by Bliss
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I See Hawks in LA won’t be holding a proper release party for “New Kind of Lonely” until its Feb. 24 show at McCabe’s in Santa Monica. But local fans can get a preview of the new tunes this Friday when the Hawks return to the Coffee Gallery Backstage.

Cut live in the studio around three microphones, “New Kind of Lonely” is an acoustic project that highlights one of the trademark elements of the Hawks’ sound: the tightly woven harmonies between frontman Rob Waller, dobroist Paul Lacques and bassist Paul Marshall. As a band, they’ve long since proved they can rock the house, particularly during more anthemic numbers like “Humboldt,” a staple of their club sets. But their acoustic shows have generally fostered an intimacy that audiences have also relished, and those fans are likely to respond warmly to the new recording. The open space in the acoustic settings directs more attention to the richly poetic, thoughtful lyrics, which balance humor with a pervasive sense of mortality and loss.

“Bohemian Highway” opens the album on a rather contemplative note, gratefully recalling old friends and roads traveled together while suggesting they’ve all disappeared. The loving “Big Old Hypodermic Needle” bids farewell to two friends who succumbed to overwhelming demons. One of the most affecting tracks is the bittersweet “The Spirit of Death,” which contemplates time’s inexorable march and mourns late fiddler and singer-songwriter Amy Farris before giving way to a spirited fiddle solo by Gabe Witcher.

“When I was a younger man, the good times eased the way

But now the stars are falling every other day

The dreams of childhood are returning to say

Your dance is coming, better pick a tune and play…”

Elsewhere, “Highland Park Serenade” wistfully name checks Figueroa, Mr. T’s Bowl and other local sites while assessing changes wrought by gentrification and time. “I Fell in Love With the Grateful Dead” looks back to youthful discoveries with a laugh over sparkling guitar leads. The album wraps with the lovely “If You Lead I Will Follow,” a fittingly melancholy close to an album that holds up loved ones and cherished ways, even if they’ve gone out of fashion. In a culture that’s ever more fragmented, the Hawks continue to show unsentimental respect for what they believe holds lasting value: land (not real estate) and the environment, music (not the music industry) and bonds of community forged through mutual care. n

I See Hawks in LA performs at the Coffee Gallery Backstage,
2029 N. Lake Ave., Altadena, 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 3; $15. Info/reservations: (626) 798-6236.
Karen Tobin and Paul Marshall open. iseehawks.com,
coffegallery.com

by Chris Griffy
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I See Hawks in L.A. is a band that has won over a ton of fans with their seamless blend of California Country-Rock and Psychedelia on their five previous albums, as well as through their strong live performances.

Of late, I See Hawks in L.A. have increasingly flirted with all-acoustic shows, hosting a one-mic acoustic series in Los Angeles’ Cole’s bar and with acclaimed tours in support of Americana superstars like Ray Wylie Hubbard, Dave Alvin, and Chris Hillman.

After years of teasing fans with glimpses of a what a stripped down I See Hawks in L.A. sounds like, the band has finally pulled the trigger on their first all-acoustic album, titled New Kind of Lonely, releasing March 6.

On New Kind of Lonely, guitarist and vocalist Rob Waller takes center stage with his dark lyrics and intricate guitar arrangements. As befits its name, New Kind of Lonely spends a lot of its running time exploring loss, both of love and of life. “Spirit of Death” explore this most achingly with the tale an aging man whose “dance is coming, you better pick a tune and play…”

But don’t think this is a funeral dirge of an album. There’s plenty of dark humor and even some hope on New Kind of Lonely. “Spirit of Death” ends on an upnote, with some dance-worthy fiddle work by Gabe Witcher that lifts the listener’s, as well as presumably the narrator’s, spirits.

But the gems on this album are “I Fell in Love with the Grateful Dead”, “Big Old Hypodermic Needle”, and “Hunger Mountain Breakdown.” The songs couldn’t be more different and show off the songwriting range on New Kind of Lonely.

