Times Square Goes Haywire

12:43pm - Luis sends me a message asking if I’m coming out tonight. I tell him I’d love to do some behind the scenes stuff if they’re down for it, and we agree to meet around 7.

6:26pm. - I’m on the train headed to Midtown.

At some point Ian Fidance shows up, so I grab him and ask if he’ll come over for a second so I can make a quick portrait of him with Austin.

After a while it starts feeling like it’s time to move, so we head up the block to get the stuff out of the van. As our luck would have it there is a cop sitting on a horse directly in front of the van. Unloading there would have blown the whole thing before it even started, so everybody piles in and we drive around the corner, figuring we’ll pull up on the other side instead.

By the time we get there, the spot where we had been hanging out maybe fifteen minutes earlier is suddenly filled with more than twenty-five cops. So, back around the block we go. The new plan is to return to the original spot, unload behind them, get everything set up as quickly as possible and start playing before anyone has enough time to figure out what is happening. If the crowd closes in tight enough, maybe that buys us a song or two. It does. About a song and a half.

They’re playing “Haywire” when the cops finally push their way through the crowd. Almost immediately they start shoving people back and grabbing whatever equipment they can reach to make the music stop. The funny part is that the band had basically planned on ditching the equipment anyway.

I take the snare drum with me to take in home and archive it. I carry it up the street and make my way back toward the van. Luis is there when I get back, so I tell him goodnight and me and Griffin head to the train.

A Day with Haywire, A show With Haywire, Some Photos Of Haywire

Yesterday I texted Nicky, fully a shot in the dark, just asking if he thought the guys in Haywire would even be open to what I do. No expectations, just sending it out and letting it sit. Then suddenly I’m in a group chat, no buildup, just dropped in with Austin, and immediately he’s like, let’s do it.

Met Austin up the street from the venue, some office building with an all you can eat buffet, bar glowing too clean for the night we were about to have. He told me to grab food first, we’d talk after. So I did, plate in hand, pacing a little, waiting to feel normal. Later we ended up on the roof, I was nervous, talking too fast, trying to land somewhere real, so I brought up Boston, how I’ve circled back to it a few times, how it never quite sticks. Then I told him the story, the one I don’t usually tell, about Lower Allston, about the home invasion, about killing a man. It came out flat, like something already processed. And for the first time in a long time, there was no shift, no judgment, no tightening in the air. He just took it for what it was, basically saying it was the cards I was dealt and that was it.

We drifted from there into talking about interviews, how they don’t really make sense for them, how the whole structure feels off. I got what he meant. They’re not trying to create distance. They’re a band that collapses it. He’ll jump into the crowd with you, let you crawl on stage, shove him, and he’ll throw you right back into it. No barrier, no script. If you want to know something, you just ask. He’ll answer. There’s no performance to it, no filtering. Just direct, honest, almost disarming in how simple it is. And in an industry that’s usually layered in strategy and half-truths, that kind of openness feels rare, something you notice immediately and don’t forget.