‘Smartness & Dollars’ has the feel of a song caught between impulse and contemplation. On one side, HAYBOY lets the music move with very little interference. The core performance was recorded live, without rehearsal and without a click track, giving the guitars, bass and drums a loose physicality that feels immediately human. On the other, Daniel Brown spent close to a year working on the vocal, searching for a delivery that could carry the song’s more personal realisation.
Throughout, the West Virginia songwriter frames ambition as something capable of becoming a distraction. ‘Smartness & Dollars’ is concerned with the point where achievement starts to replace connection, and where the pursuit of progress can quietly pull attention away from the people who give that progress meaning. It's a reflective idea housed inside a much more unruly arrangement.
But instead of turning the message into a neat piece of self-help philosophy, the music remains murky and muscular, with shades of desert rock, psychedelia and Americana moving through the same space.
As the first glimpse of a forthcoming album, ‘Smartness & Dollars’ also introduces a broader creative world around HAYBOY. He has created original pen-and-ink artwork inspired by mythology and folklore to accompany the project, including individual drawings for the first vinyl pressing.
In all, ‘Smartness & Dollars’ feels like the work of someone questioning what success is supposed to look like while still pushing creatively in every direction.