Singer-songwriter and author Doug Hoekstra has earned numerous awards for both his music and writing. Over the past three decades, his eight albums and three books have earned him an Independent Publisher Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Nashville Music Award and a nomination for an Independent Music Award. Then, after his 2008 album Blooming Roses, the Nashville polymath set music aside for long enough that you might have thought he’d given it up completely. However, recent events inspired a resurgence of the creative fire that had previously propelled him. That resulted in an ambitious and distinctive new album The Day Deserved in April, followed in June by Ten Seconds In-Between, a short-story collection published by Toronto press Better Than Starbucks.
“When my son Jude was born, I stepped away from music, to focus on him, work non-profit, teach, and do some prose writing,” Hokestra tells the Scene. “We took a lot of cool trips and such over the years, but when he hit 15 [in 2017], we went overseas and hung out with a lot of my old music pals, and I realized how much I missed that community of creatives. And, since he was a teenager doing his own thing more, I started to have more time to think and write and demo, and I probably started this batch of songs around then. I was also inspired by tumultuous times in our country I wanted to write about, and things I wanted to say musically — different than I had in the past. So there are a lot of current events in the songs, although they go through the lens of the participants.”
Dave Coleman engineered the disc at his own Howard's Apartment Studio in East Nashville. Coleman and Hoekstra co-produced the record, whose core ensemble includes Coleman on guitars, Hoekstra on rhythm guitars and keyboards, Chris Benelli on drums and percussion and Paul Slivka on bass. Additional musicians on the extensive list of personnel include Hannah Fairlight and Preacher Boy on vocals, David Henry on cello and violin and Jimmy Bowland on saxophone. Jude Hoekstra even makes an appearance on clarinet.
The Day Deserved is diverse and intriguing idiomatically. Seldom does Hoekstra confine himself to radio-single proportions; most of the tracks run at least four minutes, with three clocking in between six and eight. While the solid rock foundation and writerly lyricism are dominant features, Hoekstra explores many other musical areas. These range from vintage dub reggae on “Carry Me” to edgy and politically potent soul on “Wintertime.” Elements of jazz and folk are integrated into the basic framework, with Hoekstra’s hushed singing voice and assured authorial voice binding them together. The subject matter ranges from immigration (“Unseen Undetected”) to racial conflict (the aforementioned “Wintertime”) and disenchantment with how life has played out (“Seaside Town,” “Gandy Dancer”).
The book's material is no less diverse or compelling. Hoekstra explains that many of the stories are older than the songs; most were published in print or online literary journals. Two, “The Client Experience” and “Identity Field,” were written just for Ten Seconds. As he was writing them, he wasn’t expecting to turn them into a book. But he noticed a through line.
“I started shopping the collection around the same time I was working on the album,” Hoekstra says. “The book wasn’t as ‘preconceived’ then — it sort of coalesced around the way the pieces were coming out and this key line in one of them, ‘Performance Art’: ‘You remember reading somewhere that psychologists say when people meet, they decide within seven and 17 seconds whether or not they will like each other. You wonder about the 10 seconds in between. That was a natural thread for all the stories, I thought."
Though he’s just released these two projects, Hokestra already has another record in the works. He’s got four songs recorded live-in-studio with an eight-piece band consisting of three guitarists, three keyboardists, a bassist and a drummer. And he’s got a similarly inspired — though not related — writing project underway, too.
“They were mostly jazz players and so it was from that perspective — long songs again, though from my usual lyrical interests,” Hoekstra explains. “I have a collection of poems I’m working on that are all inspired by sound, as in soundscapes around us and how that triggers our thoughts and ideas. Sort of like John Cage, without the avant-garde — meaning, ‘Isn’t all sound music?’ I think in general, for any artist, at any level, the challenge becomes more about exploring these ideas in a way that is both true to whatever your ‘style’ is, and yet takes your creativity somewhere new. My favorite artists are people like Dylan and Miles [Davis], say, who are or were able to constantly change while still being them. I think that’s the ideal.”
As with lots of other artists, Hoekstra's now trying to figure out how to proceed in the wake of the pandemic, which isn't raging now as it was last year, but hasn't totally subsided either. He may end up waiting until 2022 to really get back on the road.
“It was a challenge to release this record after taking so much time off, and in the midst of a pandemic, but I’ve just been trying to get it out to folks as best we can. We ‘dropped’ six videos for this record. I did one myself and farmed out the other five to various pals around the country, and that was fun to do and a great way to get the music out in lieu of touring — and we are still finding different homes for those, as well.”
