Vintage Review: Will Hoge’s Draw the Curtains (2008)

Given the circumstances, Nashville’s Will Hoge could have become just another music biz casualty. Ignorantly dropped by his major label deal after a single brilliant, shining album – Blackbird On A Lonely Wire – Hoge nevertheless continued to crank ‘em out with alarming regularity. Studio albums, live collections for the fans, an excellent EP…better than a half-dozen, by my count, all while the artist continued to tour a couple hundred nights a year, developing a loyal fan base and finding his voice as a songwriter and performer.

Will Hoge’s Draw the Curtains

Now Hoge is back playing in the major leagues, and as good as Blackbird On A Lonely Wire was (and continues to be a jukebox favorite ‘round the Rev’s home and office), Hoge’s latest effort and Rykodisc debut, Draw the Curtains, is hands-down an incredibly humbling collection of tunes that perfectly frame Hoge’s talents as a singer and a songwriter. A near-perfect hybrid of streetwise rock, Memphis-styled soul, and country twang, Hoge belts it out like a Beale Street busker one moment, and soars like some hard rock god of yore the next.

Draw the Curtains opens with the lovesick ballad “When I Can Afford To Lose,” a gutsy move in an industry that demands up-tempo iTunes-fodder to draw in attention-deficient teens. Hoge’s masterful performance here is simply amazing. Beginning with just his pleading voice and a lonely piano, Hoge amps it up with a tear-jerking, soul-stirring performance that Rev. Al Green would be proud of; if your heart isn’t breaking for the singer at the end of three-minutes-plus, then there’s clearly no hope for your future. Hoge follows this suburb opener with “These Were the Days,” a guitar-driven rocker and another forlorn love song where the protagonist begs “give me something that I can hold onto” while desperately adding “don’t let it all just get away.”

There’s plenty of other good stuff to hear on Draw the Curtains as well. The complex, textured “Silver and Gold” would sound great on the radio, a blistering, nearly-fatal cheatin’ song with strikingly mournful guitarwork courtesy of Adam Fluhrer, Hoge’s sharp-tongued lyrics, and gospel-styled Hammond-bashing by guest Reese Wynans. With just Chris Carmichael’s beautifully-weeping fiddle for accompaniment, Hoge stretches his rough-hewn vocals to their limits with the haunting “I’m Sorry Now,” an apology, of sorts, from a man that done his woman wrong and asks, yet again, for forgiveness one more time.

Washed By the Water

“Washed By the Water” is a thinly-veiled commentary on New Orleans and the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, written from a survivor’s perspective. With Wynan’s elegant B3 work behind Hoge’s forceful vocals, accompanied by a church-style choir and magnificent six-string work from Pat Buchanan and Dan Baird, Hoge belts out the telling verse, “then the President came down and said things is awful sad, but ain’t no words from that man gonna bring us nothing back, but in the ghosts of church bells I hear my mama say, down here we’re washed by the water, the water can’t wash us away.” It’s a powerful musical moment, delivered with heart and no little amount of passion.

Behind Pete Finney’s pedal steel, Hoge delivers a magnificent tour-de-force in the album-closing “The Highway’s Home,” one of the top two or three “life on the road” tunes that has ever been penned by a songwriter. With brilliant language and world-weary vocals, Hoge describes himself as a “burned out junky truck stop saint” traveling down the road “with a suitcase full of empty dreams, a guitar with broken strings, a busted heart that longs to sing the blues,” apologetically explaining to the love he leaves behind that he has “a mind that always leads me wrong, a head full of Hank Williams songs,” concluding “I’m sorry honey, but this highway’s home…” The song sums up the frustrating paradox faced by every road-worn musician and perfectly captures the endless landscape of Interstate signs, billboards, and yellow lines.

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

The rest of Draw the Curtains rolls back and forth on much the same well-trodden path, Hoge delivering masterful performances of Stax-flavored lovesick soul and throwback six-string rock. Much like John Hiatt’s wonderful early ‘90s work, Marc Cohn’s first couple of albums, and D.L. Byron’s lone classic LP, Will Hoge is a romantic poet at heart, a skilled wordsmith capable of capturing complex emotions into a single phrase or verse. His lyrics are imaginative and often cut to the bone; when accompanied by his uniquely organic sound, there’s simply nobody that does this kind of music better than Hoge these days. Forget about American Idol drones and Pitchfork-approved indie-rock clones; Will Hoge is the real deal, a rock ‘n’ roll lifer with a hungry heart full o’ soul. (Rykodisc, released 2007)

Review originally published by the Cashville411 website, 2008