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The state of the world needs sweetness, honey and sunshine you can pour at will. And while not quite the global solution, Hayden Everett can individually do that for you with each spin of his latest album, So The Sun Can Pour, a melodic salve that just melts into your skin like a brightly lit morning. Each song is a scenic trail into literary vibes, vistas of guitars and vocals creating a horizon you willing walk into, a true journey of earnestness into folk excellence. Keen to learn more about the topography of this incredible album, we asked the songwriter himself to break down each song: 

Coin (Prelude)

Coin is the thesis statement for the album, a welcome and introduction to the sonic and lyrical world of So The Sun Can Pour. A one stanza poem that I wrote while solo backpacking in Glacier National Park, it immediately opens up the central theme of opposites and nondualism, that all things are tied together by this beautiful and mysterious system of counter balance. On my trek, I walked past flourishing fields of Fireweed, a beautiful purple flower that only grows after wildfire, and is often one of the first things to pop up after a landscape has been scorched. This flower served as a constant reminder and the pillar of what the album would become: death turns to life, love turns to grief and back again. It ends with the line that would become the title of the album, “so let’s let it rain so the sun can pour.”

Killer Whale

This one captures the euphoria and longing of new love. It was one of those songs that just spilled out of me without really trying. It feels light and free and has this forward motion in it that captures precisely how the honeymoon phase feels to me. Ironically, the slow down outro ended up being an accidental foreshadow of how the relationship would unfold without me even knowing it at the time.

Montana Day

Montana Day actually originated as a poem written by a very spontaneous, fast friend named Ry. He came to visit my roommate while I was living and working in Glacier NP, and we hit it off and had a super fun and meaningful weekend together. He wrote this poem at the end of the weekend about not wanting to leave, and we took my camper van to the river that day and I turned his words into a song. Certainly one of my favorite days ever and has become one of the dearest songs to my heart. Felt perfect to record this one, along with the rest of the album, up at the cabin that my great grandpa built in the mountains in CA with a bunch of my best buds.

Bird Eye View

As the captain and tour guide on a 100 year old wooden 50 passenger boat on St. Mary Lake in Glacier, I met a lot of really inspiring people. One that stood out above the rest however, was a blind man whose ability to perceive the world left me deeply moved and convicted. I wrote the song out in the backcountry as I was reflecting on the people I’d been meeting, and I actually sang it aloud as I was walking in order to alert the grizzly bears that I was coming around the corner. It’s highly advised to make some frequent ruckus as a safety precaution, especially when out there by yourself, so I figured I might as well sing the song I was writing in my head aloud to kill two birds with one stone. The story of the blind man told in Bird Eye View attempts to capture the precious gift of life and the infinite ways we can absorb and digest the beauty around us.

Wind Song

Wind Song is a very true telling of an experience I had at the summit of Divide Mountain in Montana. I was at my spiritual wits end and told God that I’d believe in her existence if she stopped the wind, which happened to be howling up there. Nothing happened, like I thought, and after a few minutes I turned my head and got ready to head back down the mountain. When I turned my head, I realized the wind was only loud because I was facing precisely in the direction for it to funnel straight into my ears. When I shifted I realized it was really just a breeze. I cracked up at the universe’s sense of humor and wrote this song about that moment.

Angela

This one is a harsh but playful critique of the city of Los Angeles. It sounds like a breakup song or a mean letter, and it is in many ways. LA to me encapsulates much of the antithesis of this record: people are trying desperately to live in the sun 365 days a year, and then are confused when all the grass is dead. The traffic, pollution, vanity, and political hypocrisy started to really get to me when I was living there, so this is the result. But honestly, I would never write this song if I didn’t have substantial love and care for that place - I’m just hopeful it can be better. 

So We Swim

So We Swim is certainly the most devastating song on the album. It details the longer story of the relationship that inspired “Killer Whale,” in a classic sounding verse-style folk song that feels like sitting on the front porch at night. With just acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and piano, it feels like the instrumentation matches the intense intimacy of the lyrics and the storytelling. This one also feels like a nice deep breath in between the intensity and loudness of the songs on either end of it.

Roll On Thru

Roll On Thru is about the consistency of seasons. Good or bad, everything passes and everything ebbs and flows. I wrote the chorus as I was solo backpacking in Iceland and got swallowed up by a big storm out of nowhere. It completely drenched me and when I was in it it felt like it would never end, but ended up actually completely passing through in only 20 minutes. The grass was left hydrated and happy and the skies were clear and fresh. In that moment, also having just gone through a really hard breakup the week before, I realized that all storms roll thru; it's their most consistent quality in a way. This song contains one of my favorite lines, and one that grounds the main theme of the album as a whole: "Your tears are just water for the seeds at your feet that are waiting to bloom."

Taylor

Taylor might just be the most special and important song I’ve yet to write in my lifetime. I wrote it as the Best Man speech for my brother Taylor’s wedding, a task that proved to be very difficult when trying to capture my infinite love for him. A few days before the wedding I still didn’t have a song that felt like it even came close to capturing that love or showing what he means to me, and in a moment of frustration I gave up on the idea of it needing to be a song. I was journaling a few hours later about what he means to me, and I looked down at the page having written all of these “firsts,” where he was right beside me. I realized that he had been breathing in the moments of learning what it means to be alive along with me, whether seemingly small and trivial moments, or big formative ones like my first breakup. The song arrived to me in the nick of time and I was able to sing it at his wedding, very poorly, a few days later through heavy sobs.

Glue

Glue is a haunting but still lighthearted waltz about grief and love being one in the same. It is very intentionally the final song on the album, both because it wraps up the central theme of duality and because it deals with endings, loss, and finiteness and acts as such for the experience of the record itself. It’s a very simple sounding song but contains lines that I mulled on for months and months. It feels like it captures my worldview and value system very effectively, musing on the way it seems the universe functions and how everything is held together. Circling back to “Coin (Prelude),” it summarizes the stories, questions, letters, and poems from throughout the album in one line: “pain is the puzzle but also the glue.”