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Thread: Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Growth

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    Administrator Mandolin Cafe's Avatar
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    Default Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Growth

    Wanted to share this announcement from Hawktail in the forum instead of as a news release so we don't get asked by lots of band to do a full News release... happens... in case anyone wonders. One of us, too many bands, but some deserve special attention, and Hawktail is most certainly one of them in our opinion.

    Hawktail - Place of Growth

    Place of Growth, acoustic quartet Hawktail's third and most conceptual album, is a journey through the natural world--a journey designed for a single sitting. From the weightless joyride of "Updraft" to the reflective daydreaming of "Shallows," each track sketches its own scenery.

    Links to pre-order: https://lnk.to/placeofgrowth

    The first single "Shallows" is out now. Here's the first "Padiddle Spotlight" video (more coming featuring each band member) in which Britt discusses "Shallows." Second single is out July 20 with a video of Dominick discussing "Updraft." Full album out August 12, 2022.



    "Maybe it’s all the time we've been spending outside these last few years... in fact, much of the group work for this album was conducted outdoors. It began when our friend Lena Jonsson challenged us to tune-swap, and Paul arranged her tune "Antilopen" for us (we made a video of it in our garage, currently unlisted but viewable here). It turned out well, spurring us to write more music to accompany it. Soon after, a single story-like gesture beckoned, a sort of "tune-cycle."

    Following this aim was an expedition: finding our way through unfamiliar musical places, and driving to Shelbyville, TN to camp out and record even as we completed the composing. Some of you may have heard us perform it in concert during its evolution. We are excited for you to hear the whole, allowing your imagination to wander with the music." -Hawktail

    Track Listing
    1. Wanderings: Begin
    2. Antilopen
    3. Wanderings: Look
    4. Updraft
    5. Wanderings: Where?
    6. Pomegranate in the Oak Tree
    7. Shallows
    8. Big Sun

    Produced by Paul Kowert and Brittany Haas with Hawktail

    Hawktail's fan base includes many people who play music themselves, so Padiddle began to create materials for these folks - sheet music prints modeled on historic broadsides. The "Shallows" sheet music print is the third in Padiddle's new series - this one arranged by Kowert for violin and guitar and featuring art by Hatch Show Print designer Heather Moulder. A limited edition of these letterpress prints are available with the release of "Place of Growth."
    Last edited by Mandolin Cafe; Jul-20-2022 at 10:40am.

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    Default Re: Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Grow

    Band bio:

    Place of Growth (2022)

    For nearly ten years, Hawktail bassist Paul Kowert has kept a computer folder of musical seeds—a digital root cellar of voice memos, studio outtakes, concert tapes. “I’ve been a cataloguer of stuff,” Kowert tells me from his hotel in Telluride (in addition to his work with Hawktail, Kowert is kicking off a summer tour as one-fifth of the Grammy Award-winning quintet Punch Brothers). “Periodically, I would go through the folder looking around, and I kept coming back to this file.”

    “This file” is a thirty-second voice memo from 2016. “We called it ‘Complete Sound,’” Jordan Tice, guitarist, recalls. “It’s me just strumming… then Britt found this syncopated rhythm. We were kinda like, oh stop that’s really cool. Then Paul grabbed his iPhone and hit record.” Zooming in from Nashville, Tice sings the riff of “Complete Sound”—it’s the B-section of “Updraft,” one of the standout tracks on Hawktail’s newest release. “You come up with things and you don’t know what to do with them yet,” Tice explains, “you don’t have the context or the experience to bring it around home base yet.”

    In the six years since “Complete Sound”—years that saw the release of Hawktail’s acclaimed freshman and sophomore efforts, Unless (2018) and Formations (2020)—Hawktail has developed not only the context and experience necessary to bring the “Complete Sound” musical seed to fruition, but those elements necessary to craft the quartet’s most ambitious album yet.

    Running just under thirty-minutes, Place of Growth is music made for a single sitting—a collection of eight tracks laced together by a common thread of recurring “Wanderings” and thematic recollections. “It’s not a single piece,” Kowert is quick to clarify, but one could reasonably mistake it for such; Place of Growth lives somewhere between a collection of tunes and a chamber suite. “If I had to give it a term—and I only chanced upon this last night,” Kowert tells me, “I’d call it a ‘tune cycle.’”

    To ask what this tune cycle (or any instrumental record) is about is to miss the point. But speaking with each member of Hawktail, a common theme emerges. At its core, Place of Growth is a testament to—indeed, a celebration of—what fiddler Brittany Haas calls Hawktail’s “connection though time” as well as the growing musical identities of each member. (Like Tice, Haas is Zooming in from Nashville—in our first interview, she’s perched at her desk at home; in our second, she’s hanging out with longtime collaborator and fellow fiddle legend Darol Anger’s dog). “We have this history together,” Haas explains. “We know each other. Hearing that—hearing each other’s personalities—was a main goal [of Place of Growth]. And I think we did achieve that, giving everybody space to be themselves.”

