Minutes after hearing a mix of "Crash and Burn" from Savage Garden's upcoming release Affirmation, singer Darren Hayes sits back in a cushy leather couch and takes a deep breath. With a bit of a smile he admits he didn't completely want to finish the song — because that meant it was time to leave the comfortable environs of Walter Afanasieff's Wally World Studios in San Rafael, Calif. "I think I was drawing it out because I love being here so much," Hayes says. The Savage Garden team of Hayes and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Jones first checked into Wally World last year to record "Animal Song" for The Other Sister soundtrack. They returned in April with a handful of songs they planned to polish with hit-maker Afanasieff, and wrapped up the project in the late summer. The album is scheduled for a November release. In his own words Hayes defines Savage Garden in unconventional terms. "Really it's just a vehicle for two people to get off, and we get off in completely different ways," he says. "I get to express myself and I get to be a rock star and I get to very publicly deal with very private issues and hide behind a mask and an image." Some of those very private issues include the demise of a relationship and his maturation in the world at large. His term when referring to Affirmation as a whole is "beautifully sad. In about 70 percent of it, there's a sense of melancholy or sadness, but it's not hopelessness. I went through some relationship stuff, and I really wanted to talk about that. I wanted it to be an album about relationships and not so innocent, not so naive." Yet, unlike the band's multiplatinum debut, Hayes wasn't interested in hiding behind metaphors. "It's actually very blunt," he says about the album's lyrics. "I'm definitely not a lyrical gangster on this record, and I didn't want to be. I wanted it to be very to the point and very clear about what I was saying because I just wanted it to be honest."

Some of those songs have that Sting-esque quality of sounding sweet on the outside but are brutally honest upon closer inspection. He points to such tracks as "Hold Me," where the lyrics describe the breakdown of a relationship, and "Gunning Down Romance," a song that explains that love is just chemicals in the brain. Then there's "The Best Thing" whose verse includes the line: "It's hard to believe that you're the best thing about me." Hayes pauses just a second before pointing out, "That's kind of really sad, saying that the best thing about me is someone else." Still, with all the changes that Hayes has undergone since the band's debut album was released in 1997, the singer has made a point of not focusing in on the fame. "I knew that the best records in the world relate to everybody," he says. "I think it's a big mistake to make a record about fame because the average person on the street doesn't know about that. You're now alienating yourself. I've always loved someone like Bruce Springsteen, because he relates to the people. So I wanted to make a record that was kind of like a soundtrack to anyone's life, even though it was very personal to me." — David John Farinella