Palliard, High Hawk
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The two of them started playing together in college in the downstate town of Charleston. In 2002 they formed a bluegrass band called Butcher’s Legs, and after it broke up in 2004, Boyles and Alford stuck together, collaborating on the songs that would end up on High Hawk’s EP. Later that year they moved to Chicago and hooked up with guitarist Joel Shute, who’d been making music with Alford on and off since high school, and after recruiting drummer Mike McGrath from the Thin Man they moved slowly away from traditional bluegrass and country. “It was a little bit acoustic in the beginning, and then it kinda got going. It was a crescendo of rock ‘n’ roll,” Boyles says. Alford has a similar take: “We were playing in a bluegrass band and listening to alt-country music. Then I guess started playing alt-country music and listening to rock music,”
Soon Boyles, who also works as a freelance studio engineer, began recording High Hawk at his West Town apartment. The six expertly raw-sounding tunes on the resulting self-released EP–the band cut the process short and mastered from rough mixes–borrow the best aspects of every style from bluegrass to Bakersfield. Alford calls his approach to writing “kind of epileptic.” “Something kinda comes out. Or it doesn’t. What it does, it does,” he says. “I think it’s interesting to try to write a song and then, after it’s more or less complete, putting it in the genre that puts it best.”
He calls the show the pinnacle of the band’s existence. It’s weird to see him and Alford assume the same respectful demeanor talking about Malian desert blues that they do when you bring up Bill Monroe, but their band shares with Tinariwen not just the appreciation of inherited forms but the willingness to mess with them. After our interview, I look up Tinariwen’s music online. Their song “Le Chant des Fauves” shares a loping, elastic trot with a lot of country ballads, and would work perfectly on a mix CD next to the first version of “Woman.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marty Perez.
