Tales of the human condition looked at through a New Mexico-lens largely benefit from some at times more unorthodox musical choices.
For New Mexico singer-songwriter AJ Woods, “Hawk Is Listenin’” is more than just an album – it’s a chance for him to take a journey through the myth and history of the Southwest at large, but also more personally, his hometown and the state’s largest city, Albuquerque. “[It’s] a place paved over,” Woods recently commented. “It is run through with the history of people and the wilderness together: ancestral, colonial, familial, personal.”
From the opening title track, you’re cued into the fact that this isn’t going to be the most straightforward exploration of the place Woods’ comes from; the almost seven-minute opus is dreamlike in its jangly rises and falls, an experimental arrangement that would feel entirely at home on a Sufjan Stevens album. Wood’s voice is high and sweet – a little bit Radiohead’s Thom York and a touch of Daniel Johnston – as he repeats phrases that are a reminder to us to keep an eye on nature to predict the future, but also to never forget the past. “Holy Rollin’ / Knife’s edge strollin’ / Land that’s stolen / Hands are foldin’ / Light that’s golden / Minds are moldin’ / Tunes are turnin’ / Birds are chirpin’ / Cats are lurkin’ / Bats are circlein’.”
Starting out with soft piano, ‘Wild on a Wildfire’ soon descends into dirty guitar reverb. “It’s like wind on a wildfire / Fannin’ the flames / The hotter that you let it burn / The longer that it will remain,” Woods wails in mournful despair, reminding us once again to not get so caught up in ourselves we forget to look to the world around us. While ‘Coyote Song’ starts out ostensibly from the point-of-view of said animal, it doesn’t take long to realise that Woods’ delicate vocals are really telling of the fragility of human existence and the weariness of the daily grind: “They grind upon bone and blood / Never casein’ to a halt / Sacrifice the vulnerable / If it gets the wheels to start.”
The sprawling ‘Gila’ clocks in at almost seven minutes in length, Woods’ vocals wavering before he breaks into something that can be described no other way than as a howl. The music feels Middle Eastern in tone, so when we hear the sound of a harmonica, it’s a surprise just how well it works. ‘Middle Forth’ moves us back into a far more tradition Americana sound as Woods suggests different ways he might spend his days once he’s passed on: “Bury me out in a sleeping bag / On the wildest bank of the Rio Grande / Float me down the Middle Fork / When the snows melt and the Gila roars.”
On ‘Gallup, New Mexico’, Woods was lucky enough to get Jimmy Stallings, the man who originally wrote and recorded the song, to join him. It’s a very personal song for Stallings as it recounts his own father’s mysterious death (“My father died / What caused his death? / No one seems to know / They found him in a coal shack / By the railroad tracks / In two feet of Gallup snow”), but it’s something that Woods felt a kinship with given he too lost a parent when he was only a child. “What if I fly? / What if I die? / Hold tight / On the knife’s edge,” Woods asks against the gritty guitar on ‘Knife’s Edge’, a track dripping with indie cool, before ‘South 285’ plays us out as Woods lists off places in something better characterised as a spoken word piece than a song.
The trek we take with Woods on “Hawk Is Listenin’” is not always conventional, it’s a twisty, turning road we go along that has us looking both back and forward, but if you’re willing to ride out a few of the bumps along the way in the form of some offbeat choices, there is a lot to be gained because, as the maxim goes, the journey is the destination.
