Artists

Ward Hayden and The Outliers' New Album and "Cold, Cold Heart" Music Video to Honor Hank Williams' 100th Birthday

Published

August 21, 2023Updated August 21, 2023

@ward-hayden-the-outliers

Ward Hayden Honors the 100th Birthday of Hank Williams

With New Album, Out 9/1

New Music Video for “Cold, Cold Heart” Available Now

Seven Special Concert Performances

On Fall Tour Schedule to Coincide With Release Of

A Celebration of Hank Williams LIVE

Ward Hayden & The Outliers – Cold, Cold Heart [Providence Sessions]

Ward Hayden & The Outliers
photo id (l to r) Josh Kiggans, Cody Nilsen,
Ward Hayden, and Handsome Greg Hall

(Scituate, Mass.) The music of Hank Williams has occupied a central place in the life, soul and muse of Americana hero Ward Hayden all but from the cradle. His special, annual shows with his group saluting Williams every New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day –the 1952/’53 dates when Hank was on his way to his next gig and died in the back of a Cadillac– “had quickly become a Boston-area tradition” (Quincy Patriot Ledger), since the first celebration in 2008.

Now, to mark the occasion of what would have been Williams’ 100th birthday on this coming September 17, Ward Hayden & The Outliers will release A Celebration of Hank Williams LIVE on the band’s own Faster Horses Recordings on September 1.

In advance of the album’s release this week, the band premiered a new music video for “Cold, Cold Heart.” Watch the video HERE. Hayden says the song “captures Hank’s gift of creating a simple and catchy song that’s also filled with emotional depth and lyrical imagery. It’s a masterfully written song and each verse to the song pulls you deeper and deeper into the story and the troubles he’s experiencing.”

The video, filmed by Evan St. Martin (frontman for the duo Laden Valley), which features The Outlier’s Cody Nilsen on pedal steel for the performance, follows the release of the music video for “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.”

For the album, a collection of 11 songs (with four additional stories), Hayden “really wanted to put together a group of Hank’s songs that are meaningful to me as a listener and fan of his music. It is personal to me in that these not only made me a fan of his music, but have kept me coming back to his music for enjoyment and inspiration.

“And my biggest inspiration for ever wanting to put a band together and write my own music was a vision of creating music that combined the styles of Hank Williams and Chuck Berry. Lyrics that tackled aspects of life that can be troubling and painful, but done with wit and honesty and sometimes with a bit of humor, and then to occasionally couple that with the rockin’ sound of Chuck’s style of rock ‘n’ roll guitar. Sounds that hit hard and also make you want to move and experience joy.

“When we started thinking about doing something to honor Hank’s 100th we pretty much immediately knew that capturing the live sound was how we wanted to do it. Live music is something truly special and unique, it’s a moment and in that moment there’s an energy that can’t be replicated in any other way than in a live setting. Live music’s a high wire act, it’s exciting and it’s spirited. We wanted this collection of songs, songs that hold a longstanding meaning to our personal and musical lives, to have that special quality.”

To continue the celebration, seven special tribute shows –Northampton, MA’s The Parlor Room (9/15), City Winery Boston (9/17), Fall River, MA’s Narrows Center for the Arts (9/29), Portsmouth, NH’s The Music Hall (10/20), Rochester, NY’s Abilene (11/2), Buffalo, NY’s Sportsmen Tavern (11/3), and Syracuse, NY’s The 443 Social Club (11/4)– that will commemorate both the birthday and album release have also been added to the band’s tour schedule

A Celebration of Hank Williams LIVE was produced by Hayden and his band: Josh Kiggans on drums and percussion, Cody Nilsen on guitar and pedal steel, and Handsome Greg Hall on electric and upright bass.

“Hank Williams’ songs have always been a part of my life as I grew up in a household that played his music a lot,” Hayden says. “Some of my earliest musical memories from when I was a kid singing along at the top of my lungs to some of his classic numbers like ‘Kaw-Liga’ and ‘Why Don’t You Love Me.’”

It’s the second live recording from their Williams salutes. The first, released in 2018 when the group was known as Girls, Guns & Glory, was praised by the Boston Globe: “Hayden doesn’t cover these songs; he shakes with them, almost bleeds them. They roll through him like prayer through a Southern preacher.” The same and more can be said of how this new LP captures the eternal spirit of Hank’s classic country compositions, recordings, and performances and brands them with the Outliers’ own trademark country-rocking sound.

Hayden’s 10th album and most-recent release earlier this year, South Shore, taps into a major country music tradition of writing about the small town where one grew up and calls home. And, in part, channels Williams as an influence. “Our song ‘Blink of an Eye’ shows the most Hank influence. It has the Chet Atkins style electric guitar part and also the sock rhythm on the acoustic guitar, which are both classic features of Hank Williams recordings. And it has the country yodel, reminiscent of Hank’s yodel a la ‘Lovesick Blues’ or ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues.’

“Hank’s yodel has been a major influence on me. I’d always wanted to include a yodeling song on one of our albums, and in our live show I do a lot of country yodeling. But it had never made its way onto one of our records before South Shore. And I must say that we had such a good time with that yodeling song that I wouldn’t be surprised to see more country yodeling on future albums as well.”

album cover – A Celebration of Hank Williams Live

A Celebration of Hank Williams Live track listing:

1. Ramblin’ Man

2. Intro: No Courage without Fear

3. Settin’ the Woods on Fire

4. Weary Blues from Waitin’

5. Intro: Hank’s Last Song

6. I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive

7. Long Gone Lonesome Blues

8. Cold, Cold Heart

9. Intro: Leon Payne

10. Lost Highway

11. Honky Tonkin’

12. Intro: The Song that Made Him Famous

13. Lovesick Blues

14. Half as Much

15. Why Don’t You Love Me

Ward Hayden’s personal reflections on Hank William’s “Cold, Cold Heart”

“‘Cold, Cold Heart’ is such a classic Hank Williams song and to me really captures Hank’s gift of creating a simple and catchy song that’s also filled with emotional depth and lyrical imagery.

“In an interview I once saw with country legend Merle Kilgore, he talked about conversations he’d had with Hank Williams about Hank’s process for writing this type of song about love and heartbreak. And in the story of Hank Williams, when Hank’s life was going well he would have difficulty writing songs, but when his life was filled with turmoil and difficulties in his marriage, Hank was able to draw on those experiences and the words to these songs would come much more easily to him. But, what I loved about the interview with Merle is that he reveals that when Hank’s life was going well he would turn to ‘picture books,’ these teenage and romance comic books that used images and often times lighthearted jokes to tell the stories in these comics. For me, ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ blends the best of these two songwriting influences in Hank’s life. The song acts almost as a biography for Hank’s relationship with his first wife Audrey Williams and the difficulties he was finding in his marriage based on her having had a past marriage go poorly. And it also us takes the lyrical imagery you might find in one of the comics he would read and takes the visual of a frozen ice block of a heart and melting it.

“It’s a masterfully written song and each verse to the song pulls you deeper and deeper into the story and the troubles he’s experiencing as he finds himself in love with a woman who’s heart is so frozen from previous bad relationships that despite his efforts he’s unable to free her mind from doubt and melt her cold, cold heart. Relationship drama at its finest.”

Ward Hayden & The Outliers on Tour

August

26 – Plymouth, MA – Plymouth Waterfront Festival

27 – North Shoreham, RI – Captain Nick’s

September

3 – Charlestown, RI – Rhythm & Roots Festival

4 – Salem, NH – Tuscan Village Summer Concert Series

10 – Sellersville, PA – Sellersville Theatre (Members Party)

15 – Northampton, MA – The Parlor Room