Halford takes on the ‘former guy’ in new song
Redwood High grad takes on ‘the former guy’ in new song
I’m always happy to hear from alumni of the IJ’s Lobby Lounge concert series for young Marin musicians that I produced from 2014 until the pandemic halted our 2020 season. I’m guessing a couple hundred kids passed through the Lobby Lounge over the years, and I get a sense of fatherly (grandfatherly?) pride when they check in, letting me know what they’re up to as they go on with their lives and careers.
It does my heart good to hear that some are pursuing music full-time and others are enjoying it as a sideline, hobby or an avocation — music for its own sake.
Which all goes to say that I got an email the other day from Aaron Halford, who was the lead singer and frontman of a dynamic Redwood High School band called Canopy that we featured in the Lobby Lounge in 2016. After graduating from Redwood, he went on to Boston University, finishing with a degree in journalism, a major he’s had second thoughts about.
“It took me a few years to realize that I’d rather be studying music,” he says. “At this point, journalism is not what I want to do, but I think it helped me with my songwriting,
“I didn’t start out thinking that I would make this song political.
It’s the first time I’ve written anything political or theoretically controversial.”
— Aaron Halford
teaching me how to look at the world in a critical way.”
Between journalism and music, I’m not sure which is a tougher field to make it in these days. Whatever the case, Halford, now 22, left Boston, escaping its frigid winter,
drove across the country, moved into a house in Berkeley with a friend and began preparing to become a working musician once the COVID cloud lifts. I remember thinking when I saw him perform in high school that he had the voice, stage presence and talent to be a successful singersongwriter and performer if he chose to go that way. As the son of Marin singer-songwriter Jeffrey Halford, it’s definitely in his blood.
In his email, he included a link to his new song, “Nowhere to be Found,” an R&Bflavored tune that, after hearing it, convinces me that my initial impression of his potential was correct. Toni Morrison, as I recall, says all good art is political. And “Nowhere to be Found” unabashedly follows that axiom in its critical take on the 45th president, aka “the former guy.”
“I didn’t start out thinking that I would make this song political,” he says. “It’s the first time I’ve written anything political or theoretically controversial. I want to make music with live instruments that can
withstand the test of time in the way that Motown or Stax or the other great R&B labels have been able to do with their artists. But my goal was not only to make a great R&B song. If I can have something to say and influence people with something that’s interesting based on my own life or on current events happening in society, that’s what I gravitate toward.”
In “Nowhere to be Found,” he lambasts the former president for his false claims of voter fraud, his policies on immigration, his opposition to a woman’s right to choose and his mismanagement of the pandemic response, referencing the grim milestone of 200,000 COVID deaths in the United States, which was the case when he recorded the vocal. There are now more than 511,000. That illustrates the difficulty in writing about current events — they only stay current for a moment. The anger and frustration that initially motivated the song also changed. It got stronger after Jan. 6.
“I titled the song ‘Nowhere to be Found’ not to suggest that Trump still doesn’t carry a lot of influence, but rather that he was absent when the country needed him the most,” Halford says. “After the Capitol riot, I kind of hit my fed-upness with Trump and his supporters.”
Some listeners might be puzzled, as I was, by his use of the year 1942 to represent a backward time before civil rights, the women’s movement and other social justice causes that would become prominent in future decades. The problem is that 1942 was also the first full year of World War II, when Americans were mobilizing to fight a war on two fronts, largely united under the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, arguably one of our greatest presidents. A better choice might have been 1954, the year of the McCarthy
hearings, but that’s just my take. Halford points out that 1942 rings better in the rhythm of the song but agrees that it isn’t “some hallmark year for awful behavior.”
“Nowhere to be Found” was recorded the way music is recorded these days — remotely. It was started in collaboration with Riley Overend, a friend from music class at Redwood who went to Boston College. Overend, who has done sports reporting for the IJ, sent Halford some piano and drum tracks he’d come up with, inviting him to do something with them.
Halford wrote the lyrics to fit the chord structure, which became the foundation of the song. Working in his bedroom studio, he added bass, rhythm guitar and vocals. The vocals, by the way, are stellar. Matt Michna, a former bandmate in Canopy who’s a senior at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, contributed a lead guitar solo and Augie Bello from the New School in New York added saxophone, the finishing touch.
“I want to create a groove that stands alone even without the lyrics. I want my music to have universal appeal.”
— Aaron Halford
Halford was inspired by the classic protest/political songs he grew up listening to by the likes of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye and James Brown. He has no ambition, though, to become known as a protest singer.
“I know that there is socially conscious music that’s mainly concerned with lyrics, and that’s great,” he says. “But I want to create a groove that stands alone even without the lyrics. I want my music to have universal appeal.”