Notes
An album of leaving and staying, of coming and going, of loving and longing, and the wonderful happenstances of life... Sorta Kinda Maybe - The band's fourth album is a happy-sounding mish-mash of rock, pop, blues, and roots music, but it's held together with a string of lyrics that evoke the heaviness and desperation of striking out on a new path, and the longing, randomness, and freedom of the road. The ambitious 12-song album - which includes an 8-song bonus disc - ultimately depicts the pain and beauty of being alive. It's joyous and sad and everything between - a perfect road album. The road is a potent myth in America, and much of this album reflects a Kerouac-like yearning for what's ahead, with the knowledge that what's left behind will be sorely missed. Hawk's lyrics are playful and earnest at the same time, and his characters inhabit a world in constant flux where movement is the only certainty. The road isn't easy, but it offers something that fills a great American need for someplace else. John Steinbeck wrote in his road story "Travels with Charlie": I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation - a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something, but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every state I visited. The title track reflects the scattered wonder of life's many perspectives: "Masquerades / a twisted phrase / the strangest things turn into facts / a story true but not exact." Truth, indeed, is not always an absolute. It is in the eye of the beholder. Jesse Black provides soaring harmonies around a track that sounds like vintage R.E.M. with a little psychedelic '60s thrown in for good measure, thanks to Pascal Nasta's groovy drums. "Strawberry Smile", the first single from the album, changes the narrator's life with a chance meeting in the California desert: "She rolled her window down with elegant fingers / let out a laugh like bubble gum / she asked directions, I set the course / then I forgot where I came from..." He sees his chance and figures, why not? Fate gets a nudge from his opportunistic ideas: "She said, ' I thought I'd take a drive out to the Salton Sea / I don't fit in here in Palm Springs' / I claimed coincidence, 'I'm headed there myself / I heard it looks like bathtub ring'..." Our hero essentially altered the course of his life with one "what the hell" moment. The fact that the Salton Sea is a dying, stinking, man-made, ex-resort probably piqued his interest as much as our strawberry-smiled girl did. Told to a two-chord toe-tapping rhythm, this story puts you in the car to witness an instant connection and a tale that'll last a lifetime, even if this is their only day together. There's an interesting outro as well, that shifts into a gear reminiscent of the end of The Beatles' "Hello, Goodbye". Birds and butterflies reinforce the floaty road show, as they appear more than once in the thread of the songs. "Blackbird on a lonely wire was waiting, but my mind was gone," Hawk writes on "Letting Go", a tune co-written with bassist Chuck Bordelon. The leaving is difficult but necessary, although he asks, "ever get the feeling you're driving away / from all you know? / the rear-view tears at you / the pull of the undertow / and the people recede into the too huge world in calico / and you know it's time for letting go..." The Sunday-morning leaving is the hardest - you know you're on your way, but you linger in the awkward space between staying and going. "Letting Go" has beautiful harmonies and piano, courtesy of California musician Adam Marsland - ex of Cockeyed Ghost - who captured the song's melancholy perfectly. Bordelon adds a surprisingly bubbly bass line to the ballad, which suggests that although it's sad to be going, it's also exciting to be on your way. Later, th
