In every “framily,” every workplace, every campus, every community, we need a house band. We need a soundtrack to daily life. I’m incredibly grateful to have friends & fellow-travelers in close geographic proximity cranking out such consistently compelling & conscientiously crafted songs as found on the new album by my community’s house band, Hayden Mattingly & Honeybrook.
Having worked at the same higher education institution for more than 20 years, I am always grateful to learn about my colleagues’ more interesting hobbies, second careers, & side hustles. It was at least 15 years ago when my sadly-now-deceased colleague Kurt told me about a band that he heard jamming in the parking lot by the Catholic Church at a festive seasonal shindig. The lead singer, guitar player, & principal songwriter of the group that was then-called Tenshades is wildlife biologist & environmental science scholar Hayden Mattingly.
Not long after learning about Tenshades, I made sure that we booked them at a local street festival. In addition to the sparkling originals in their set, the cover songs in their repertoire confirmed a kinship with the psych-jangle of place-based roots rook, ranging from R.E.M. to the Band. For the current live shows, the band is now called Honeybrook, a name that perfectly evokes the ensemble’s organic sweet & flowing audio ambiance. Over the years, my former student, keyboardist, & solo-artist in his-own-right Drew Griswold brought more to their live shows, which we frankly don’t get enough of in Cookeville, maybe two-or-three a year if we are lucky! (Griswold doesn’t appear on the current offering, but if you see Honeybook in-person, you will hopefully catch him.)
With 2022’s The Next Moonlight & now the brand-new-for-2025 release From Dreams We Emerge, Hayden Mattingly has distinguished himself as a visionary rock poet whose literary songbook is a profound extension of his love for the natural world in all its wild diversity & spangled specificity. How else do we get an anthemic lament for an endangered species like we find in the song “Candlefish”!? This gorgeous & groovy hymn gets an uplifting bounce to its serious topic by the seriously talented rhythm section of Benjamin Clark on bass & co-producer Mike Harrison on drums. The late-disc heartfelt ballad “Second Stand” alludes to the unlikely courage that we find later in life to align with our values of love & truth, to defend against all that offends love & truth.
The natural world bursts from the grooves on every track found on this record, even & especially with overt lyrical references to biology & ecology found on some of the songs. It’s no wonder that Hayden draws so much of his inspiration on the trails that traverse the mountains & the creeks & the caves of our local bioregion. When Hayden shared his appreciation for the early-20th-century “vagabond of beauty” Everett Ruess (referenced in “Candlefish”), the internal recognition I experienced was from the misty depths. When this album gets its official streaming release, I cannot recommend it enough for taking your smartphone & best headphones on your favorite local trail, to experience these songs as a solo-walking-meditation, embedded in the ecological expanse from which they are born.
When the album opens with “Alive,” listeners immediately get injected & infected with the record’s thesis statement. When the narrator asks us to “adjourn from the rotten status quo,” he doesn’t need to ask us twice. We are as ready now as we were when Stipe, Buck, Mills, & Berry asked us to “Begin the Begin” more than 40 years ago. With the singer, we are “coming alive,” because we are! As I spent a few weeks allowing the advance listening copy to hook me on this needed addition to the Hayden Mattingly canon, I found myself texting the songwriter about certain tracks. With “Alive,” we shared a chat about its affinity with the late mystic Howard Thurman’s viral meme: “Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Punctuated by the pulse of Harrison’s drums, this track is the perfect opening track. It grabs us by the soul & skin; we are all in!
The genius that drips from these dreams emerged to be fully formed on a recent winter-break creative-binge in a rural recording studio. Enter co-producer, collaborator, & technical curator Cody Smith, whose Sunday Drive studio, found at the end-of-the-road overlooking a vast vista in Overton County, provided the physical & spiritual playground for creating this jammy, juicy, & fulfilling feast for our ears. Entering the amazing room that another regional musician simply called “sick” for the first time, I immediately got vibes of similarly sacred temples of sound in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, & Motown, an inspiration for his labor-of-love that Cody immediately owned & acknowledged. Even before almost getting lost on the back roads finding Sunday Drive, I knew that this album acknowledged a delicious debt to the very dirt of our homeplaces. Now that I have visited the hallowed space that Smith has created, I will always revere & recommend it.
While “classic rock” may be more of a contested referent for hardcore collectors & nerds than a genre per se, Hayden Mattingly’s albums are the greatest instant-classics of classic rock that your friends outside our regional scene may have never heard of, a reliable & humble vibe of warmth, fuzz, & funk. Because if Sunday Drive studio isn’t the Fame or Muscle Shoals Sound of the Cumberland Mountains, it might also be our Big Pink. A defining sound of classic rural country funk might be the wonky wah-wah of The Band’s Garth Hudson’s clavinet on “Up On Cripple Creek.” The sound of that addictive boogie shows up on “Highland Dig,” attributed to Hayden’s sister Mary Ben Bonham, who adds a spoken-word interlude to that crunchy earworm. It makes me want to do my silly hippy dances, just thinking about it.
Stop whatever else you’re doing, no, really do it right now. Then fire-up your best stereo with its banging speakers, give your heart over to the secret glories to be discovered in From Dreams We Emerge.
Dig it. Dance to it. Do that again. Then tell all your friends. -Andrew William Smith/Sunfrog/Teacher On The Radio
April 2025
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