“I Fell in Love with the Grateful Dead” is the tale of a Deadhead who “in ’72 I rode up the coast, on a sputtering Triumph with draft dodging freaks from my college.” It’s a nostalgic tale of a more simple time when “hippie carefree melodies filled my head where I did what I did and said what I said in the parking lot caravan of the Grateful Dead.” It’s an appropriately Jammy track, with plenty of Dead inspired guitar and bass antics

“Big Old Hypodermic Needle” tells the tale of two friend who overdose together to get “one last time for the memory of the sunset turning gold.” The arrangement on this one is interesting, oddly jaunty and dance-worthy for such a dark subject. While this could have provided a distraction in less capable hands, I See Hawks in L.A. manage to make it sound like it’s the most normal thing in the world. As with the speeded up ending to “Spirit of Death”, it reminds us that one person’s fear and dread is another’s welcome release. As the song’s final lyrics tell us “coming home’s easy when you hear the angel bell. Two sweet sisters and the sunrise, hear the angel bell.”

“Hunger Mountain Breakdown” could have been a Bill Monroe song in another era. A straight up Bluegrass number, it tells the tale of a man planning a dramatic ridgetop suicide and features some stellar instrumental work from banjo picker Cliff Wagner and fiddler Gabe Witcher.

New Kind of Lonely is a true anachronism, a thoroughly modern album that still manages to sound like it belongs alongside the dark lyrics of Hank Williams and Ralph Stanley and the tight vocal harmonies of The Louvin Brothers. It’s a lovingly crafted ode to a bygone era, where Country artists weren’t in the business of making feel good pseudo-pop songs but instead told unvarnished stories of love, loss, pain ,and death.

In a time that is often compared in the news to The Great Depression, the world needs albums like New Kind of Lonely that look back to those dark times.

New Kind of Lonely hits store shelves on March 6. An acoustic album release party will be held February 24 at McCabes with electric versions of the album’s tunes being debuted in a show March 10 at Pappy & Harriet’s.

I See Hawks in L.A. is where it wants to be — swimming against the stream

BY SERENA MARKSTROM
The Register-Guard
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Coulda, shoulda, woulda. The reality is this: For the songs on I See Hawks in L.A.’s January release, “Shoulda Been Gold,” to actually have become mainstream hits in this country, the whole culture would have had to change.

Not that the members of the Los Angeles-based alternative country band would mind a bit of a revolution. But the title for the album, which is about two-thirds songs from previous recordings and packaged with five previously unreleased songs, contains a little wink.

The band deals in dense, witty, tuneful, subtle, clever and harmonious country-folk songs. Of course they aren’t going to have mainstream hits.

On musical merit alone, maybe these songs should have gone gold. But it is often the case that the music-buying population and the opinions of professional reviewers do not match.

The band’s previous albums have been reviewed in Spin, Village Voice, USA Today, Uncut and High Times, a news release says, indicating that the band has been on the critics’ radar for some time.

Lead singer Rob Waller said his band identifies with outlaw country and folk. He’s of the opinion that what passes for country music these days is really pop music.

“We write songs about things that are on our minds,” Waller said.

Los Angeles as a dirty word

These songwriters think about such topics as “Byrd From West Virginia,” about the late U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, who famously spoke against the war in Iraq.

“He was the one senator who got up and spoke against it,” Waller said. “I remember going to war protests and there was nobody there. Very few people were saying no.”

People here in Lane County protested the war, but Waller said he did not see much of that in Southern California. In fact, the band’s name alludes to having an outsider’s perspective while living in La La Land.

People there tell him there are not hawks in Los Angeles. But he and his bandmates see them.

“We witness the wildlife. We connect with it,” he said. “In other places, people will get mad at us for being from Los Angeles.

“Sometimes, it turns people off about us that we have that in our name.”

The group’s eponymous song has the lines “If you see hawks/ Then maybe we should talk,” referring to like-minded people getting together.

Band members live in Southern California because they find plenty of session work, and they have friends and family who live there. And Waller, having grown up in the Midwest, relishes the beach and the warm weather.

