‘Unseen Undetected’ is the first track to be released from the new album by Chicago born but Nashville based musician Doug Hoekstra ‘The Day Deserved’ which lands next week on April 30th. Doug, who one writer described as “either the Hank Williams of the printed page, or the Raymond Carver of the recording studio” is a long time friend of ours here at AUK, and a regular feature of our intimate little evenings we used to host here in Liverpool.
The record is Hoekstra’s first album in over a decade – musically, the songs are diverse and deviate far from the typical singer-songwriter fare, with a nod to the likes of Cohen, Velvets, Kinks, and other artists he tends to get compared to. All were fully demoed to explore arrangement ideas, but flowed from core band sessions, coalescing into a mix of the tight and the orchestral, reflecting rock, folk, and reggae touches, colours of everything from gypsy fiddle to reggae roots melodica – a new one for us! Lyrically the tunes are character-based, but reflective of the day and the times.
Describing the new song, Doug told us: “Unseen Undetected is a song that alternates narratives, between that of an immigrant family coming to America for a better life, and white nationalists, who espouse intolerance, and worse. Both are often unseen and undetected in the daily turning of the earth, until of course, someone lets the genie out of the bottle. Then, positive light is shone or hidden darkness revealed. It’s current events, but it’s timeless, and it’s character-driven.
Although I enlisted friends to create the other videos for The Day Deserved, I tackled this one myself – the idea being to mirror those perceptions of unseen undetected through a collage of images that was both literal and abstract. Footage is drawn from all over the place, and included a few shots from my home movie archives, including a fleeting cameo by my son Jude, wild horses in Monument Valley, and a glimpse of Castle Clinton (Battery Park NYC) at the end – where my father’s father came to America, on a boat from the Netherlands.”
The release of ‘The Day Deserved’ on Drop Autumn Records will be followed by a new short story collection ‘Ten Seconds In-Between’ (Better than Starbucks press) to be released in June, 2021. In the meantime this is as gorgeous a slice of lowkey Go-Betweensy americana as you’ll hear today, and with a nice video to boot.
