Last March, Sam Westhoff, who performs under the moniker Haffway, stood beneath a lone spotlight onstage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and delivered a song about struggling to slow down.
The performance, an opening slot on Bear Rinehart’s Wilder Woods Tour, was as bare-bones as the way Westhoff was dressed: a simple white tank top, baggy green pants, a baseball hat. It was a reminder that, despite being on Nashville’s most legendary stage, you can’t get too hung up on the small stuff.
Haffway’s studio version of “Golden,” the song he sang that night at the Ryman, however, revels in the details. Beginning with a simple acoustic strum and a gentle rhythm, it evolves into a lush singalong, with help from the country-as-cornbread singer Brent Cobb. Listening to it with headphones, you hear the vocalists bob and weave around each other, with Westhoff emphasizing certain words to underscore exactly what he views as important: “mom,” “life,” “now.”
“Golden” and 10 more tracks make up Haffway’s debut album, Wither. Out now, it’s a record, he explained recently in a voice memo to me, “of the highs and lows of unmanaged mental health.”
Fear not, though, Westhoff is doing quite well these days. While the album, recorded in his tiny home studio above a garage, may have its share of canyon-bottom lows — the immersive “Deep End” will gut you — the Oklahoma native and Nashville resident exudes hope throughout Wither.
“If you listen top-down, it’ll make you feel weird. But weird is whatever you want weird to be,” he says. “The arc of it is me expressing how much I love my wife and also the process of how much I don’t want to be alive anymore.”
He laughs. “It’s sad as fuck.”
That may be true lyrically, but sonically the record is uplifting. There are stacked ELO-like harmonies on opening track “Rest in Peace,” ethereal atmospherics straight out of the Shins catalog on “Alpenglow,” and a church-choir vocal on the title track, which closes the LP. It’s sad and weird, as Westhoff says. Just like life can be.
But it’s the daily beauties that he sings about with Cobb in “Golden” — the moon, the sun, the choosing to not work on Sundays — that make it all worth living.
Westhoff can’t help but include the Ryman Auditorium in that list. When he performed at the historic venue back in the spring, it marked not only his first time on its stage but his first time in the building at all.
“When I moved to Nashville at 28, I had a goal of not going to the Ryman until I play it,” he says. “So, it was a really magical, cool evening.”
But like his stage name, that March performance went only halfway for Westhoff — he didn’t have an album out at the time. This Sunday, he’ll return to the Ryman whole, with the superb Wither under his arm.
