When songwriting is necessary

The new album “Unstable Oscillators” from Greenfield-based musician Daniel Hales is a compilation of three EPs that he has completed since the pandemic hit. Recorded under the name of Selah haleS (that’s not a mistype), this music is darker and more personal than we’ve heard in Hales’ previous work with his band Frost Heaves.

Hales wrote these songs while not only coping with the isolation imposed by COVID-19, but also dealing with a series of major losses in his life. So this was more than just music he wanted to make — it was music he needed to make.

Hales will celebrate the release of “Unstable Oscillators” with a live stream show on Friday, April 9 at 7:30 p.m. The show will also double as the 12th-anniversary show for his band’s first album, “Frost Heaves,” by Frost Heaves and Hales.

He will be joined by Frost Heaves bassist James Lowe for this performance.

“Covid Summer Shades” was the first EP in this trilogy and was released last summer. It was followed by “Answering Machines,” which came out in early March, and the final EP “Unstable Oscillators” that, combined with the other two will be released as a full album on April 2.

You can purchase this music at bandcamp.com.

“I was kind of releasing these as they came,” Hales explained in a recent interview. “I sort of thought of them as a trilogy. I’ve been referring to them as my sad bastard trilogy. When I was finishing up the third one, it just seemed a chance to put them all together as they are thematically linked.”

And these songs do work well together. Hales, who is also a poet (his book “¿Cómo Hacer Preguntas? or How to Make Questions: 69 Instructional Poems in English” was released last spring), has always written lyrics rich in imagery and beautiful phrases.

This album is no different.

Yet the songs are bound together by their emotion, be it anger or sadness. Much of Hales’ writing here is extremely direct and personal.

For example, he explores the end of a relationship on the catchy “Corona Summer Song” as he sings “You moved out on March 15/Left me and the cat in quarantine/Scaling back my summer plans/Covid’s holding them for ransom.” And on “It’s Hard” he laments that “It’s so hard to lose the love that held you for so long.”

“Yes, some are very blunt and it’s a very different kind of lyric writing,” Hales said in describing how the new songs came about. “‘Corona Summer Song’ was the first one that I recorded for this album, and it was sort of the anger and sadness explosion that kicked it all off. But some of these songs are hopefully more nuanced than that.”

Hales admitted that so honestly revealing his feelings in some of his songs was sometimes times difficult to do. “It’s a little uncomfortable for me,” he said. “There’s one song off the second EP that I didn’t put on the collection because after hearing it, people were calling me and asking if I was okay. But some of this is like a more intense version of what I’ve already done and is more Frost Heaves in feel.”

“Unstable Oscillators” is not without its moments of humor, even if the humor is rather on the dark side, and not all of these songs were written during the past year. “Cross on the Hill,” a song that combines acoustic guitar and synths to great effect was written about 25 years ago. Hales never felt ready to record it until now.

He was working on the song last year around the time that his mother passed away, and while this loss was not directly reflected in the lyrics, he said this loss did inform the music.

“I wrote it when I was a much younger man,” Hales said. “I knew I’d play it for friends and they’d encourage me to put it on an album and I’d be like, ‘I can’t, I haven’t suffered enough loss to really feel it.’ ... 2020 took care of that.”

When Hales started work on this project he intended it to be a solo project — not only because of the isolation imposed by the pandemic but because his bandmate, bassist James Lowe, was sidelined with a hand injury making work on a Frost Heaves album impossible. But Hales didn’t get very far into recording before he started working with Patrick Porter, a musician/artist friend who resides in Austin, Texas, who contributed bass, synths and even “angry guitars” on the first two EPs. Lowe recovered from his injury in time to participate on the third EP.

Like Frost Heaves albums “Unstable Oscillators” is a mix of sounds and styles with textures and layers of sound and an assortment of effects, making this music impossible to tag with an easy label. From soft melodic-driven songs like “Side of Your Mind,” to the raw energy of “Sang the Hangman,” on which Hales’ fierce vocals recall the days he led the band SHArQ, Hales and his collaborators create a unique brand of indie rock in which the listener hears something new with each listen.

Don’t worry about this being a maudlin listening experience, because it’s not at all. On the contrary, there is some fun, upbeat music here. The title track is the perfect example, a mid-tempo tune with whirling synths set against a sampled steady beat provided by a Billy Martin, of Medeski, Martin and Wood fame and some funky bass provided by Lowe.

“So Hard” is an acoustic folk tune, of which there are two versions, one clean and the other not so clean. On the clean one, Hales has some fun injecting various old telephone sounds in place of a bleep. And the aforementioned “Corona Summer Song” is a poppy number that you could sing along too — if you aren’t paying attention to the words.

“That’s a whole type of song that I love when I think of bands like the Smiths,” Hales said. “It’s that kind of music that, if you aren’t paying attention to the words, it’s a really, upbeat chipper tune. And then you listen to the words and the dude is thinking of killing himself.”

Looking back, was the writing and recording of these songs as cathartic as he hoped it would be?

“If nothing else I can’t get the solace I need, but I’m going to express what I’m going through, and so it had that,” Hales said. “But at a certain point there were some songs that I just pushed away because it’s done, so it was therapeutic, but it was push and pull because I didn’t want to remain in that head space for so long”

He added that it was another reason that he released the songs in bursts as he did.

“I didn’t want to sit on these songs for a long time,” he said. “I wanted to push them out and hopefully push a lot of the yucky feelings out too, and it sort of did that.”

For the April 9 show, Hales and Lowe will play songs off the new album, a few covers and some songs off “Contrariwise: Songs From Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass,” which debuted with a live show at the Shea Theater in 2013.

And, of course, they will play songs off “Frost Heaves,” the album that Hales said is the band’s favorite, which was released on April 10, 2009.

The live-stream will be filmed partly in The Shea Theater Arts Center (acoustic), partly at Hales’ home in Greenfield. Tickets are on a sliding scale from $1 to you name it, with 40% of sales directly benefiting The Shea Theater Arts Center. Tickets can be purchased at https://www.showclix.com/event/shea-presents-daniel-hale.

Sheryl Hunter is a music writer who lives in Easthampton. Her work has appeared in various regional and national magazines. You can contact her at soundslocal@yahoo.com.

This post originally appeared in the Greenfield Recorder.