Time always seemed to stop whenever one of Michael Hayes’s songs would crackle to life on the radio inside my parents’ car on a cold-as-chrome winter’s afternoon.

I remember being 14 and hunched toward the gleaming dashboard dial as if receiving a secret transmission. There was always something inviting, if somehow slightly baleful, that pulled me closer to Hayes’s soft flame of a voice. Even now, that music always manages to summon those memories, faded like Polaroid pictures with the sepia creeping in.

OK, so I wasn’t that kid in the car, and the songs Hayes wrote with his criminally under-heard bands, Lemonpeeler and the Vinyl Skyway, weren’t on that radio. But they should have been. In another age, they almost certainly would have been. Nevertheless, those tunes are a reminder of everything that first enthralled me about music when I was that teenager, trying to find my way in the world and being unsure how to get there.

Ultimately, there’s a greater emotional truth at work here than the rote facts of when much of this music was actually released (this past decade, if you must) and where I first heard it (sitting at my desk, up against another deadline). But those mundane details don’t capture what makes Hayes’s supremely lovely singing and songwriting so trenchant and transporting. And after all, where the music takes you is really what counts.

The truth is, the first time I heard Michael’s songs, I felt a flush of instantaneous recognition: this was music at once bewitching and bittersweet; earthbound and ethereal. Most importantly, though, was the feeling of connection to songs and a songwriter who sounded like a close friend and confidante.

“Diamonds Down The Drain” is a captivating document of Michael Hayes’s music and the scope of his sublime gifts (the band’s not too bad either). Listening to this collection is like holding a kaleidoscope to the light – gazing through the glass and glimpsing a decade of artful inspiration and hard work, refracted back as sunshine tinged with shadow. As always, with Michael’s intuitive touch, the ratio of light and dark depends wholly upon the angle with which you look through the lens.

Indeed, these songs sparkle and glint like the diamonds they are. And thankfully, they have not slipped from our grasp. Rather, like a handful of jewels sitting in the palm of our hand, we have them here with us, reminding us of the interior radio that’s tuned, timelessly, to our dreams and imaginations.

J. Perry, September 2009