The Longest Day

Hay’s debut, The Gathering, was an earthy gem of 2017. Now Hay returns with The Longest Day, recorded live over four days in Giant Wafer studios in Wales and mixed by Toby’s brother Tim. Its release coincides with the summer solstice, and it is another bright offering, both more celebratory and more urgent than its predecessor. Hay is a 12 string guitarist and his style, with its penchant for unusual tunings, is all his own. His distinctive sound often comes from a desire to make his guitar sound like another instrument altogether. He engages with landscapes and their inhabitants, and while The Gathering painted a musical portrait of Hay’s home, the scope of The Longest Day is broader. He visits America (Leaving Chicago and Marvin the Mustang From Montana) and Cornwall (Late Summer In Boscastle), but also travels inward: a heartbreaking and joyous pair of tracks - Curlew part I and Curlew part II - explores loss and grief, the circularity of time and its healing qualities. On the title track he looks both forward and back in time while recognising the importance and difficulty of living in the present. These themes - travel and return, time, the common ground between natural rhythmic processes and the rhythms of human life - occur throughout the album and are reflected in its enigmatic musical language. Where Hay’s themes have become more expansive, so has his musical range. There are elements of jazz, the country twang of a violin, the exploratory tendencies of modern composition. The result is an atmosphere of collaboration, and indeed Hay’s fellow musicians (Aidan Thorne on double bass, drummer Mark O’Connor, saxophonist Greg Sterland and violinist David Grubb) play a crucial role in the overall sound. But in the end it is all grounded in Hay’s deep understanding of and affinity with his surroundings.