HAYBOY finds something more valuable than success on ‘Smartness & Dollars’

For all its distorted guitars and psychedelic atmosphere, ‘Smartness & Dollars’ is ultimately a song about priorities.

HAYBOY, the solo project of West Virginia songwriter Daniel Brown, uses the new single to question the value of ambition when it begins to crowd out the relationships and experiences that make life feel meaningful. It’s a simple idea on paper, but the way he frames it gives the track considerably more weight.

Musically, ‘Smartness & Dollars’ sits comfortably between alternative rock, art rock and the heavier edges of psychedelia. There’s a looseness to the performance that immediately works in its favour, helped by the fact that the core track was recorded live with drummer Dylan Hill and bassist Steven Buehler without rehearsal or a click track.

While the instrumental performance was captured quickly, he spent close to a year refining the vocal until it carried the emotional tone he was after. And that disparity between instinct and patience is one of the more interesting things about the song. The music feels as though it’s happening in the moment, while the words come from a much longer period of reflection.

There are echoes of Queens of the Stone Age, All Them Witches and The Black Angels in the heavier, more hypnotic corners of the arrangement, but HAYBOY’s Americana undercurrent prevents the track from settling neatly into any one scene.

‘Smartness & Dollars’ also acts as the opening statement for a wider album project, with the artist extending its themes into visual art through a series of hand-drawn illustrations inspired by mythology and folklore.

On ‘Smartness & Dollars’, the question is an especially human one: what is achievement worth if the pursuit of it costs you the people who matter?

And HAYBOY wraps that thought in a track that is heavy, strange and quietly vulnerable, allowing the emotional message to emerge through the distortion rather than compete with it.