Ward Hayden & The Outliers Debut New Music Video For "(Breaking Up With) My Hometown"
Published
Ward Hayden & The Outliers
Debut New Music Video
For “(Breaking Up With) My Hometown”
Music Video and Album
Bring It All Back Home
With Profound Personal Narratives
New Album, South Shore,
Set to Release May 5
\Ward Hayden & The Outliers – (Breaking Up with) My Hometown [Official Music Video]
photo id (l to r)
Handsome Greg Hall, Ward Hayden,
Josh Kiggans, and Cody Nilsen
(Scituate, MA) In the long, rich history of country music, life in a small town is a major theme in many of its finest songs. On South Shore, the ninth album from singer, songwriter Ward Hayden and his band The Outliers, they deliver a rich and rewarding new chapter within that tradition and much more on the essential matters of life, love and the world around us.
Due out on May 5 on the band’s own Faster Horses Recordings, South Shore delivers further winning iterations on the band’s “smooth, authentic Honky Tonk, early Rock & Roll vibe that’s incredibly endearing” (Cincinnati City Beat). It’s a collection that brings it all back home to the small coastal town of Scituate. MA, some 30 miles south of Boston, where Ward Hayden hails from and returned to five years ago.
Ahead of the album’s release, the band debuted their music video for the track “(Breaking Up with) My Hometown.” View it now, HERE
Hayden notes “We shot the whole video down in Scituate. I really wanted it to capture the elements of the town that made leaving it so bittersweet, but also have a tendency to pull you back like a magnet. The locations were all really sentimental places. What’s wild and mind blowing to me is that the sights around Scituate that have remained meaningful to me throughout my life are now becoming part of my wife and daughter’s life, and I’ve really enjoyed sharing that with both of them tremendously.
“When I left Scituate back in 2008 and began touring more heavily, Rob Loyot, who’d played in a touring band for years, told me that ‘once you get serious and get out on the road you won’t be going to a lot of birthdays or parties or participating in many local events anymore.’ He wanted to give me a heads up about the sacrifices that were involved and necessary with touring, and that you miss a lot of the things that happen back home. And he was right, once I left I’ve rarely been home for fishing tournaments, or parties or get togethers of any kind. But thankfully I’m surrounded by a good support system and people who understand that I’m pursuing something that I’ve felt called to do. Especially when it comes to my wife, who makes it possible for me to continue touring by going the extra mile at home, being there for our daughter while I’m away.”
Last month, the lyric video for another track on South Shore, “Can’t Wake Up,” released. The song is another original that holds deep personal meaning to Hayden who wrote it after having a nightmare that recalled emotions of losing a best friend in a fatal car crash that also forever altered his life, as well as prophesied the start of the war in Ukraine. (See Hayden’s personal note below)
South Shore opens with the mission statement of “Write a Song.” the album’s first single. followed by observations, memories, and contemplations on the place he hails from, both then and now, on the title track. Hayden explores such themes as toxic relationships on “Crazy Love,” his place in the world in “Gasoline” and “Things These Days,” and how quickly and constantly things change in “Blink of an Eye.” Being the father of a two-year-old daughter sparked “Hush,” about a mother offering life lessons to her child. And Ward closes the LP with a philosophical meditation on what’s to come that he wrote for his wife, “The Great Unknown.” It’s all set within the band’s “amber-soaked melodies, tight musicianship, and casual elegance,” as The Boston Globe describes their sound.
“It’s the closest thing I’ve ever done to a concept album,” Ward notes. “I wanted to just recount my experience of growing up in a small town and what it meant and what it took to get out and leave that behind and try to pursue something, chase after something that was and is a dream. I used to joke that my greatest achievement was I got out of here because it was no easy feat.”
Soon after starting his band in his mid-20s, Hayden got out of Scituate to Boston, just up the coast. Known as a great American music city, it proved to be an ideal launching pad for his group. Ward Hayden & The Outliers (formerly known as Girls Guns and Glory) are the only act to win both a Boston Music Award for Act of the Year (as well as with six other BMAs) and legendary Beantown radio station WBCN’s annual Rumble.
Ward Hayden on
the special locations chosen for
“(Breaking Up with) My Hometown”
music video:
Some of the locations like Maria’s Subs and Rocco’s Barbershop are Scituate institutions. A guy I grew up with who now lives in California, for his birthday every year his mom buys him a Maria’s Sub and has it expedited and specially shipped to him.
And Rocco’s is a classic old school barbershop. People hanging around talking about everything under the sun and giving haircuts in traditional styles, long before those styles came back into fashion. The tv writer Peter Tolan (Murphy Brown, Home Improvement, Rescue Me) is also originally from Scituate and at one point was working on a tv show based on Rocco’s Barbershop, but the show has yet to come to fruition. But down in Scituate I know a lot of people are still pulling for it to happen.
Ronnie Shone’s General Store, which is right down the street from where I grew up, so it’s where my friend and I would hang out and think up things to do and usually find some way to get into trouble.
