Coles Corner (2005)

This has been a close friend of mine for years now. It comes out when I'm travelling in the car on long journeys. It appears when I'm down or tired with a whisky in my hand late at night. It's a good friend which I can rely on to always be there. Great retro 50's vibe to the songs yet timeless too. Many will sound familiar because they have that vibe of always being there in the background. Favourites are "Coles Corner", "Just Like The Rain", "Hotel Room", "Born Under A Bad Sign" and "Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?"
Good album. Highly recommended.

This album is simple yet elegant, warm and graceful, with lots of space for the listener to enter into. Hawley's love of Roy Orbison, Elvis, and Scott Walker has left the best possible mark on him as a singer and songwriter.He understands that in writing a song, the most important thing is to make it immediately available to the listener as either a lived or desired experience. He paints his lyrics with melodies to get that across, then records with the intention of creating a world at once familiar and somehow utterly dreamy, timeless.
Coles Corner is an intimate collection of love songs (most of them broken), where sadness and melancholy are carefully housed in forms and frames that understand the weight of the emotion communicated without letting the emotion overwhelm the song itself. They are saturated in tenderness and the heart of true romantic, not self pity or bitterness..

The opening title track is like the beginning of as a suite or a film score.
"Just Like the Rain" is its mirror image, a song fueled by thin, shimmering guitars, articulated against restlessness and a desire for return, to find the ghost that has haunted the narrator.
Reveries, nostalgia, longed-for wishes, regret, sadness, and the bittersweet mark of the beloved left on the heart of the left and lost. Early rock & roll and rockabilly, country, traces of the vintage-'40s pop, jazz, and blues, fall together on a dimly lit, intimate streetcorner that has witnessed it all.
There isn't a moment on Coles Corner that doesn't stand up, doesn't fall into the next, giving them all uncommon, even singular depth and dimension. And the singer's voice conjures shadows, glimmers of soft light, street lamps, tears, and the sound of lonely steps on a rainy midnight street. Coles Corner is expertly assembled and executed.
It is magical and utterly lovely!!!
MAGICAL TRACKS No 5 & 6.......