Past Music Columns

Hello, We Must Be Going

High Hawk's new album is genius, but your chances of hearing it are slim.

Palliard, High Hawk
WHEN Sat 12/9, 9 PM
WHERE Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia
PRICE $8
INFO 773-227-4433 or 866-468-3401

Clockwise from top left: Jeff Lyman, Ryan Boyles, Joshua Alford, and Mike McGrath

Marty Perez

By Miles Raymer
December 8, 2006

WHEN I AGREED to take over this column, the list of local bands I wanted to profile was pretty short. But High Hawk was on it -- for the EP they put out this year, which made a messy and occasionally brilliant coupling of backwoods country and psychedelic rock, and for the album they were working on, which sounded like it could've been huge. To my ears, they had the potential to remind the world that Chicago's lock on alt-country isn't just 90s history. Then they announced they were playing their last show this Saturday at the Hideout. There are better ways to get moved to the top of the list, but breaking up your band works too.

"We're pretty country," says bassist Ryan Boyles, and I'm inclined to agree. I'm sitting with him and front man Joshua Alford, who writes the band's songs, in the upstairs room at the Hideout, talking over cans of PBR, and it feels like a conversation that should be happening on a porch -- though I'm happy it isn't, since it's sleeting outside. Boyles talks with an easy twang -- he was raised in southern Illinois -- and Alford doesn't talk much at all. He has a tendency to sit quietly with a sardonic grin on his face, then jump in with a punch line. He's gonna make a great old guy in a few decades.

The two of them started playing together in college in the downstate town of Charleston. In 2002 they formed a bluegrass band called Butcher's Legs, and after it broke up in 2004, Boyles and Alford stuck together, collaborating on the songs that would end up on High Hawk's EP. Later that year they moved to Chicago and hooked up with guitarist Joel Shute, who'd been making music with Alford on and off since high school, and after recruiting drummer Mike McGrath from the Thin Man they moved slowly away from traditional bluegrass and country. "It was a little bit acoustic in the beginning, and then it kinda got going. It was a crescendo of rock 'n' roll," Boyles says. Alford has a similar take: "We were playing in a bluegrass band and listening to alt-country music. Then I guess started playing alt-country music and listening to rock music," he says. "And then started playing rock music and . . . I'm not listening to speed metal, but . . . hah."

Soon Boyles, who also works as a freelance studio engineer, began recording High Hawk at his West Town apartment. The six expertly raw-sounding tunes on the resulting self-released EP -- the band cut the process short and mastered from rough mixes -- borrow the best aspects of every style from bluegrass to Bakersfield. Alford calls his approach to writing "kind of epileptic." "Something kinda comes out. Or it doesn't. What it does, it does," he says. "I think it's interesting to try to write a song and then, after it's more or less complete, putting it in the genre that puts it best."

Sometimes what the band settles on isn't a single genre but an organic hybrid of two or three. "Ukelele and Lie" begins with Alford's ragged baritone howl and old-timey uke playing -- he sounds like a coonskin-coat crooner at the tail end of a gin binge -- but then Boyles and Shute enter with a dirty 70s hard-funk line, the drums drop in, and the song explodes into something that manages to feel like a dramatic rock pileup while hardly involving any rock. "Woman" appears twice on the EP, first as the kind of tender ballad that Ryan Adams can still pull off when he's not trying to drive away his remaining fans with Grateful Dead covers, then as an acid-rock workout colored with feedback and trippy effects.

In the right hands the EP could've become a sensation among alt-country freaks and casual Wilco listeners alike, but the band's own hands weren't the right ones. Except for the songwriting, Boyles was doing almost all of the work -- not only recording but also booking and promotion -- and he admits he wasn't cut out for multitasking. "My brain doesn't work between those things," he says. "If you asked me to put down a bass line while I'm trying to record and listen in the headphones, there's a total disconnect there." No one else in High Hawk took the project too seriously -- asked to sum up the band, Alford calls it "back porch music" -- and as a result there wasn't much of an effort to push the CD.

One of the only shows High Hawk actually pursued was an April gig at Martyrs' with Tinariwen, a Tuareg band from Mali that plays protest songs in a hypnotic traditional style enhanced with electric guitars. Boyles begged for a spot on the bill, and after the original opener canceled, High Hawk got the nod. He calls the show the pinnacle of the band's existence. It's weird to see him and Alford assume the same respectful demeanor talking about Malian desert blues that they do when you bring up Bill Monroe, but their band shares with Tinariwen not just the appreciation of inherited forms but the willingness to mess with them. After our interview, I look up Tinariwen's music online. Their song "Le Chant des Fauves" shares a loping, elastic trot with a lot of country ballads, and would work perfectly on a mix CD next to the first version of "Woman."

Only one thing has had a greater influence on High Hawk's trajectory than the band's own unwillingness to steer it, and that's been romance. Shute left in April, after his new wife had a baby -- Jeff Lyman of City Electric now plays lead guitar -- and at the end of the year Alford is due to decamp to Austin, where he'll live with his girlfriend, who's now in North Carolina. "I'm moving there for love," he says. Boyles adds that his bandmate has a deathly hate for Chicago winters; Alford just points at the sleet-battered window and shrugs.

Pretty much everyone in the band already has other projects going -- McGrath is still in the Thin Man, Lyman plays with For All the Sweet Children, and Boyles is in Low Skies plus a second group with their front man, Chris Salveter. Given his songwriting skill, Alford shouldn't have any trouble finding bandmates in Austin. But High Hawk's imminent demise has derailed their plans to release Amor Fati, the full-length they already have in the can. The album makes the EP's most daring genre-crossing experiments seem tame and its most elating highs seem crude. Sad, slow, and romantic, it opens with a four-part suite that begins in a Spanish classical mode, crashes into creaky, jazzy blues, and surfaces somewhere in Uncle Tupelo country. Ambition like that has pushed a lot of other bands into pretentious conceptual train wrecks, but here the ideas never overshadow the songs. The album is sprawling and ingenious, sure, but it's also just a great bum-out record. Right now you can get it only on CD-R directly from the band -- they'll be giving it away at the Hideout. Longtime High Hawk boosters Palliard, self-releasing a new full-length of their own, headline the show; members may also join High Hawk for their set.

For more on music, see our blogs Crickets and Post No Bills.

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