All Music Guide's The Whole NoteBeyond Cole's Corner: A Conversation with Richard Hawley
By Thom Jurek
When Cole's Corner was shortlisted for the U.K.'s Mercury Prize in 2006 (the equivalent of a Pulitzer stateside), many who'd followed songwriter Richard Hawley's quietly evolving career thought simply, "Surprising, but it's about time." The Artic Monkeys eventually nudged Hawley from the winning position eventually. However, during their acceptance speech from the stage that evening they declared that he had been robbed. Then the two acts from Sheffield got drunk together to celebrate -- Hawley because he was quite relieved he did not win. Seemingly overnight, Hawley had become a "name" to his countrywomen and men and Americans alike. A local mustard company in Sheffield issued a "Cole's Corner" brand in his honor. The reason was simple enough: Hawley is one of them. Not only had he been in the Longpigs and been the guitarist in Pulp and a crack session player and producer, but since he began making his own recordings in with a mini-album in 2001, Hawley wrote about what he knew: Sheffield. Cole's Corner was a bulldozed local landmark where a department store once stood, but it's a meeting place for lovers, friends, business partners -- in other words, a spot virtually anyone from the town could identify with. Nevertheless, the music and words, sung in a languid, honeyed baritone, could be adapted to virtually any realm of experience. His settings were rich, lush, and utterly accessible.
Fast forward to 2007, and Hawley issued Lady's Bridge, named for another local landmark, a place that linked the poor side of town Hawley grew up in, to the rich side. It is the oldest bridge in the once renewed steel town and film capitol of England. The setting may remain in Sheffield, but the songs have grown immensely; while the ballads are plentiful, there are also some rockabilly numbers and near doo wop finger-poppers as well. These songs are elemental to Lady's Bridge because they reflect the kind of music Hawley grew up with. His father Dave was a Gene Vincent-loving first generation "Edwardian" or "Teddy Boy." He played in rock & roll, vintage R&B, and blues bands most of his life -- after working all day. Hawley's father passed away during the creative process leading up to Lady's Bridge after a three-year battle with lung cancer. Strings and other organic textures make appearances, but the magic inherent in Hawley's brand of classic rock & roll songwriting remains unchanged. The United Kingdom has already spoken, by resounding its approval over the album, which has launched a hit single in "Tonight Streets Are Ours." The Sheffield locals have offered their thumbs up as well with the Kelham Island Brewery launching four Richard Hawley ales! AMG spoke to Hawley by phone from Sheffield, to chat about the album, his town, and what it is that keeps him rooted there.
AMG: Lady's Bridge is named for another local Sheffield landmark, just as Cole's Corner was. In some sense, all of your records are rooted where you live. Can you talk about that a bit?
Hawley: It is quite simple really: it's where I'm from, it's where I live, and I have no desire to ever go anywhere else. I am firmly rooted here. My wife and I just got what we call here an "allotment," which is a small plot of land where you can plant things, from vegetables to flowers. There was something really great about spending time getting my hands dirty in the earth. Sheffield is not just in the songs; it's me, man! [Laughs] Seriously, though, I am not one of these songwriters who sit and dream up situations like, I think I will write a song about being alone at night in Scotland or anything; I have to write what I know. Ninety percent or more of what's in these songs on the album, and from all of my records, really, is either about people I know, something from my own life (obviously the first song, "Valentine," is about something very personal) or from things I know about the city's past.
AMG: That may be true, but while there is something timeless and romantic in your songs, they don't feel nostalgic necessarily. Memory and nostalgia are two different things though they seem to be reflected together in "Tonight the Streets Are Hours." Though written in the present tense, it reflects a different, more innocent age.
Hawley: Right, but there's a fine line between them, man. I have to keep the focus on all the time, and get rid of stuff, try to pare it down to the minimum. I feel like you have to walk that line, take that risk, but be merciless about getting rid of things in the songs that either aren't true or just don't fit, don't belong. "Tonight the Streets Are Ours" and "Serious" have a different feel from what was on my earlier records, but they certainly belong here for many reasons.
AMG: That becomes obvious, but your records, especially Cole's Corner and Lady Bridge, both feel inhabited by other presences, other than yours. Your voice brings their stories to life, but they are obviously not you.
Hawley: There are ghosts in these songs to be sure, but they're ghosts I know. Cole's Corner is nothing but a patch of concrete now, but it's still there, the people who have passed there, and have memories of that as a meeting place are all valid, and I used them to a degree, while imagining others. It doesn't make those stories untrue, and it certainly doesn't make the songs untrue. The new album named for Lady's Bridge in Sheffield is not only a historical landmark, but it is also because I've crossed a bridge in my own life recently. But more than just me, the last song on the record, "The Sun Refused to Shine," is about a friend of mine, a woman. It was her wedding day and she was marrying the absolutely wrong guy. All of her friends, we all knew it, but she couldn't see it. Here was this wedding, and we're all there and feeling absolutely tragic, man. She ends up marrying this guy and moving off to New Zealand with him, only to come back because our feelings about this guy were right: he was abusive among other tings. He wasn't only the wrong person for her, but just a bad guy period. But she sorted it out, eventually got remarried and has two children. But that's a real story, something that happened to someone I know and that's when it comes out in my songs.
AMG: There must be other events as well.
Hawley: "Roll River Roll" is about the those victims of the Great Sheffield Flood. "Valentine," while personal, is about the passage of one partner who leaves the other one behind, the thing that has to happen in the end regardless after a very long relationship. These are sad songs, but at the same time, they are represented by real life occurrences and how I interpret them.
