Doug Hoekstra
Waitng
Paste Records PM06
By Marianne Ebertowski
 Doug
Hoekstra is a quiet sort of guy and it shows in his music. Hoekstra's
music is gentle and fragile. His lyrics usually avoid big drama
and concentrate on "normal lives" of "normal
people" with the everyday drama each human life contains.
Hoekstra's lyrics are like Ray Carver's poetry or short stories,
populated with people like you and me, our little fears and little
frustrations and little sufferings that add up to that rather
big and devastating thing called "human condition."
Just like Carver's work, Hoekstra's stories are often too close
for comfort. And even when there are actually big dramas happening
like in "Theresa," the fate of a Brazilian child prostitute,
they are told with an unsettling matter-of-factness, you know,
like, well, these things happen, that's the way the world is
and there's nothing we can do about it, or can we?
Maybe it is his self-effacing nature and feeling for understatement
that has made Ohio-born and Chicago-suburb-raised Doug Hoekstra
more appealing to European than American audiences. Hoekstra
whose father's father emigrated to Chicago from Friesland (Netherlands)
and whose mother's parents came from Lithuania, got degrees from
DePaul University and Nashville's Belmont University in creative
writing and English before he formed alt.country band Bucket
Number Six in 1990 with which he made two albums.
Waiting is Doug Hoekstra's sixth solo album. It was
cut in his home studio in Nashville during the last weeks of
his wife's pregnancy. Waiting for his son to arrive, Hoekstra
recorded all songs on a Boss 532, playing almost all the instruments
himself with just a little help from some friends, like George
Marinelli (known from his work with Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Hornsby
and James Taylor). All of this makes Waiting his most
intimate album.
Hoekstra has an eye for detail. It shows in his observations,
his lyrics and his musical arrangements. You won't catch this
man on anything remotely sloppy. More a narrator than a singer,
he whispers his words against a backdrop of mostly acoustic guitars
and electric piano with other instruments discreetly dropping
in at just the right moments. Apart from a sensitive and, basically,
romantic human-interest writer, Mr. Hoekstra is very much a cinematographic
writer. There is a lot of picturesque imagery subtly and compellingly
underscored by his spare and brittle musical arrangements.
The opening track, "Blow Beautiful Dreams," is a
delicate reflection on Christmas Day and human nature in general
laced by ponderous guitars and keyboard:
All these kisses on the cheek
The smell of cinnamon potpourri
And the void that always lies between
Who we are and how we're seen.
"Sunday Blues," a father and son tale about going
to church on Sunday and back to normal on Monday, continues in
the same line.
In spite of who you are and what you fear
Thomas and his father and their bond unbroken
Travel through life with words unspoken.
"Theresa" is the hallucinating story of a young
Brazilian girl with nothing to win or to lose apart from her
baby which she delivers aged 12 and sells for 50 dollars to a
bunch of crooks who know a couple in the USA who are willing
and able to pay twenty thousand. Then there's "Crawling
Out From Under," where the protagonist Carl stops dead in
his tracks and, "crawling out from under everything he knows,"
reconsiders life from a totally different perspective.
If Hoekstra were able to sing "Driftin'," it could
easily be a classic. It's a song with a strong emotional intensity
and a very pretty melody accompanied by strings impersonating
keyboard. It's beautiful, but it drifts, indeed, rather that
hits you in the head and heart as it deserves to.
Hoekstra keeps drifting "In the Middle of the Night,"
in a state between sleep and awareness:
In the middle of the night, it's a circumstantial state
Eyes half shut, though wide awake
Footsteps echo in the hall, voices fall and see
Into another world where all we see
In the dream and the dream is meant to be
I'll take you there with me
In the middle of the night when I can sleep.
The song features a riveting interplay between acoustic guitar
and bass that brings to mind the Velvet Underground's quiet work.
"Dark Side of a Pearl," is an exquisite dark and poignant
end of a relationship song with Hoekstra sounding like Lou Reed
on a good day accompanied by Nico on an even better day. It
is actually Amelia Whyte who's doing a perfect vocal job on this
one.
With "Screwball Comedy," a song showing Hoekstra's
love for movies, "Nighttime Rain," a particularly
h(e)art-hitting tale of loss, "The Artesian Well"
which leads us to the hills of West Virginia and the very dark
"Eternity," dominated by drum machine, acoustic guitars
and Wurlitzer, Hoekstra leads us to the big finale of his album,
the title song.
"Waiting" with its beautiful, melancholically drifting
melodica is easily the best song on the album. It has a hazy,
dreamy melody and, again, with Ameila Whyte's background vocals
echoing Doug's lead, it closes the album with a gentle kiss
on closed dreaming eyes.
Waiting patiently for me
I'm wishing you could help me see
Waiting for tomorrow's news to come through
As a gifted songsmith and a master of low-fi atmospheric Americana
music, Hoekstra plays in the same league as Sparklehorse and
Will Oldham. Waiting is not the sort of album that immediately
grabs you, you will have to actually sit down and listen; Waiting
is like the quiet person in the corner of every party, other
guests don't notice, because s/he does not try to attract attention
s/he's just waiting to be talked and listened to.
And like that quiet person, albums like Waiting are easily
ignored and left on the shelf. That's the way the world is,
just one of these little drama's Doug Hoekstra tends to write
about so gracefully.
www.doughoekstra.com
www.pastemusic.com
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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