You don’t have to talk to Elana Hayden long to realize she’s not from around here. Hayden speaks with a strong New York accent, the kind that elongates her vowels and turns “daughter” into “dottuh.” But hey, when you’ve got a singing voice like Hayden does, you don’t need to worry about talking very much.
Hayden grew up in Port Washington, New York, on the north end of Long Island, a short jaunt from Manhattan.
“I grew up spending most of my time in the city doing crazy things” she remembered.
Most of those crazy things revolved around singing. For her entire life, Hayden has been what she calls a “chick singer.” The cover of her newest record, 2021’s “Carry You Home,” shows her at age 12, propped up against a guitar case. For decades she lived in Manhattan, making a living with her voice.
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She sang on commercial jingles, and backed up big stars like Willie Nelson, who she sang with at a bicentennial show in New Jersey. She got to share a stage with folks like Harry Chapin and Patti LaBelle. Best of them all, she said, was Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, a soul and R&B drummer so technically proficient he invented a new type of rhythm still called the “Purdie Shuffle.”
The closest Hayden came to a working a day job was as a vocalist for Warner Chappell Music, where she’d sing backup where needed, and often take lead on demos of songs the record label wanted to pitch to their star singers.
“I had to sound like a lot of different people,” Hayden said. She demoed songs for Celine Dion and Taylor Dayne, and even recorded the original version of Dayne’s 1987 hit “Tell It To My Heart.”
“She stole my licks and then had a hit with it,” Hayden laughed. But she’s not bitter. That’s the business.
“It’s an interesting life, being a background singer,” Hayden reflected. “You’re a hired gun.”
That's true, but she took lead plenty, playing shows all over New York City and Long Island.
Being a full-time vocalist like Hayden is one of the most working class gigs you can get in the entertainment industry. There’s glitz and glamor, sure, but the spotlight is usually focused on another part of the stage.
“People paid me to make music, and it was so cool, because I wasn’t sitting in a cubicle in an office from 9-5 and commuting in the rush hour,” Hayden said.
“I’m not a household name,” she admitted, “but that wasn’t my goal. I just wanted to make a living as a vocalist.”
She did that for decades in New York City, one of the hardest places in the world to make a living doing anything. The atmosphere in the city was “competitive,” Hayden said, but that was part of the joy. Every day you got to go do your job with other people who are the best in the world at doing that job. You’re constantly among the best of the best.
All of this begs an important question: How’d she wind up in Montana?
“Well, there’s this guy,” Hayden laughed. “I’m such a cliché.”
The guy’s name is Mike Leslie. He’s funny, charming and one hell of a bassist. Right now you can catch him in the local bar room country standard bearers The Hellroaring, but twenty years ago, Leslie, a Billings native, was also trying to make it in New York City.
They first met when Leslie auditioned to play bass in a band Hayden was a member of. He got the gig, and the pair formed a budding relationship.
That continued for a while, and Hayden even got a steady job: as the director of Bach to Rock, a music school in New York. She compared it to the 2003 cinematic masterpiece “School of Rock,” but broader. Jack Black only taught his pupils a regimented history of rock and roll. Hayden’s students, who were both kids and adults, could learn all sorts of genres and techniques — and then test their skills on some of Manhattan’s most iconic stages.
It was a good gig, a great one even. But it also involved payroll and staffing and lots of other things that started to look too much like that 9-5 job Hayden always dreaded.
And then COVID happened. It hit New York first and hardest, shuttering the city’s many venues. Live music, the thing that had kept Hayden spiritually and economically afloat her whole life, was suddenly no longer viable.
“It was a nightmare,” she reflected. “Everything shut down.”
Leslie left first, returning to his hometown in 2020. Hayden kept on at Bach to Rock, which stayed open in a very limited capacity, but she could tell her time there was winding down.
“We were barely keeping things going,” she said. “I was burnt out. I thought, ‘If not now, then when?’”
“When” turned out to be September of 2022. Hayden gave her two weeks at the school, emptied her Manhattan apartment, loaded up her Honda Fit with a cat, a microphone and some plants and drove to Billings. The whole trip took her three days.
It was “a leap of faith,” she realizes now. “I was ready for a change, to slow down, take a deep breath and maybe find a better quality of life.”
She’s found it in Billings. This is her first time living outside of New York, and to her amusement, her friends back home still think she’s out here homesteading without central heating out on the prairies.
“It was a smooth transition,” Hayden said. “It’s more relaxed, and people are very nice.”
She hasn’t had a cross word with anyone in Billings, although she pointed out with a laugh that she made sure to change her New York license plates shortly after moving.
Montana also offers something she was missing in New York: a chance to perform music. By the end of her tenure in the Big Apple, she was so busy with the music school that she hardly had a chance to just listen to and play tunes, the thing that made her fall in love with this art form long ago.
“There’s a thriving music scene in Billings, and there are a number of musicians here who could hang in New York in a minute,” she said. “They’re top shelf, really incredible people.”
She regularly plays with some of Billings’ best — folks like Erik Olson, Parker Brown, Scott Jeppesen and Alex Nauman (and Mike Leslie, of course). She met most of them by just going to gigs and open jams, at first observing and networking but eventually sitting in.
“I didn’t have an ego, I just wanted to meet people who play,” she said. “You’ve just got to put yourself out there.”
She’s also adapted to some of Billings’ musical idiosyncrasies. For whatever reason, the stretch between Billings and Powell, Wyoming, is home to some of the best jazz musicians anywhere in America. Even the folks involved don’t seem to know the exact reason, but it’s hard to imagine any other town this size in the West that could host a weekly jazz night.
Back in New York, Hayden usually played pop music — selections from the Great American Songbook combined with more current hits. But she’s enjoying the opportunity to be a jazz singer.
When you’re making a living as a singer, it means you have to take on a lot of gigs. Some of those shows require you to be almost anonymous. Hayden and her band play sets at places like the Yellowstone Art Museum, the Windmill and Carverss Brazilian Steakhouse. At shows like that, where patrons aren’t typically there seeking out music, you have to play tunes that are incidental and fade into the background.
That’s not an impediment for Hayden. It’s just another part of the job. But she does relish the opportunities to play to a real audience of people who paid to see her, and are going to pay attention and listen.
Pre-remodel, the Art House Cinema and Pub had sneakily turned into a top notch music venue, with lots of quality seating and a pre-built expectation for audiences to sit down and watch what was happening. So when they beefed the place up, they expanded on that idea. The biggest theater at Art House now has a stage that can be installed to make the place an even better live music spot.
Hayden and her band will be performing at Art House on Sunday, April 7. She wants to pack the place, not only for herself, but for the venue.
“I want people to come and support this space,” she said. “I love what they do there.”
That’s an idea expressed by a lifelong backup singer, who is used to amplifying others as much as she is amplifying herself.
“After the whole COVID thing, when everything shut down,” Hayden said, pausing. “It just showed you how important it is to have live music.”