As he did this phone interview, Waller was sitting on his porch watching blue jays, doves, sparrows and maybe a woodpecker crawl all over his bush-like fig tree. It was an idyllic, 75-degree day.

“There is a baby hawk in my neighborhood,” he said. “We feel like (the hawk is) our omen, talisman.”

Grasping for the genuine

The band formed in 1999 and put out its first CD on Sept. 11, 2001.

The Sept. 11 release date turned out to be an interesting tone-setter, because the band regularly has been critical of the government.

“Country music, for a long time, was the place for freaks and outsiders,” Waller said. “It was the music of the unwashed masses. … Murder ballads about killing their girlfriends, getting drunk and things that they are ashamed of.

“I don’t hear that intimacy (anymore), a genuine looking at yourself.”

In their bios, band members get a little playful with their role as music industry outsiders.

“We thrive in the margins and tour the secondary routes and blue highways: Chattanooga, Winters, Mariposa, Sebastopol, Johnson City, Knoxville, Eugene, Montpelier, Lafayette,” it says.

Perhaps you caught the group’s Thursday show at Sam Bond’s Garage. On Saturday, the band flies down Interstate 5 to play the Axe & Fiddle.

If any of you are living in the hills of south Lane County, perhaps even as off the grid as you can manage, you might want to head for downtown to catch this band.

It didn’t make the group’s greatest hits, but it has a song called “Ever Since the Grid Went Down,” which imagines life without organized utilities. The song is not conclusive that it would be a bad thing.

“We’ve always been kind of an apocalyptic band,” Waller said. “Maybe (if the grid went down) it would be better. Maybe it would be more local.

“Maybe it would be an end to this corporate tyranny.”

CONCERT PREVIEW
I See Hawks in L.A.
What: Alt-country and psychedelic
When: 9 p.m. Saturday
Where: Axe & Fiddle, 657 E. Main St.
Admission: $5
Copyright © 2010 — The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA

I See Hawks in L.A.
Shoulda Been Gold
Collectors’ Choice

I See Hawks in L.A. is that rarest of things — an actual country-rock band, carrying the flag of the Burritos and the Byrds in a time when country-rock generally means Kid Rock-lite, decked out in white t-shirts and warbling anthems to pickup trucks. The Hawks, formed in 1999, have gathered up the best of the group’s four albums for this collection, and it’s a fine introduction to a band that should be huge. From odes to hard times in the pot biz with “Humboldt” to the infectious “Raised By Hippies,” the Hawks’ gorgeous harmonies and tasty guitar work shine all throughout the disc. Made up of California country veterans including fiddler Brantley Kearns (Dwight Yoakam, Hazel Dickens), guitarist Paul Lacques from Double Naught Spy Car, and Paul Marshall (Strawberry Alarm Clock, Rose Maddox), I See Hawks in L.A. create country-rock more vital and fresh than most anything heard since the days of Parsons and Hillman. Highly recommended.
I See Hawks in L.A.: www.iseehawks.com

James Mann

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by Gary Miller
State of Mind Music

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What’s it like to be playing country, bluegrass, and Americana in Los Angeles in the 21st century? The name of the band I See Hawks in L.A. provides a clue. “A lot of people say there aren’t hawks in LA.,” says frontman Rob Waller. “It’s because they don’t look up in the sky. They aren’t aware of the wildlife that’s still very present in this concrete urban metropolis… As a band we’re sort of a coyote or a hawk or some sort of wildlife that people don’t think is still here but is.”

Since its founding in 2000, the Hawks have enjoyed a status that’s far from that of an endangered species. They’ve spun out an impressive series of albums, ranging in tone from old-timey jams to Byrdesque country rock and dark, noisy rock and roll. They’ve held a long-term residency at Cole’s Bar in downtown L.A., toured both the US and Europe, and built a loyal following. Their new release Shoulda Been Gold (American Beat), celebrates this status, compiling the best of a decade’s work into a “greatest hits” compilation that’s worthy of the bigger audience its title ironically hints at–and is 100% hit-free.

