Hoekstra breathes life into folk music by Jason Nickey

(Singer-songwriter Doug Hoekstra will perform at the Cellar Lounge Saturday night)

To put it plainly, there are far, far too many folksy singer-songwriters littering the musical landscape nowadays.

The reason for this, I think, is because it's a relatively easy style of music to fake your way through. Anybody with a modicum of musical knowledge can strap on an acoustic guitar, pen obscure yet personal lyrics and ape Bob Dylan in the local coffee shop. The more heavily traveled the musical path, the harder it is to push the boundaries and create something new.

Enter Doug Hoekstra, a Chicago-gone-Nashville singer-songwriter who will perform at the Cellar Lounge Saturday night.

With his dark, literate style, his breathy vocals and penchant for the odd production twists, Hoekstra seems poised to breathe some vitality into this tired old genre.

His latest album, 1999's "Make Me Believe" (One Man Clapping Records), came as something unexpected — a forward-looking singer-songwriter album, one that doesn't come off sounding forced or strained, emerging from a strong sense of tradition, but nearly unconstrained by folk clichés.

While Hoekstra admits to a heavy Dylan influence (as most other musician do), he's far from a simple imitator. His vocals fit somewhere between the whispers of Nick Drake and the speak-singing style of Lou Reed, but his most obvious influences are buried so far underneath his own distinct style as to hardly matter. Here and there you'll catch a reminder of the singer-songwriter tradition, but they only serve to highlight the difference.

The main way Hoekstra is different is that his songs are, in many ways, condensed short stories (Hoekstra is also a published fiction writer).

The formula of most singer-songwriters is to try and be as personal and soul-baring as possible, but Hoekstra instead uses his personal experience as a launching pad for his tales. He doesn't let the listener get bogged down in his psyche, he know people have their own problems to deal with, so he uses metaphor and analogy.

Hoekstra is also set apart by his idiosyncratic production choices. Most singer-songwriters, when going about making an album, view the studio where they are working as just a place to capture their performance. Far less often do they view the studio as an instrument in and of itself.

"There are people who are really great writers, but when you're making a record, it's an entity of it's own," he said. "Sometimes I'll pick up a record by someone I really admire, and I'll be totally disappointed because I don't think they went the extra mile in terms of approaching the studio."

Almost every song on "Make Me Believe" has some surprising texture popping up here or there, some unlooked-for instrument (melodica, cello, odd percussion noises) nodding in, or a strange vocal treatment.

On the other hand, Hoekstra doesn't try to recapture on stage what he has done in the studio. He views them as different types of media altogether. This keeps his songs evolving and interactive, he said, taking on a new life within different environments. "It keeps me more interested, and it keeps the audience more interested too."

How many times has the music press crowned someone "the next Dylan?" It happens about once a week. And how may times has it panned out? Never. It can't happen and it shouldn't. And I'm not going to make any such ridiculously grandiose statements about Doug Hoekstra.

But I will say that Hoekstra could make folk music matter again. He, and a handful of others fighting the good fight, could wrench it from the hands of strict traditionalists who would forever confine it to museums, and the mimics who have beaten it into the ground.

He's not the next Dylan, he's the first Doug Hoekstra, and that should be enough if history is just.

Opening up for Hoekstra will be Kat Parsons. After listening to her CD "Framing Caroline," a few times I thought she sounded like a cross between Jewel and Ani Difranco — strange as that may seem.

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