Like any right-thinking 20-year-old hipster, Hayley Sales counts among the musicians she admires Jack Johnson, Ben Harper and Dave Matthews. The difference between Sales and her contemporaries is that she is competition
for any of aforementioned singer-songwriters.
Sales’ first major-label release, Sunseed, is a triumph. With a feel-good message, philosophy-light lyrics and fancy fret work, the first single, “What You Want,” is Jack Johnson meets Norah Jones. Sales also sounds suspiciously like Jones on “Wish You Were Here,” as well as on Sunseed’s other more obviously adult-contemporary offerings.
However, unlike Jones, Sales employs a phrasing that pays homage to ’40s jazz—and, surprisingly, it works. In fact, this album is so well produced that, while it may offer nods to the familiar, it never veers into cloying or derivative territory.
With a guitar style reminiscent of Johnson, an attitude that echoes the cool of Harper, and Matthews’ sense of disenfranchisement, Sales is a talent to reckon with. The Vancouver Island resident lives on an organic blueberry farm that also houses the other family business, a recording studio relocated from her birthplace of Washington, D.C. The studio’s clients included Miles Davis, Sweet Honey in the Rock and The Grateful Dead.)
With a solid musical pedigree, groovy connections (Wavy Gravy still records at the blueberry farm) and right-on politics, Sales could be the post-millennial It Girl.
A debut to note.
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