Understanding how this all worked out means understanding California’s tenuous yet tenacious connection to country music. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl brought refugees by the thousands from Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and points east. These migrants came in search of a better life, and brought their music with them. In the 1950s, it evolved into the “Bakersfield Sound,” stripped down honky-tonk played by the likes of Wynn Stewart, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard. In the 1960s, acid-droppers like Gram Parsons, the Byrds, and Texan import Doug Sahm put a psychedelic twist on honky-tonk. They, in turn, were succeeded by new traditionalist Dwight Yoakam, punker John Doe, Blaster Dave Alvin, and the like.
So it wasn’t entirely improbable that when Rob Waller moved to L.A. from San Francisco he carried his love of traditional bluegrass, country, rock and roll and three-part harmonies with him, or that he’d find people of a like mind to share that love.

Aptly, the Hawks’ genesis involves a wilderness connection pilgrimage. In March 1999, Waller traveled to Vegas with drummer Anthony Lacques and his brother Paul, a guitarist. According to Waller, “Paul’s girlfriend was with us and we went hiking in the Mojave Desert and we were running around and being boyish and she was lollygagging behind us and we lost her. And we were certain we would find her very quickly. At some point, somebody said, ‘We should have a country band in Los Angeles named I See Hawks in L.A.’ Then all of us agreed to it. I don’t know why, but we did.”
There was, of course, a happy ending. Hours later, the girlfriend emerged from the desert, seriously pissed off but unscathed. And I See Hawks in L.A. was born, at least as a concept. The first jam sessions wouldn’t happen until the following year.

Still, forming a trad-based band in Los Angeles at the time, was a little bit, well… “Contrary.” says Waller. “It was kind of like ‘let’s have an old-timey band in Los Angeles in the year 2000. I mean that seems kind of bizarre.”

But the reception the band got was anything but contrary. “Country is obviously not the dominant music genre in LA, and that’s not a surprise to anyone who’s listening to music here and anyone who’s making it,” Waller says. “What was somewhat of a surprise was how people seemed to want the thing that we were doing.” The band quickly gathered a core of loyal fans and, with the release of their debut CD in 2001, the critics jumped on board.

The band’s original members included Waller on rhythm guitar and lead vocals, with Anthony Lacques on drums and Paul Lacques adding six-string and pedal steel. From the start, the band found two key anchors–vocal harmonies and the songwriting of Waller and Paul Lacques.

“To me it centers around Rob’s voice,” says Paul Lacques. “He has a very rich voice, and he’s one of my favorite singers. So when we’re working on a song, all our first inclination is to find a harmony part. Me and [current bass player] Paul Marshall have loved singing harmonies for decades, and I guess the first thing is, we jump in with harmonies. We’ve had harmonies on almost all of the songs we’ve recorded, so the choice becomes is it more heavily acoustic, or more heavily electric or totally acoustic or more hard-core electric. From there it just sort of builds organically. We just add tracks until it feels like it’s done.”

When they write songs, Lacques says, “It’s usually me and Rob, and we’ve written a lot of songs with my brother [Paul] and a few with Paul Marshall, but we basically sit down and throw a lot of ideas around. There’s a lot of laughing and goofing around and we sort of generate a lot of lyrics and then kind of turn to surgeons after that. We usually have way more lyrics than we need. So we have the fun first half, but the serious ending half. Anarchy, I would say, is the basic approach.”

The result are tunes that reflect a variety of Americana influences.

Asked to name those, Paul Lacques generously acknowledges the impact of older artists like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. But just as critical, he says, are contemporary players that the Hawks have shared stages and even toured with, including Mike Stinson, Randy Weeks, and Tony Gilkyson.
“We went to see Mike Stinson play and he’s just got this classic honky-tonk throwdown country-rock sound and we said we gotta write some songs like [him]. It’s such a fun vibe, and we kind of emulated it,” Paul Lacques says.

