Hawley Grail
..."I'd be a shit rock band. On all my records the influences I draw on are well before 1969. I still listen to Marty Robbins, one of the best singers that ever lived.
"I don't hear that very much in a lot of modern music that I hear. People seem to be scared to expose themselves to what they're feeling."
For a man who's quite relaxed and not bolshy or argumentative, Hawley has fixed ideas on what makes interesting music. "If I'd been in a pub band playing blues or whatever I'd be happy," he says. "When you earn your living out of music there's a honesty to it that I like. I refuse to compromise. When I write songs the first person I have to please is myself," he says.
The songs on Lady's Bridge pass the test. It's the most compact treatment of loss and lonliness since Frank Sinatra recorded In The Wee Small Hours in 1954 or Roy Orbison, the Sultan of Sorrow, performed surgery on heartache in the 1960s. Echoes of that bruised baritone haunt Lady's Bridge...
Whole review at the link.
1 comment:
Rawley was in a band ten years ago named The Longpigs who had a not-bad Echo-like CD that you can probably find for .01 on E-Bay. His two solo records have garnered great press, although I reckon they're too mature for me. Singer-songwriter's a parlous marketing category and a worse one to have to hear. Glad you and Mr. T like it, however; hard to get any CDs me and the formidable Mrs. agree on. She's stuck on The Hold Steady; we three (boys 2) men in the family shriek and swear to no avail, as driver chooses tunes.
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