Hayden Arp is a producer, songwriter, and mixer from Alexandria, Virginia. He attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he studied electronic music composition. Arp has toured the US extensively, including occasionally joining Lucy Dacus as a guest performer.
He is the creative director of In The Round, an audio-visual production company specializing in virtual choir videos. Arp currently lives in Vienna, Austria, where he runs a studio working both in-person and remotely on projects for clients all around the world.
“Passenger,” the first single from Hayden Arp’s debut LP With Eliza, is a rumination on memory, intimacy, and the difficulty of writing it all down. The song was started, alongside the entire With Eliza album, in August of 2018, when Arp was living in Richmond, VA.
“There was a week in 2018 when I had the house to myself and nothing on the agenda. Sun and and the sounds of crickets flowed through the windows, and, as I began to relax into the openness, a number of songs began to flow out. In that week I tracked guitars for most songs on the With Eliza record.”
The song channels that lazy summer warmth, with gentle loops that mimic the soothing, repetitive motion of traveling down an endless highway. It’s an earworm you won’t want to get rid of any time soon, as Arp’s gentle delivery and the song’s enveloping embrace easily take you away from the everyday.
Name a perfect song and tell us why you feel that way.
“Keine Blumen” by Oehl. When I moved to Austria a year and a half ago, I knew very little about the Viennese music scene. And, I regret to say, I didn’t have high expectations. Oehl is one of the groups that has firmly changed that perception. Keine Blumen came out just a few weeks ago and has been on constant rotation. Poetic, sparse, and touching.
Explain the title of your album.
Eliza is a character that comes up again and again across the album. She is the partner through all the travels described on the album, and is consistently described as being good with words. I think of her as functioning as both – a real character in these stories, but also a metaphor for language itself, for being able to articulate yourself well. The title With Eliza is double-sided. It’s about times spent with Eliza, the person, as well as the desire to speak and write well.
Does your album have an overarching theme?
Writing, memory, road trips, and summertime in Virginia all are thematic through-lines. Also, there are a lot of cricket sounds.
What are some of the best venues you’ve played? Why?
I got to join my friend Lucy Dacus for a song at the 9:30 club in DC many years ago. I’d been seeing shows at 9:30 since I was young, and really loved getting the opportunity to see how it was run, and feel what it was like to be on that stage. Would be a dream to play there again someday.
Tell us about your favorite show you’ve ever played.
Back when I was studying at Oberlin in Ohio, I set up a concert in this old stone chapel we had there. It featured a number of my friends playing strings, and we had the whole show lit by candles. At the end we blew them all out, did the last song in the dark, and held this minute-long moment of silence after it was finished. It felt like a very strong communalizing (?) experience, which is what I’m after when I’m performing always.