AMG: Is writing a process of cataloging things for you over time then? Are there some songs here that asserted themselves when you were working on your others records, or written when you were recording Cole's Corner in particular? The reason for asking is they feel in one sense all of a piece, though this album is more diverse musically.
Hawley: None of them were written before I started working on this album. Only "Valentine" had been begun earlier, and for a long time I just couldn't get it right, couldn't get it down to that bare, raw thing that could then be built up in recording. I wrote 40 songs for this record, and ending up recording 11. I approach songwriting as the songs begin to suggest themselves, or as I work on ideas...but also the thing you said about my records all being of a piece is simply that I am a guy who plays guitar who writes songs. I am not one of those "singer/songwriter" types. I always perform with a band, but what I'm trying to say is I don't feel like I have to reinvent the wheel or anything. I'm just trying to write the best songs I know how, and if I work at all at this job, which is great for me -- I'm really a lazy bastard -- it's at that. I like the way I've gained confidence as a singer of my songs, and in the way I record. The sound isn't going to change that much because I am writing always with the idea of an album in mind, and that has to be my album and recorded in my way.
AMG: You called yourself a lazy bastard; anybody who writes 40 songs for a record can't be that lazy. That's 40 songs in a single year!
Hawley: What I mean is I don't have to work at writing songs. I work hard on the songs. That's a different thing. Songs come to me all the time, I just write them down. I don't have to work at getting material. Since so many of these situations in my songs and on this record in particular are from the point of view of real things, all I need to do is jot them down.
AMG: So they come quickly but you said you worked on.
Hawley: Stripping them down, paring them back, getting them down to the barest minimum in order to make sure they are good. That's the work part. I go into my studio in Sheffield, with a table, a wall, a blank sheet of paper, and a guitar. Sometimes there's an engineer there, or some of the guys in the band, but mostly they are sitting around waiting for me to make something happen. I like my work, and my way of working. I am reasonably confident now that I've got a good song, and when thinking about good songs, there are so many of them have been written, but I don't aspire to anyone else's ideal. There's a lot of stuff about me sounding like this person and that person, but I am a rock & roll songwriter, or a songwriter period. I am not Jerry Lee, or Elvis, and I don't want to bring back anything or start anything, just write good songs. As a producer, I can be merciless when it comes to this. With myself, I can be brutal that a song contains nothing more than what it absolutely needs. I have a good sense of it, but it can be heartbreaking to have to let something go.
AMG: But more than this, you write albums more than just songs.
Hawley: But albums have to be made up of these things don't they? [Laughs] I hear an album as an album, so I write that way too. I am not even interested in recording three singles and filling up the rest.
AMG: But that in itself is a very old way of working. There's all this emphasis on tracks, on singles now. Do you have any songs on this record, say two or three, that stand out for you from the rest?
Hawley: Never thought about it really. I could never pick individual songs out because I do write in terms of the album. I understand singles. I used to buy 45s when I was a kid, because the single was the thing, but that single got played on a record player and anyone could hear it. I would play one song to death, just over and over again.
AMG: But you are going back to a time when those singles were issued often for their own sake, whether we are talking about the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Often, an artist would pump out a bunch of singles just to have them on a jukebox in a bar or at a lunch counter somewhere. Now they are tied deeply to albums, and albums are often a collection of songs created as singles. The MP3 player has underscored that reality.
Hawley: That is true. But that's also what I am getting at: when I used to buy singles, or albums for that matter, they used to be (sometimes to the great annoyance of my parents) publicly shared things. People could gather round a record player and listen together. Now people are plugged in individually, and that conversation is lost. I write albums for the purse of creating, either from my memory, someone else's story, or history (I study local history and am familiar with it because my dad and grandfather filled me in on a lot of it and some I read on my own), the idea of telling a series of stories that fit together. Don't get me wrong, I own an iPod, but I don't write my songs to be on one.
AMG: You write, live, and record in Sheffield. The world is small then, seemingly on purpose. Has all the attention changed much for you in terms of the way you live? And how do you see yourself growing musically now that there is real media attention on you? Did you feel any pressure when recording Lady's Bridge as a follow-up to Cole's Corner?
Hawley: First, you couldn't pay me enough money to record in any other studio other than Yellow Arch in Sheffield. I know it; it has the gear and the sound I want. I'd be lost in one of those big places. I never feel any pressure at all when writing or recording. Sometimes I feel a bit when having to cut things from a song, but that's from myself. I pay no attention to anything outside, or very little really. And because I am doing something on such a small scale relatively, I don't have to worry much about it. If I had one of those careers where I was living in an airplane and flying 'round the world all the time, I don't think I could do it. I'd probably fall apart.
AMG: And musically?
Hawley: Well, learning to work with different types of things, having arranged strings in places, having more control over my voice, and learning more of what I want and playing with a band that knows how to get it and knowing what I want from an engineer when I hear those songs in my head. But more than this, it comes down to wanting to make records that are timeless, that are indeed modern and can be heard that way, but could have been made a long time ago and could be heard by anyone as contemporary to their time -- at least since rock & roll anyway.
AMG: What's next then for you?
Hawley: Well, we've been through the East and in Europe, and round November or December we'll be playing over there on a tour, before Christmas certainly.
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"Tonight the Streets Are Ours" video:
youtube.com/watch?v=bLVHoDU4KKU"Serious" video:
youtube.com/watch?v=r-1O0pAw5A8
