireland Music Awards. That was almost it.

But then Hayes started to really think about the situation. She had fans. She had the press. Europe damn well loved her. The U.S. was an open playing field, Hayes only ever visiting the States once for two weeks in 2002. If she could just put out her own disc, she could probably do just fine. Everyone else seemed to be making it work these days. Why not her? So she booked some studio time in France, got her old guitar player to produce, and started making a record.

What Hayes ended up with might be that breakthrough she's been looking for. Not because The Hollow of Morning is some commercial record; in fact, it's far from it. Opener "This Is What You Do to Me" is a breathy Nick Drake ballad, Hayes's voice nearly cracking as she whispers out lines about breaking through the chaos. The blues-tinged "Chasing Dragons" is so intimate it feels like Hayes is going to climb out of the speakers and start weeping in your arms. And "Home," with its swirling distortion and echoing reverb, threatens to overpower the singer more than a few times.

Yet it's those moments, combined with the pristine snarl of tracks like "Out of Our Hands" and the quaint folk of "Sad Ol Song," that makes Hollow feel so personal and real. It's one woman's chronicle of rediscovery, tracking her progress from the lowest moment to the absolute peak.

"That's what I love about the record," Hayes says. "Some of those songs are seriously like reading a diary on stage. A few I can't even play because they're so personal. But I somehow tricked myself into thinking that, even if I can't play them in public, they can go on a record."

And that trick seems to have worked in more ways than one. While Hayes released Hollow herself back home, she's attracted some high-powered friends here in the U.S. New label Second Motion, owned by Yep Roc founder Stephen Judge, asked to release the disc in America. Soon after the deal was inked, Dave Matthew's ATO label offered to promote and distribute the disc.

"People just seem to be coming out of the woodwork for this record," Hayes says. "And it's a hard record. But it pulls you in and leaves you hovering. And it seems to be working, which is great, because I wasn't sure anything would work again." That doesn't seem to be an issue anymore.

Last updated on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 10:03 pm

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