Back in Black

As if to relay those emotions with a narrative flow, the sequence of songs on Baby 81 more or less follows the order in which the songs were recorded.

¨It made things a little easier,¨ Hayes offers with a chuckle. ¨You can go on and on and on about what the right sequence is. You can think too hard about keeping people interested for the whole album versus putting, you know, the singles up front. We learned about that early on. We´d call a club owner and ask Did you listen to the CD?´ and the guy would be like, Oh, I´m listening to it right now´ and it´d be like, skip... skip...´¨

¨But,¨ Hayes confesses, ¨I skip too!¨

Baby 81 does reward the patient listener with payoffs deep into the record, including a nine-minute track, ¨American X.¨

¨It´s a little strange these days,¨ Hayes muses. ¨People seem to think they don´t have as much time as they do. Everybody´s... I don´t know. You´re kinda bombarded with things telling you that you´re busy. All you really need to do is take a breath and say, I´m not that busy.´ It´s just life. Not to deny people´s busy-ness, but there´s the same hours in the day as there have been during any other time. We get things done more quickly, so the problem is you seem to give yourself more things to do. But it´s just a matter of making the extra effort.¨