Hayden will be performing at the Bishop tonight with local singer-songwriter Myah Evans opening.
“It’s the place in Bloomington, for me, for live music,” she said in regards to the Bishop.
Hayden has performed at the Bishop several times in the past and said she thinks it’s a great venue. The college audience is very important for her live show, she said, and the Bishop having a lower age restriction than other Bloomington venues allows a greater number of college students to attend the shows.
The cello has been a part of Hayden’s life since she was 7, she said. After graduating high school at 18 she was accepted into the master’s program at Yale University to further her studies in cello performance. She said she was glad to get through her classical training at such a young age because her real interests have always lain in the music she is making now.
“My classical training wasn’t very encouraging of thinking outside the box, but I still felt it was very important for what I do,” Hayden said.
When she finished the master’s program at 21 years old, she began to work on her career as a solo musician, a career she said music school didn’t prepare her for. Hayden said music school hadn’t taught her how to do things like book her own shows or even to actually make a living as a musician.
“You have to do it on your own,” she said. “You have to hit the road and you kind of have to figure out those things outside of school.”
Hayden also said playing lead guitar in several bands throughout high school had given her a general idea of what she was getting herself into.
“It’s a sonic landscape. It’s definitely building textures and lots of sounds you wouldn’t normally expect from a cello, and then also combining that with some other instruments and my voice as well,” she said while describing her music.
Hayden uses various techniques, such as using a drum stick on the strings or beating on the scroll of the cello, to produce these unexpected sounds.
People are often surprised that all the sounds on her albums are made by her through these techniques or electronic effects like the use of a loop machine, she said. Even if she chooses not to, everything heard in her recordings is reproducible onstage.
“A lot of what I write is done while improving and constantly manipulating the sound of my cello and working with effects and stuff like that,” she said. “A lot of ideas are born there, but I don’t necessarily want to restrict my writing to what I can do right there on the spot. I want to write as if I am writing for a quartet or a chamber group and then record that and then be able to do exactly that live.”
Aspects of her classical training, such as the virtuoso element and the structure of some songs, are still present in her music, she said, but it is combined with the influence of the music she grew up listening to.
Hayden listed Jonny Greenwood, lead guitarist of Radiohead and composer of the soundtracks for movies like “There Will Be Blood” and “Inherent Vice,” as well as the Japanese noise rock band, Melt-Banana, as two of these important influences.
Hayden recently returned from touring with the Indianapolis folk pop duo Lily & Madeleine and will be going back on the road with the duo in February.
When she isn’t touring, Hayden said she spends most of her time on the farm that has been in her family since the 1890s, where her home studio is located. She is working on the currently-untitled follow-up to her 2012 album, “Solid State Cello.”
