Darren Hayes announces memoir

Since I saw someone in the Tea request thread asking recently, Darren Hayes just announced his memoir!

Darren Hayes was the vocalist and frontman for the 90’s band Savage Garden, which Gen X-ers and Millennials will especially fondly remember for chart-topping songs like “Truly, Madly, Deeply”, “I Want You”, “To the Moon and Back”, and “I Knew I Loved You”. Seemingly abruptly, the band broke up in 2001, for which Hayes was largely, and inaccurately blamed for.

Hayes’ personal life has always been intertwined with his music. His abusive childhood with an alcoholic father, his family history of mental illness, his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, a woman, at the height of SG’s fame, and their subsequent divorce all notably come through in recognizable songs. When Hayes came out as gay in the early 2000’s, he’s talked about being blacklisted/how things changed/his label effectively destroyed his career:

“I don’t regret [publicly coming out] for a second. It wasn’t that I was blacklisted, but it was that I became a ‘niche’ artist purely based on my sexuality. There was a kind of unintentionally patronizing view of me. No longer a sexual object, but more of someone you might take home to Mom […] I was suddenly your gay uncle. That was frustrating. My sexuality was used as a descriptor, and if you think about it, that’s nuts. No one says ‘Openly heterosexual singer Adele.’ ”

He remarried and spent 17 years with his husband, whom, even after separating recently, he amicably still considers his best friend and the best person he knows. Darren took a 10-year hiatus after releasing several of his own albums after breaking from Columbia Records, and then came back with his fifth album, Homosexual.

The Do You Remember tour reintroduced him to international audiences, which I got to see Darren perform last year on his US tour, songs from Homosexual and his entire discography along with SG, and and it was fantastic. His voice, showmanship, and rapport with the crowd was great, it made my little millennial heart so happy to hear/see songs from a CD I wore out 25 years ago in my childhood bedroom performed, something I lamented because I thought I never would get the chance after their breakup.

Given how much has occurred in Darren’s roller coaster life, the hard times and the rise and fall from stardom, matched with his deep empathy and openness about difficult subjects, I am so sat for this memoir!

by netherworldly