And the other locations are the Scituate Town Pier where all the fishing boats come in to unload their catch, and it was a spot where I spent a lot of time in my younger years going out on boats to fish and lobstering. Some of the best days of my life were spent going out on boats that went out of Scituate Harbor. So it’s a place that holds a lot of fond memories and a lot of fishing and lobstering stories.
We also went to Peggotty Beach which is a spot that’s great in the summer for going to the beach, but also a great spot to hide out in the cold month and drink a few beers on the beach with your friends. Nowadays it’s a place where my wife and I often bring our daughter so she can play in the sand and just walk along the beach and look out at the water.
And one of the last spots in the AJ McEachern Memorial Trail. AJ was a high school classmate of mine and a friend who I played hockey with for a while. He tragically passed away from an accident when he was working over the summer while we were still in high school. His passing had a deep and lasting impact on the whole town and especially on his classmates. There have been a lot of great fishing tournaments held in his honor, as he loved to fish, and a lot of great memories going his memorial trail to celebrate the tournament winner and the fish that got weighed in, and having some beers while catching up with old friends.
The group went on to later win an Independent Artist of the Year at the French Country Music Awards plus an Americana Music Awards nomination for Album of the Year. Playing some 200 dates across America over the last two decades as well as more than a dozen tours of Europe, they’ve won over a loyal following by melding country music’s and rock’n’roll’s finest roots with contemporary authenticity and appeal.
On their musical journey, Ward Hayden & The Outliers – currently Josh Kiggans on drums and percussion, Cody Nilsen on guitar and pedal steel, and Handsome Greg Hall on bass – have cut albums with such noted producers as as Boston studio legend Paul Kolderie (Radiohead, Hole, Warren Zevon, Morphine, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Uncle Tupelo) and roots rock guru Eric Ambel (Nils Lofgren, Marshall Crenshaw, The Bottle Rockets, Blue Mountain). South Shore returns them to recording in Hayden’s Atlantic coastal homeland with producer Rob Loyot, who recorded Ward’s first three albums, and who Hayden feels “might be my musical soulmate.”
Hayden’s career playing his “own brand of American roots music that satisfies like homemade apple pie” (Farmington Valley Times) has had benefits and challenges that he both enjoys. “I had a hankering and a desire to have some adventure and to just get out there and see the country and hopefully see the world. I’ve just been traveling around almost non-stop for pretty much my entire adult life,” Ward concludes. “Once I made the decision to do this, I knew it would be a roller coaster. I was obviously hoping for good things to happen, but it’s been ups and downs. For me, it’s been about hanging in there through all aspects of the ride and whether things are going well or when things get tough, not giving up.”
Ward Hayden & The Outliers on Tour
May
5 – Syracuse, NY – The 443 Social Club
6 – Rochester, NY – Abilene
7 – Columbus, OH – Natalie’s Grandview
11 – Lexington, KY – Thursday Night Live
12 – Indianapolis, IN – Duke’s Indy
16 – Richmond, VA – Get Tight Lounge
18 – Thomas, WV – The Purple Fiddle
19 – York, PA – Central Market House
20 – Easton, MD – Stoltz Listening Room
26 – Pembroke, MA – Soundcheck Studios
5/27 – Brownfield, ME – Stone Mountain Arts Center
June
3 – Bethlehem, PA – Godfrey Daniels
4 – Union Dale, PA – Arlo’s Country Store
17 – Cohasset, MA – South Shore Arts Festival
27 – Block Island, RI – Captain Nick’s
July
2 – Marblehead, MA – Marblehead Festival of Arts
3 – Mystic, CT – Blue Mondays Concert Series
14 & 15 – Breide, Norway – Norsk Countrytreff Festival 2023
“Can’t Wake Up” (Official Lyric Video)
Ward Hayden
on writing “Can’t Wake Up”
“The song came to me in a dream, in a nightmare I literally could not wake up from. It was before the war in Ukraine ever started, Later, seeing the areas that were just leveled by bombs and missiles in the news was crazy. Watching what’s recounted in the song play out in real life in this modern day and age was strange for me. If somebody decides to go to war against somebody else, it just wipes that life that people in the war zone knew right off the face of the earth.
“I wrote the song after my life in my hometown pretty much exploded and burned down into nothing. My best friend passed away in a car crash that caught fire; he and I were both about to go to Law School. In the wake of his passing my perspective on how I wanted to live really changed. I exploded the life I’d known up until that point. I decided to not go to Law School and join my father’s law practice, and instead pursue music as a more serious endeavor. My relationship with my long-term girlfriend of eight years came to an end and then I had a falling out with my other best friend, who had been in Girls Guns and Glory, but didn’t want to be away from home touring (he went on to pursue a career in Marine Biology). I think the stuff happening in my own life crept into my unconscious mind while I was dreaming of things being blown up and burned to the ground.
“It was majorly cathartic to write. In my mind, I relive the memories pretty much every time I hear this song and a lot of emotions come flooding back. For me the only option, once so many things in my hometown fell apart, was to venture out, keep moving forward, and see what else the world had to offer someone looking to start anew.”
# # #
