Jackie Hayes Traces Her Chicago Roots
Jackie Hayes is a single-minded songwriter, someone who never loses her focus. 2021 EP ‘There’s Always Going To Be Something’ became her breakout moment, boasting colour-saturated indie pop that dwelled upon the personal.
Linking up with long-time collaborator Billy Lemos, her outstanding debut album ‘Over & Over’ landed just a few days ago, and it’s an exceptional release. Equally adept at conjuring scuzzy indie thrills as she is as layering perfect pop melodies, Jackie Hayes is moving in a lane of her own.
Running through her debut record, though, is an awareness of her surroundings, and a desire to express herself. Brought up in the Mid-West, relocating to Chicago vastly expanded her imagination, and provided the creative network she needed to amplify her voice.
Here, Jackie Hayes looks back on some key locations that provided landmarks for her journey…
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my apartment on foster
I lived in Chicago from late 2018 to 2022 and spent the majority of it living in the apartment where I wrote and recorded my album as well as my last EP. I met my current drummer by moving here. One day we were messaging on Instagram and I realized he lived in the same building, two units over from me. We would hold band practices together in his living room and meet up outside to talk about music. A good chunk of me living in Chicago was during lockdown so I spent a lot of time in my apartment writing and making music with Billy. Michael, who I wrote a lot of the lyrics with, lived nearby and would visit us often to come work on stuff. I also worked down the street at a grocery store as an essential worker during lockdown.
the basement in my old house
I spent a lot of time in my old basement in my childhood home. I played guitar and would blast cds that I got from the library and attempt to play along. I used to have really bad stage fright with singing so I would hide down there and practice. When I got older and bought my first iPhone I recorded videos of myself playing guitar and singing and posted them to Twitter. This is where I had a lot of my first “band practices”. I so desperately wanted to be in a band when I was younger but I had trouble finding members. When I was in middle school my friends and I formed an emo band called “heartless outcasts” – we had 2 tumblrs and a Facebook page yet never actually practiced. When I was older, one of my closest friends lived with me for a little and we would play music down there. We played some DIY shows in the area under the name “mercy rule”. I wrote and recorded a video of me playing one of my first songs, “flower” down there. It was kind of nasty down there not gonna lie – a lot of spiderwebs and stuff – but I ignored it.
Artwauk
I’m not sure if this is still happening but when I was younger there was a monthly event in Waukegan called artwauk. Local Artists – visual and musical and anything else – would showcase their art downtown. I would play out on the sidewalk or in a gallery every month. There are a lot of cursed photos out there of me with my acoustic guitar. I’m sure they are out there somewhere. I did lots of covers of things that I was listening to at the time. This was the first time I really performed anywhere besides those few county fair talent competitions I did. There was a venue that was a part of artwauk where I threw some of my first ever shows, including the family reunion (my old name) headliners. Those were some of the best shows ever. One time I threw a show there just as “Jackie” and sang like 10 songs about one of the people who was sitting in the audience. I specifically wrote these for the event. I don’t know why I did this, it was kind of iconic, kind of cringe.
Metra station in Waukegan
I’ve spent many, many hours on the UPN. The station I went to the most was in Waukegan, it overlooked Lake Michigan and was next to the old Ray Bradbury library. When I was in high school, my friends and I would constantly go to shows. None of us had cars so we would take the bus to the metra station, and then head to either Kenosha or Chicago. Or sometimes I’d
take the train to Kenosha and get picked up to go to Milwaukee. But the majority of the time I was going to Chicago to see a show. The usual spots were subterranean and the metro. I loved looking out the window on the metra at the lake. My life was centered around attending shows and concerts for a good 5-6 years. And now I guess it’s centered around playing them. A lot of the time I’d sneak out to these things. One of my friends that I used to do this with is actually my tour manager now.
Dunkin’ Donuts (any but particularly the one on grand)
If there’s one thing about me, I hate math. I would sit inside Dunkin’ Donuts to skip first period math. I’m sorry but I do not do numbers. I think I passed that semester with a D. I had a weird relationship with all of my math teachers too – we just did not like each other very much. I think math teachers can sense that you don’t like their subject and then take it personally. My school used to have these late start days and my friend’s mom would drive us to get Dunkin’ Donuts before school. After school, my friends and I would go and get the 99 cent iced coffee they used to sell before taking the bus to work. One of my friends and I would walk to get hashbrowns. It was close enough to the school where you could basically go every day. Now we go to Dunkin’ Donuts on tour a lot. I’m a fan of their new menu items. Dunkin please sponsor us.
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Lewis fresh market
My friends and I would go here after school to get tacos, it was our favorite place to go before going to a show. And it was only a few minutes away walking distance from the school we all went to. I went back recently because I wanted to visit one last time before I moved out of the area. It used to be that you’d order up front but they expanded to have a whole restaurant area in the back. About a mile up the road from there was a Starbucks. One day my friend and I walked all the way to that Starbucks in the freezing cold and snow just to get something, I don’t know why we did this but it took like an hour because of how slippery the sidewalks were.
Gurnee mills
Growing up I went to the mall a lot. My godmother owned a store in the mall and we would visit her. My friends and I would walk around with $5 and buy a sbarro pizza or get subway cookies. My favorite stores to go into were zumiez, hot topic and claire’s. I worked a lot of jobs at the mall. The most memorable one was a mall kiosk that was right in front of the food court. You know the ones, where they recruit you to take a survey and give you $3 for it. My friend and I were “supervisors” but we mostly fucked off and did the surveys ourselves. It was one of the funniest, weirdest jobs I had ever had. There were no rules and they hired us all on the spot. Things haven’t really changed – I always tend to work jobs like this in between tours and they’re always so strange. I genuinely do not know why none of us got fired but I always sensed that the higher ups just didn’t care. They ended up shutting it down because I don’t think our site performed very well. Given what I’ve just shared with you that probably makes sense.
Summer fest grounds and church camp
This is where the closest warped tour was held – in milwaukee, wisconsin. It’s something I looked forward to every year. It was always a who’s who event at warped tour (sarcastic but not really, I always saw so many mutuals at these things). One year I couldn’t go because my mom
said that god came to her in a dream and told her I shouldn’t attend. I was pretty upset about that. It was very interesting trying to be emo or scene or whatever you’d call what I was doing back then in a Christian household. I remember we used to go to this Christian camp in the middle of Wisconsin and I’d roam the woods all day, listening to music on my walkman. I went back to that old church camp this year (on the way back from a trip to MN) and drove through it, purely because of a morbid curiosity I had. Although it had been 7-8 years since I’d last gone, nothing had changed. It was fucking weird.
The beach (Literally any of them off Lake Michigan)
I was blessed to grow up close to the beach in waukegan. When I had a car for a brief stint I would take it up and down sheridan road and usually end up at Waukegan beach. This is where some of the eye 2 eye music video was shot as well. When I lived in Chicago I would go to Montrose Beach. Or there was Kenosha beach, I forget the official name. I remember going during the summer of Pokémon go and I’d never seen so many people there in my life. Like literally everybody at the beach was playing Pokémon go.
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‘Over & Over’ is out now.
Photo Credit: Rhianna Hajduch
