Savage Garden

Australian-bred Savage Garden defies ease of definition in a modern-day music world where acts are packaged into one of a handful of neatly – and yet often limiting – niches.

Instead, the duo of singer/songwriter Darren Hayes and tunesmith/ instrumentalist Daniel Jones harkens a day when intelligent lyrics, gloriously accessible melodies and crafty production illustrate music for the masses in their most illuminated form. Through worldwide sales of 11 million of its 1997 self-titled debut, Savage Garden has conjured a definition of pop music with the most positive connotations, thanks to their worldwide hit singles, “I Want You,” “To The Moon And Back,” and “Truly Madly Deeply.”

With the release of their emotionally-charged second studio album on Columbia Records, the 12 -track, “AFFIRMATION,” Hayes and Jones are embarking on a brave new journey, more intimate than ever and yet with a reach that’s universal via its prevailing themes of love and love lost, despair, and the hope and faith that come from learning to channel emotions into lessons learned.

The album, which was recorded in San Francisco and New York, was produced by the Grammy-winning, Walter Afanasieff (Ricky Martin, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Michael Bolton), with Hayes and Jones co-producing and writing all songs. “Musically, lyrically, and performance-wise, we wanted this album to grow out of something natural,” says Hayes. “It’s almost beautifully sad, in a kind of bittersweet way.”

Hayes practically forced himself into emotional upheaval by transplanting from his home in Australia and moving to Manhattan for a year in 1998, to feed off of the city’s ironic mix of intoxicating adventure countered by its sometimes consuming loneliness.

“I placed myself in very adverse conditions because I was intent on making a record that could be a soundtrack not just to my life, but to everybody’s lives,” Hayes says. “I experienced very real things, where I had to make new friends, to miss my family, to carry six bags of groceries from the corner market to my apartment without a car or a trolley – just the normal day-to-day struggle of being in a new place.”

And while there are themes of loss and emptiness, Hayes says that lyrically, the project consistently focuses on looking past such despair. “This is hopeful sadness. I don’t wallow in self-pity. Elation and pain are experiences that make you realize you’re alive. Thank God you feel them; otherwise you’d be numb. That would be the worst thing,” he says.

Musically, “the horizons really opened up for us in terms of sound,” says Jones of Wallyworld Studios, the cutting edge San Francisco-based complex owned by Afanasieff, where much of the project was tracked. “The expertise of his people and the quality of the equipment allowed us to experiment with sounds and techniques that weren’t accessible to us the first time around. We wanted to infuse some elements of techno and keyboard sounds with guitars and still get the emotion through with the vocal on top. We were able to play around with a lot of samples and do some obscure editing with a lot of loops.”

“It was important to make sure every song sounded different, so one of the biggest things we achieved was bigger, better production with a whole new bag of editing and instrumental tricks,” Jones says.

Among the tracks on the album is first single “I Knew I Loved You,” a sweet, scintillating ballad. The song glitters with devotion and the joy of true love: “I think I’ve found my best friend/I know that it might sound more than a little crazy but I believe/I knew I loved you before I met you/I think I dreamed you into life.”

“It’s a very simple love song,” Hayes notes. “Nothing else on the record is as pure as that one, and I think it was essential for this album.”

“There was a sense of innocence that was missing between the first album and this one,” Jones adds. “We needed to find that place we started from and be able to identify again with ‘Truly Madly Deeply.’ I think it turned out beautifully.”

Other highlights include the hitworthy title track, a free-wheeling romp of nearly two dozen one-line life lessons, learned through both adversity and good fortune; “Two Beds & A Coffee Machine,” a startling and tragic piano-based take on spousal abuse; ” The Animal Song,” the percussion-soaked anthemic roust also found on the soundtrack to the recent Diane Keaton/Juliette Lewis film ‘The Other Sister’; and “I Don’t Know You Anymore,” which tells of visiting a loved one from the past and recognizing that they have moved forward with their life (“The picture frames have changed/So has your name”).

In addition to a more personal lyrical palette and the increasingly textured instrumental presentation, “AFFIRMATION” also brings on a clarification of the roles that most comfortably fit the pair of longtime collaborators and friends – who wrote their first album holed up in a one-bedroom apartment in a rural section of Australia, armed only with complementary talents and few ideas of the complexities that fame would soon bring them.

“I’ve always wanted to be more of the Dave Stewart than the Annie Lennox of the band,” Jones explains. “I’m more comfortable with the musician side, so I will be moving into that arena a lot more – like band rehearsals, remixes, things with the music. I’ve never been comfortable with being any kind of celebrity, so we decided that Darren will act as more of the spokesman of the band.”

“At first, we felt like we were supposed to homogenize ourselves like Frick and Frack, this team that always did everything together,” Hayes adds. “But it’s true, I enjoy being the public face of this band, where Daniel is more interested in designing sounds and producing. We sat down and agreed, I’m good at this, you’re great at that. We’ll continue to write music and come together on stage and make videos, but the rest of it, we’ll play it the way we know it and prefer it.”

It’s this inner growth that so ably allows SAVAGE GARDEN to demonstrate tangible steps forward on “AFFIRMATION,” an album whose tight, well-executed songs demonstrate command of a destiny replete with many a shining moment to come.

“I think there’s a tendency for sophomore albums to topically come out as a reaction to success or fame, but I think that’s boring,” Hayes says. “What people do relate to is what it’s like to have their hearts broken, to fall in love, or to have that occasional bad day. Those are things that continue to affect all of us every day of every year.”