Album Review: Elk-Lake Serenade by Hayden

Hayden Desser, the mysterious Canadian, has been ploughing his own idiosyncratic furrow for almost a decade. It isn't easy to describe what he does, but it is has caught the attention of the likes of Steve Buscemi and Neil Young. It's Young who sometimes springs to mind as Hayden's fourth album meanders pensively through its 15 tracks (16 counting the hidden one).

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Elk-Lake Serenade, Toronto singer-songwriter Hayden’s fourth album, could be the soundtrack to some Hollywood tearjerker. The sweeping strings of “Wide Eyes” open the record on a Tom Waits note and lead into the story of a man desperate to impress an old love. Hayden’s comic-tragic male protagonist/archetype works his way through several different phases: Infidelity, death, drinking problems, divorce and, in the album’s coda, an arrest.

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