Cosy recording which traverses a range of musical styles and flavours of rock including Southern and country.
The High Hawks first got together in 2019. They comprise six members of various bands including: Leftover Salmon; Hard Working Americans; Taxi; Railroad Earth; and Horseshoes & Hand Grenades. The sextet of music veterans are all old friends and love to play together; in addition, they can draw on well over a century of musicianship between them. With four singer-songwriters, the band had no shortage of material to draw on for this record when they went into the studio. Of the 12 songs which were chosen to be included on the album, Tim Herman and Adam Greuel each contributed four, while Vince Carbone and Chad Staehly provided two each. Each writer sings the lead vocals on their own songs.
The album opens with Greuel’s ‘Diamond Sky’ which has beautiful fiddle playing running through it. It’s a largely acoustic, wonderfully downbeat number reflecting on the mid-winter doldrums. The second track ‘Somewhere South‘ is a good time tune. It’s an ode to people, known in North America as “snowbirds”, who escape the chilly climes of the north of the United States to find some ‘good fishing ‘ in ‘the Keys‘ or Mexico.
‘Temperature Is Rising‘ is about social media, and stepping back and listening before jumping into the fray where ‘words are tangled branches‘. Staehly’s ‘Fox River Blues‘ has the main protagonist ‘running from the past’ with ‘nothing to lose’, which leads to some bad choices that take him outside the law.
There are some tracks which have a laid-back rock’n’roll, jam sound to them such as ‘Somewhere In The Middle‘. ‘Shine Your Blues‘ provides a suitably upbeat conclusion to the album with a tint of a Cajun sound, taking the listener all the way down the Mississippi to Louisiana.
The album has a great live feel to it and it doesn’t need Herman’s assurance to know, that as he puts it, “AI had no part in the making of this record”. The band view this record as a musical travelogue, which given the diversity of the song styles and the rich musical tapestry that they weave, sums it up well.
