Bringing bigger textures and grunge influences to ‘Chinook’
Recording for the album initially began after Hawk moved back to North Carolina for a short stint. With some help from producer Sam Acchione, Hawk traveled to Philadelphia for three- or four-day stretches before deciding to live in the city for a month to bring the project to completion.
While making the long drives back to Philadelphia, Hawk took the time to go through the CDs she’d started collecting though her childhood.
“I became totally obsessed with Alice in Chains and even Pearl Jam and these things that I interacted with as a kid,” Hawk said. “It’s just revisiting something as an adult and taking completely new meanings from it … Alice in Chains are known for doing those really unsettling, beautiful harmonies, and that was something that I quite instinctively just started to utilize on my record.”
The relationship between the two collaborators was strengthened by their appreciation for rock music, which she said she only shares with a few people.
“Sometimes I saw limits for my songs that maybe he didn’t,” Hawk said. “I knew I wanted bigger textures on certain things and I wanted to have these like full atmospheres and all this kind of stuff, but I just wasn’t exactly sure how to make that happen.”
Reflecting on the process, Hawk said the switch from making demos at home to recording in a studio helped her start to “dream quite bigger” with the initial concepts.
“It was just like, ‘Oh, we can add this kind of percussion,’ or, ‘We can add in this old organ,’” she said. “Having those possibilities was not something that I was used to.”
Softer moments on the record like “Four O’Clocks,” a track about her early childhood home that was demolished to build a highway connecting to the military base, are contrasted by songs like “Caretaker,” a punk song with driven amps and guitar solos.
“I remember writing and recording my demo of that song,” Hawk said. “I was just trapped in a tiny little room in my apartment and I was very mad and I was just screaming into my microphone. And then I was just kind of like, ‘Yeah, that rocks.’”
“Superhighway” was also noted as an “outlier” by Hawk that takes inspiration from a demo she made with her earlier band Customer, turning it from a punk song into a new wave track.
“I was just really obsessed with a lot of Eastern European dark wave at the time and I was ordering cassettes from Russia, and I was just inclined to make a song like that,” Hawk said.
Overall, the album represents a smorgasbord of influences and aspects of Hawk’s writing that introduces listeners to different directions she hopes to explore.
“It’s funny to see that stereotype just come to life that I am a girl with an acoustic guitar sometimes and they think that I’m just going to make some folk music, and I don’t,” Hawk said. “I like records that are fun to listen to, I like variety, and I don’t know what my future records are going to sound like either and I think that that is quite thrilling for me as a songwriter.”
The album is available via streaming and CD.