    Mandolinist Dominick Leslie, texting me in the midst of a country-wide tour with Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway, writes movingly about the sort of space Haas describes. “It’s like being in a room with three great therapists,” Leslie says, “playing with a group that listens as deeply and wholeheartedly as Hawktail. Hearing them play is like hearing the voices of old friends.”

    By giving each “old friend” their own space to speak, Place of Growth makes for a remarkably wide-ranging—though nonetheless unified—musical journey. With “Antilopen,” a raucous arrangement of Swedish fiddler Lena Jonsson’s original, we find Hawktail at their boldest and most energetic—a showcase of the quartet’s dexterity and sense of adventure (a fitting tribute to Jonsson and the tune’s animal title). With “Shallows,” we hear Hawktail at their most intimate and introspective; played without a steady pulse (“a rubato kind of thing,” Haas explains, “more like something classical musicians do”), “Shallows” is dreamlike and lyrical, allowing the melody—passed from fiddle to mandolin to bass—to speak on its own terms.

    Place of Growth revels in these extremes—in bridging the gaps between the vigor of “Antilopen” and the tenderness of “Shallows,” between the drive of “Updraft” and the openness of “Big Sun.” It revels, in other words, in the idiosyncrasy and imagination of Hawktail—a combination made possible by care and patience, by giving four musicians the time and space to grow and flourish together.

    To make that space and time—to make that space and time count—Hawktail traded their native Nashville for a secluded studio in rural Tennessee, tracking Place of Growth over two weekends (made up of sixteen-hour days) at Shelbyville’s Tennessee Studios. “We basically camped out in the studio, sleeping in the same building we were recording in,” Tice says. “We’d drive out of the city and be entirely alone with the music and with each other.”

    If Hawktail is reluctant to proscribe a particular meaning to their music (“it’s not our place,” Kowert says), each member returns to this notion of musical and personal connection—to Haas’ description of giving “everybody space to be themselves,” Tice’s image of being “alone with the music and with each other,” Leslie’s vision of four “old friends.”

    This is as much explicit “meaning” as Kowert will provide. And that just might be enough. “There’s never gonna be another one of these people,” Kowert says. “So what does the album mean? It’s the music that we made at this time in our lives with this specific group of people. It couldn’t have been anywhere near the same if anyone was different, I’m proud of that. It couldn’t be anywhere near the same.”

    And it may not be “anywhere near the same” again—not in the immediate future, at least. As various projects scatter Hawktail to the wind, the next stage of the quartet’s growth is anyone’s guess. But to think of Hawktail’s future may be to miss the point once more. Place of Growth is a record with its feet planted firmly in the present, perhaps a perpetual present; it is a record that captures musicians at a distinct moment in their lives and holds that moment in place. In this capacity, one cannot help but think of the herbarium sheet on the album’s cover: a flower—a bell heather—plucked and pressed over a hundred years ago; a living thing—a growing thing—held in place, preserved.

    —Noah Altshuler

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    Default Re: Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Grow

    Tomorrow we'll release a streaming copy of "Updraft" from the album.

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    Default Re: Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Grow

    Here's "Shallows," already released:


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    Default Re: Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Grow

    What a great group of players, and people! Each member has at some time over the years to go out of their way to answer questions or just be a welcoming friendly presence when we've met. Can't wait to hear their live show in this quartet.
    Last edited by BradKlein; Jul-19-2022 at 9:57am.
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    Default Re: Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Grow

    Out of all the "new" bands, I think these guys are my favorite.
    "your posts ... very VERY opinionated ...basing your opinion/recommendations ... pot calling ...kettle... black...sarcasm...comment ...unwarranted...unnecessary...."

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    Default Re: Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Grow

    Here's a new track just released today, shared from our Instagram Profile as a Reel:


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    Default Re: Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Grow

    Saw Brittany and Natalie Haas last night on the Peniche Anako in Paris. Holy smokes. Just holy smokes. Geniuses. And kind and fun and friendly and my little world was rocked... in the best of ways.
    MATTHEW ROSE STUDIO

    KRISHOT A (1999)
    Weber Yellowstone F (2012)

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    Registered User Denis Kearns's Avatar
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    Default Re: Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Grow

    Thanks for the link. As a botanist, I really liked seeing that a herbarium specimen was used to announce some excellent music, but I can’t find any plant species that is actually named hawktail in any of the national plant databases I frequent. I guess I’ll just have to query the band. Will listen to the tunes once I’m off the train.

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    NY Naturalist BradKlein's Avatar
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    Default Re: Hawktail announces new album coming August 12 - Place of Grow

    I had the same reaction to the cover art, Denis, and asked Brittany Haas if the specimen was lavender.
    She told me “ash heather!”
    Last edited by BradKlein; Jul-25-2022 at 9:02am.
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