Hayley Sales

Everyone has a story. What’s mine? I’m twenty–three years old, living in a cottage with a recording studio on my parents’ organic blueberry farm located on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. I’m fortunate to be surrounded not only by nature at its finest, but also by family, friends, and Tibetan monks who live in the temple across the street. We also guest young WWOOFers (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) that travel to our farm from all over the world to work in exchange for free room and board during harvest season. Over the past summer, while we were recording my second album When the Bird Became a Book, I’d often run outside between takes to help them chop wood, plant carrots, paint gates, eat way too many handfuls of blueberries, get in a surf or swim, and on several occasions, bump into black bears in the backyard.

My parents are basically what one would call ‘children of the sixties’ who have instilled in me values for preservation of the environment, social justice and most of all, they exposed me to music, to art. When I was little, my dad had a recording studio in the basement of our house. Both night and day, the walls and floors were rattling to the beats and rhythms of the rap and hip-hop artists that would come in to record. Apparently, I would drape myself in dresses and promenade through their sessions belting random melodies as loud as I could. I was already soul deep in a love affair with music by the time I tackled the ripe old age of four.  At age five, I danced into the Nutcracker as a sugar plum fairy and over the next eleven years partook in roughly 90 other plays.

Many of the experiences that make up my rather short history sound fictional; I definitely feel blessed to have had so many eye-opening opportunities so early on in my life. Whether it was touring with a Hindu saint from India, meeting the Dalai Lama, trekking around the world with my clothes shoved into a guitar case, self-penning and recording my debut album Sunseed at age nineteen, being taught by Patch Adams how to juggle or, on a more serious note watching my older brother survive a brain tumor, the pages of my past are definitely jam packed with a variety of the good, bad and the very unordinary.

The last couple of chapters have been filled with recording, surfing, touring, music, environmental activism, and the new album, When The Bird Became A Book.  In total, my dad (Papa Sales) and I spent roughly nine months in the studio recording and mixing the music. Everything was recorded at GlassWing studios here on the blueberry farm except for the bass and drum tracks, which we recorded at Two Stix, a neat little studio owned by the drummer of Death Cab for Cutie, down in Seattle. My drummer, Tacket Brown, was like a kid in a candy store. From floor to ceiling, the walls were coated with snares, toms, cymbals and kick drums.

The recording process was organic and social. Everyone from Donavon Frankenreiter and G Love to my three-year old niece made guest appearances. One night we managed to shove twenty people into the vocal room to sing and slap their knees for the song “Not in his Garden.” Another day, in search of a certain unobtainable sound, I rummaged through the barn, found a heavy chain, brought it out to the gravel, lifted it and dropped it, jumped up and down for joy, brought out the recorder and wound up using it as a percussion instrument.

Over the next year, I hope to be travelling and promoting When the Bird Became a Book. The travel junkie in me can already feel the road churning in my shoes. There is nothing I love more than travelling except maybe music. Put the two of them together and even the bleakest stretch may as well be the yellow brick road.

While touring and promoting this album however, I plan to focus more and more on, and become more and more involved in the fight for oceanic and marine life preservation. I am hoping to use my art to bring awareness to the pressing issues at hand, and likewise to inspire. I think music is an exchange of energies, and I love the exchange. It makes me feel good and inspired me to write music that I hope makes other people feel good.