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Jan 10, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Lawrence Fafard

Canadian folk singer/songwriter Shaina Hayes first debuted in 2022 with to coax a waltz, written and recorded while simultaneously running a CSA (community-supported agriculture) farm. After the record’s release, she put farming on hold while touring for the record, opening for The War on Drugs and The Barr Brothers, during which she also began writing her forthcoming sophomore album, Kindergarten Heart.

With her upcoming record, Hayes expands on the warm and pastoral stylings of her debut, knitting together strands of bedroom pop, folk, and country, along with spacious production from her longtime collaborators Francis Ledoux and David Marchand of zouz. She announced the album last year with her lead single, “New Favorite,” and today she’s back with another new track, “Sun and Time,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Sun and Time” is a winding folk song, colored by downtempo, meditative rhythms, and hazy scrawls of guitar. It is gentle and unhurried, drifting in a bleary swirl of sun-dappled instrumentation and plaintive lyricism. The track finds Hayes reflecting on the cold winter months and dreaming of the sun’s warmth, offering the track as a momentary reprieve from the winter blues: “Holy weary winter / This one’s something / I watch you suffering at its hand / Boggy berry princess / We are fading / But I can still make out your laugh / When I look back / To a chamomile kind of heat and the tireless grass.”

Hayes says of the track, “Sun and Time’ was written for a dear friend who I used to run a vegetable farm with. It describes the intense lows that we would both feel in the winter when we’d begin to get stir-crazy waiting for the next growing season to begin. The song is a plea for her to remember the beautiful things that we were able to accomplish together, the strength of her character, and the fact that, at the very least, there’s always another summer somewhere around the corner!”

Check out the song and video below. Kindergarten Heart is out on February 23rd.