A Brief History of The Irons
The Irons is an Austin-based band signed to Porchfire Records. This article was written entirely of my own volition as a long-time fan. You can listen to their music on Spotify, Bandcamp, and most other streaming services.
I first saw Hayden Havard and his motley crew of band members in a small coffee house in East Texas playing to a crowd of about a dozen locals, myself included. Back then they were called “Rules and Regulations”, and had a slight if not overt Christian undertone to their music.
During the performance Havard danced back and forth from his microphone to his keyboard, lighting up the room with his energy, and by the end my mouth was sore from smiling.
What became clear to me that night was that Havard had a potential for songwriting and composition that clearly expanded beyond the borders of his small hometown. It would be only a couple of years before he and the marvelous guitarist from Rules and Regulations, Caleb Tippit, moved to Austin to pursue their new band, The Irons, full time.
However, as Havard expresses in his music, this process of fulfilling your dreams, especially when you come from such humble beginnings, is streaked with loneliness and self-doubt, but also a magical amount of freedom.
As Havard grew as a person and as a musician in Lufkin, Texas he must have slowly begun to realize what I did that night at the coffee house. But to reach his full potential he would have to do something few are capable of. He would have to shed everything that wasn’t himself, including many of the imposed cultural and moral norms of his pastoral surroundings.
The Irons would not be a Christian Rock band. It would be a Human Rock band which would aim to describe honestly and poetically Havard’s emotions, dreams and transformations in the hopes that they might comfort and inspire someone. Not only did it work, it is still working to this day.
“Juan on Juan”
The first Irons EP, “Juan on Juan”, explores this process of shedding one’s enforced norms and identity in the pursuit of something greater, and hints at a rebirth “Peter Clear Boy” would magnificently carry onwards.
In the first song, “Preacher Boy”, Havard sings of a preacher eerily similar to himself who falls in love with his wife’s friend, and must decide whether to follow his heart or to betray his entire identity. Havard ingeniously represents the uncertainty and disconcertment that comes with such a drastic change by describing the preacher as paradoxically both a boy and a man.
One part of him is certain and has “great plans” for the future, and yet another part of him is “confused” that his “hooves weren’t holding hands” (Havard uses “hooves” throughout the song; a touch of mystery and absurdity that make his lyrics so interesting).
Havard uses the chorus to ask the listener over and over again (four times as if he’s genuinely wondering), with Caleb Tippet riffing intoxicatingly beautiful guitar melodies in the background, “what do you do” in this situation? He needs to know, but no one will answer him.
The song ends with the preacher and the wife’s friend meeting one night under the stars after falling for each other, and Havard beautifully questioning himself, this time eight times, “What do you do?”.
It’s here that the cinematic version of the album would fade to black, and after a pause, reveal the words “one year later”, and then boom, a burst of color. The preacher, this time fully a man, riding down a sunny road with his wife’s friend on a motorcycle beside him. The stirring chords from “Motorbike Girl” freeing all tension and revealing their answer to “What do you do?”. The preacher and Havard have both made their decisions. They will follow their hearts.
“Peter Clear Boy”
Peter Clear Boy, The Irons’ first full-length album, is one of those albums that steals your most personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings from you, soaks them in the mystery and beauty of music, and humbly hands them back.
I remember listening to it for the first time on a three hour drive back to my hometown from Austin and playing it over and over again the whole time, my mouth agape in amazement wondering how he had distilled the loneliness, existential wonder, and excitement of moving to a new city and following your dreams into such beautiful poetry.
The album deals with themes of loneliness, self-overcoming, and existential dread in a way that is refreshingly and cathartically honest. Yet it wraps these relatable themes up in the riddle of this character, Peter Clear Boy. You can listen to it a thousand times and find some new clue or discovery each time about who he is and how he relates to the overall themes.
While the album shifts, sometimes abruptly, from melancholy to hopeful to whimsical to nostalgic, two common threads pervade the whole: a profound sense of loneliness (New to the City, Slowly, Future Police) and a haunting awareness of the unstoppable march of time (Peter Clear Boy, The Forever Poet).
The first five songs of the album set up a problem: Havard is lonely and melancholic, attempting to slowly sublimate his sufferings into something beautiful (he succeeds by the way). Then, in the last five songs we get an imaginative exploration of love as a solution, looking forward in anticipation (She’s Out There) and backwards in nostalgic rumination (The Forever Poet).
Overall, the lyrics of the album stand on their own literary feet as poetry, pure and simple, but the crisp drums and sweeping soundscapes certainly don’t hurt. It’s everything a good album is: musically sophisticated, both relatable as well as deeply mysterious, and creatively boundary-pushing.
Since I first saw Havard in that secluded coffee shop he has honed his song-writing and composition skills as well as accumulated an entourage of talented band-mates. They have embedded themselves within the Austin music scene like caterpillars in a cocoon, and I have a feeling that their new album, “Taking it All In”, will give us a glimpse of what kind of wings grow when you give a creative genius the resources and relationships he needs to create something magnificent.