Not only musicians but national events have shaped the Hawks’s sound. The band’s self-titled debut dropped on September 11, 2001. It was largely acoustic and a bit more mellow than later efforts.

“Things got kind of dark, says Waller. “September 11 and the Bush years definitely influenced us as songwriters. We are pretty connected with and interested in political realities. California Country (2006, Western Seeds Records), which had a dark cover, was kind of our most intense, loud, dark record. We wrote a lot of those songs after the invasion of Iraq. It’s not that we [were] writing necessarily about those things directly, but I think that the energy that was coming off that stuff definitely influenced our mood and our sound.”

Hallowed Ground (2008, Big Books Records) lowered the tension a little bit, but kept the focus on the bigger sound and the literate (and occasionally sardonic) lyrics that have become the band’s stock in trade. Now comes Shoulda Been Gold, the hit-free hits album, which Waller views as somewhat emblematic of the state of music in decade 1 of the new century.

“We as a band, me as a musician, I think the culture of musicians [in general] is kind of getting over the idea of being a rock star. And if you think about it, the period of… being a rock star was pretty short in the history of music… from 1950 until about the year 2000 was the era of the rock star. And it was fuckin’ great–for the rock stars, and for the music business. They made tons of money. It was the perfect storm of being able to record music really well and also being able to control the sale of recorded music.

About I See Hawks in L.A., he adds “We’re not rock stars. But we’re not isolated and totally obscure. We’re somewhere in between. We can make records and play shows and we have certain regions where we have really good fan support and others where we don’t. We have an audience for the music and they tell us what they like and what they don’t like. And for the people who’ve been following the band for five or six or seven years, this really does feel like a greatest hits record, even though there’s no magazine chart that says so.”

For now, the Hawks are doing what they’ve always done–writing songs, doing some touring, and preparing to record another album. Musical outlaws in a city of concrete, they’ve found a niche they can call their own.

Shoulda Been Gold 2001-2009
I See Hawks in L.A.

Review
by Hal Horowitz

The irony of a working band with no hits, or even a recognizable name, releasing a “greatest-hits” album — let alone one that runs a whopping 79 minutes — is not lost on the founding members of I See Hawks in L.A. Founding members lead vocalist Rob Waller and guitarist Paul Lacques address that anomaly in their wry, witty seven pages of liner notes to this generous 17-track overview of the titular years. The group only released four albums during those nine years, but this career/label-spanning disc packs enough terrific Americana into its playing time to convince any fan of the genre that this group’s music has flown under the radar for too long. It’s impossible not to reference Gram Parsons, not just due to the sun-baked West Coast roots and C&W sensibilities, but because of the soul and subtle humor evident in the groove. Seven songs are previously unreleased, so even those familiar with the Hawks’ catalog will need to add this to their collections, especially since some of the newly recorded tunes, including the title track, are highlights of the collection. Lead singer Waller has an emotional, natural voice that gives these strummy gems a focal point while lifting them to a level out of the reach of less talented singers. Sumptuous harmonies such as those on the closing gospel “The Mystery of Live,” interestingly recorded live, also help these songs soar like the bird in the band’s unusual name. Instrumental guests provide fiddle, pedal steel, and organ that augment the quartet’s sound, and Carla Olson helps on female harmonies for two cuts. Her presence on “Bossier City” reinforces the understated Parsons/Emmylou Harris influence. The humor and bluegrass of “The Salesman” balances more serious material such as “Highway Down,” one of the Hawks’ most intimate and moving songs, and a lost classic in waiting. “Midnight in Orlando” name-checks Disneyland/World with droll lyrics played against a lovely slow Eagles-style melody tinted by sorrowful pedal steel and soulful organ. The energy raises a few notches on the uptempo “Wonder Valley Fight Song,” about as close to rock as this album gets. The disc’s title implies that these tunes should have been, if not gold records, more popular than they were. At the very least, this collection should help establish I See Hawks in L.A. as a journeymen roots act with more than a few tricks, and memorable songs, up its collective sleeve.

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