New Tricks

“You love me too and I have always known / It’s more than acquired taste,” Hoekstra tells his lover in the chorus, then concludes, “Sometimes it takes my breath away / All the minutes that we waste / On this endless chase.”

There’s certainly no accounting for taste, and it played no role in his decision to change up his MO a bit for Roses. Hoekstra cuts back on the female vocals that have dotted previous releases, and adopts a more elliptical narrative style.

“I did try to go a little more like Dylan would, with the verses that are almost parallel and form a narrative in a different way,” says Hoekstra. “It’s funny, you spend your life trying to develop a style, and then when you develop your style you kind of run from it. You try to, hopefully, do different things, be interesting and mix it up a little bit. So that was really the reason, plus I had some great players on this record and I thought letting them stretch was one way to get some different textures in.”

Roses was produced by David Henry (Slaid Cleaves, Vienna Teng), who lends his hand to several tracks. He’s one of at least 12 guests, including Bobby Bare Jr. (backing vocals), keyboardist John Deaderick (Patty Griffin) and guitarist Joe Rathbone. The band provides sympathetic and versatile backing for Hoekstra, who leads them in a number of offbeat directions.

Chief among these is the jazzy cocktail swing of “Naper Vegas Scrabble Club,” an ode to Hoekstra’s now-gentrified hometown of Naperville, Ill. Reimagined as a retirement home, Hoekstra heralds his homecoming to a place “Where words fit perfect on the board / Free of life’s tragedies.” He’s given a rocking backbeat for the blues-soul rave-up “Part of the Problem, Part of the Solution,” and some herky-jerky guitar jangle for “Your Sweet Love,” which harks back to Hoekstra’s days fronting Chicago roots-rockers Bucket No. 6 in the early ’90s.

Blooming Roses coheres nicely, evoking a somber circumspective vibe that avoids melancholy or sentimentalism, from the quiet, cello-driven reflection of “Instincts” to the country-tinged “Disrepair” to the swelling six-minute closer, “Everywhere Is Somewhere.” (The latter recalls the aching Americana of The Band, but was cut in Norway with members of Thomas Dybdahl’s band.)

Hoekstra admits he’s excited, and while acknowledging he’s always excited about a new release, suggests something is different this time. “Maybe there’s records where I had a stronger group of songs, but there seems to be something more intangible to make [Blooming Roses] hold together more,” he says. “There’s a sort of subjective thing that I like that I think came across on it. It’s interesting in a seemingly more effortless way.”

Roses marks Hoekstra’s first new full-length since 2003’s Waiting, time that was filled with the release of a live album (Su Casa, Mi Casa), an EP (Six Songs) and a short story/essay/fictional autobiography, Bothering the Coffee Drinkers. He’s currently working on his first novel, and says that, while similar, the processes are fundamentally different.

“[With the novel] you have to hammer it out every day whether you feel like it or not, whereas with the music, I feel like I can carry it around in my head more,” Hoekstra says, perhaps offering some indication why we have so many more songwriters than novelists.

“Doing one form—it feeds off itself,” he says. “When I get done with a record, I almost write enough for another record right after it because I’m so excited to be in that process, I don’t understand how people have writers block. That’s arguably the most enjoyable thing, when you’re starting from nothing and creating something.”