Liam Hayes looks more than a little like Bob Dylan–specifically Dylan circa Blonde on Blonde, after a shopping spree on Carnaby Street–and fans and supporters will attest to the magnitude of Hayes’s vision almost as fervently as Dylan’s did his. Yet in the past 12 years his band Plush has released just two singles and–as of February, when Fed came out on the Japanese label After Hours–two albums.
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Most of the album was recorded and mixed a year ago, but Hayes spent another year tweaking and rerecording. Basic tracks were cut all over the city–in traditional recording studios like Delmark’s Riverside and Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio, with a mobile setup on a soundstage, at the Congress Theater, and even on the roof of a south-side loft building. Hayes hired Tom Tom MMLXXXIV (formerly Tom Tom 84), a veteran arranger who’s worked with the likes of Earth, Wind & Fire, Phil Collins, and the Jacksons–to polish the brass and string charts and recruit topflight session men to play them. Each song was painstakingly assembled–on tape, no computers–from the numerous sessions. “When it came time to mix the album there was a stack of tape seven feet long and three feet deep on the floor…probably 50 reels of tape,” says Isotope 217 bassist Matt Lux, who played on the entire album.
Hayes grew up in Chicago; he attended Lincoln Park High School and the Chicago Academy for the Arts and then took (but never completed) a few music classes at Roosevelt University. He began performing sporadically with Plush in 1990, and in ’94 the band released a remarkable, beautifully orchestrated single on Drag City, the label owned by Hayes’s childhood friend Dan Koretzky. A less satisfying single came out on the now defunct Flydaddy label in 1997, and the following year Drag City released Plush’s long-awaited debut album, More You Becomes You–for all intents and purposes a solo piano record.
If anyone has a right to feel slighted it’s Murphy, who’s known Hayes since high school and had played in Plush for more than a decade when Jennings was brought in. But Murphy says he was relieved: “I was like, ‘Finally.’ The year before I stopped getting calls was a year of constantly thinking, ‘How much more of this can I take?’ But at the same time, those tunes have always knocked me out, the vision has knocked me out, and it’s always been fun to be a part of what’s going on with him because he’s genuinely, like, crazy. He’s one of those music personalities that you read about, except that I was in the room when crazy things would happen. When he sent me a copy of the CD it included a letter that said, ‘It’s finished, I think.’ He could tinker with it the rest of his life; it could be another Smile.”
