3/22/04

Born in Northern Arizona, brought up in both Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and Tucson, people ask Haddon if his family is in the Military. "No, they're just psychologists" he says with a grin. "Even so, many wars were fought." he laughs. Haddon is now at home in the local theater and indie film scene, where he does both sound design and musical composition.

I met Haddon at his home studio. Inside it, furniture connects to sound equipment like puzzle pieces. Seated at his keyboard, surrounded by buttons and controls, it felt like a spaceship cockpit. I squeezed into a chair behind him, a co-pilot on this journey through music and sound. We stare ahead at the image of Katie, Haddon's fiancee, lying in the grass laughing, the huge screensaver drawing us in like a portal to another world.

Haddon approaches musical composition always from a dramatic standpoint rather than a musical one. He feels that music is critical to setting a scene and conveying emotion. He describes a new play he's writing music for, a historical drama depicting a infamous American trial and it's resulting miscarriage of justice. "I envision a steady, rhythmic pulse as the heartbeat of the society that puts this man on trial" he says. "Over the course of the show this heartbeat will devolve into chaos, as all the pieces of the puzzle come apart" Despite the importance of music in a show importance, he adds, "...the score must not step on the dialogue or do anything to detract from the story. Rather, it should come and go like a ghost."

Haddon starting picking away at the piano in his Nova Scotia living room at age five. Later that year he wrote his first song. At age 17, He released his self-titled CD, Haddon S. Kime. According to a review on Cdbaby.com, the CD is "piano and keyboard based-electrifying piano pop glittering with the elements of rock, folk and country blues."

"I don't know who wrote that," he said, somewhat embarrassed. "I was a tad more full of myself then, and just tried to make each song vastly different. Hey look, I can do this, and this, and this... I suppose I still do that in some ways, though I'd never reveal it to the press."

In the end, Haddon possesses an uncanny ability to conceptualize objects musically. I tested him, and asked him to musically describe one of his least favorite things. "That would either be our current president, or antique wooden furniture" he says. "How about our current president sitting on a creeky ornate antique chair!." With that, he turns to his keyboard and plays an impromptu piece at once tragic, imposing and suffocatingly rich. More than enough to make me confident that he could write a score for anything, tangible or otherwise: love, the upcoming presidential election, maybe even peanut butter.

-Angela Dombroski