There’s something genuinely compelling and original about Doug Hoekstra’s music. Something about the way his soft-spoken delivery betrays an intelligence and literate sensibility that’s all too rare in today’s music scene. After releasing two albums with his first band, the proto-alt.country Bucket Number 6, Doug went solo, reaching critical attention in this country with the release of 1999’s eclectic Make Me Believe. All too often referred to by lazy journalists as ‘folk’, the album boasted a wilfully perverse and entertaining gamut of arrangements, female vocals and terse story songs whose delights unravelled on each successive listen. This year’s Around The Margins is another step forward, introducing sultry gospel backing and ingenious jazz arrangements to a collection of songs which hook you in from their first lines, taking you into the detailed, precise nature of their worlds. Like his songs, Doug comes across as articulate, extremely self aware and conscious of his motives and thought processes. I talked to him on the last night of his brief British tour to support the release of Around The Margins.

Oh yeah, to me each song is a different soundscape and it’s almost like little movies and I want the mood to shift from song to song so that you have an interesting progression of songs and it makes for a more interesting listen. You have the studio at your disposal so it seems to me like you should use it and if you can do things to vary the tracks, you should go for it and I don’t think there should be any rules about it - just whatever serves it, whatever creates the right mood.

That’s something I’ve never done before and part of that is the guy I collaborated with in Chicago, Jeff Kowalkowski. He’s very jazz oriented, very avant-garde, and so I think I’ve been turned on to a lot of that stuff through him. We would start with him and me laying it down and then we’d come up with different ideas of what we were going to do with that and in Undone... I wanted that coda to be like the key change and have it fall apart and be undone, and he suggested "I got a sax and clarinet player, why don’t we bring him in?"

I thought there’s no way you can top Dylan’s version for being biting or loud so the best way to go was go the other way. Isis has always been one of my favourite songs and I figured it would be a real challenge. I wrote the melodic bridge - that’s not on the original - because I just wanted to ‘play.’ I knew we would do a kind of sax/clarinet bed and I wanted to give a little release [where] Dylan [would] blow a harp for a few bars. I wanted something a little more than that. Actually, Jeff and I sat down and we kind of literally wrote the song down on a big board and chopped it up like an orchestrated piece - we mapped it out just like you would on a chart - and that was kind of the idea to make it work and to make it ebb and flow - dynamics - because, as you know, Dylan’s a master at dynamics and phrasing. I think there’s a lot of interesting things in the song, I think when Dylan’s at his best the songs can stay with you for years and take on different meanings. Isis is a song that’s always connected with me and I like the mythology.

The title Around the Margins seems to be a pretty good summation of both the lyrical and musical themes of the record.

Well it’s a lot of things. It’s a line from Birmingham Jail, and when I looked at the songs - I don’t think about it when I write the songs, I just write the songs and I write about what interest me - but when I looked at what the songs were about it just seemed it was all around the margins in terms of the kind of people I was writing about and the places we were going musically and where I’m at as a kind of Indie left-of-centre artist - it all seemed to fit.

I think I liked it more before I moved there! Nashville is good because there’s good musicians and it’s nice weather and it’s cheap to live and it’s really easy to find really great people to work with - you can get stellar, stellar people and that’s the key thing about there. I think the industry there for the most part sucks and it is very mainstream.

I’ll tell you how it came about. I was working on my master’s degree in Nashville - one of the things about going to Nashville is you get so immersed in music there …music, music, music…they say if you throw a rock in Nashville you hit a songwriter. I wanted to get some other impetus and I was working on my master’s and it came time to do my thesis and it grew out of that. It’s like how pop culture gets assimilated into academia. I used two models. One of them is hard-boiled detective writers like Chandler and Hammet and then I used songwriters like Springsteen, Guthrie and Dylan. Then I take it back to Byron and the Romantics…because these people, not only are they doing fringe art forms that become more mainstream, more academiscised, but they’re also characters in the same way, outside of society. I did the Dashiel Hammet tour in San Francisco and it’s like I have a guitar player who relates everything to what movie was shot there and it’s weird…that’s what people like Warhol were into and I think that’s all very interesting. I mean I do it all the time, you know, you stand there and ‘this is where that unreal person lived’ and I was in Brighton and everyone was like, ‘Quadrophenia was shot here,’ anyway that’s kind of what the book gets into.

Do you find that books inspire your songwriting?

I think there’s very, very few singers who can hold a sixty five-minute record without boring you to tears. I think Dylan does, I think Dylan’s a great singer. I think Sam Cooke’s a great singer. I think there’s people who can do it but a lot of singer songwriters... they just kind of phone it in with the guitar. In rock there’s a preponderance of interesting singers but not necessarily great ones and so, part of the reason I do that is to vary the textures from song to song and - as you notice from the record - it’s not straight harmonies; a lot of time it’s intertwining and there are even scored lines like on Lost Among The Ruins, so stuff like that is interesting. I mean why not use the voice as an instrument? I also think female voices go good with me. I think there’s a nice interplay at times and it covers the sonic range because I sing so low. I think it made me a better singer too. I mean, I may pull back on that a bit on the next record because I don’t want it to be too much of a crutch and I don’t want it to be a cliché but at the same time it’s been really cool.

Well, SOTW is this cabbie, truthfully, taking me to the airport. He was telling me a lot of that story...I think the immigrant experience in America’s interesting. My grandparents on one side were born in Holland and England and on the other in Lithuania and I think that you have a little different perspective because you hear all the stories and you feel somehow more connected to the heritage and to what your grandparents did to get there, where they came from. I think that’s natural, I can’t say it was a heavy part of my upbringing but it affects you and makes you. Chicago, where I grew up, is a very immigrant based place and all my friends have the same kind of experience and then you go down to somewhere like Nashville and everyone’s been American for generations…I do think it’s a different perspective.

A lot of times yeah, like Giving Up Smoking is completely true. Birmingham Jail’s kind of like a news piece but that’s obviously true. Desdemona’s totally fictional so is Undone, though you know as an artist you can, if you want, self examine yourself, you can find pieces of yourself in every piece of fiction. I have a lot of friends who self-edit before they write, and I try not to.

Looking back, how do you rate your first two solo albums?

They suck. No (laughs), I think they’re pretty good. I just think it was like a progression because the band I was in, Bucket Number 6, we were sort of alt.country - although we were a little more bent - and then when I did the first [solo] record it kind of started there, so I had a little more of that influence and it was a little more straighter folk. Then on Rickety Stairs I used more gospel and it was a little bit broader, but at the same time I see myself writing about a lot of the same things but I think the writing’s gotten deeper.

Is Margins then, closer to what you hear in your head?

I think it’s like all kinds of music, some of it you dig and some of it you don’t but I think as a form [hip-hop’s] really cool because it came out of real experience in a way that a lot of rock and roll does not anymore. I remember back with my band, Bucket Number 6, we’d use a drum machine sometimes and people would crucify us and I could never understand that. One of the good things too about all the hip-hop stuff is that it’s brought the technology to where people can accept that and, I think, it’s perfectly valid because sometimes you’ll get a different effect using that technology and you should go for it. What I always say to people is ‘I see my music as urban,’ because we live in a predominantly urban culture whether you like it or not… it would be just goofy for me - with my experience - to sing about juke joints and running through the fields and all this other shit that people like to when they emulate old rock and roll, or old country, and it’s just not a relevant world, at least not to me.

Do you tend to be a bit of a control freak in the studio?

No. I let people do what they want but the point is if they come up with something great you can leave it in, if it’s not so great you can mould it. Usually I’m very open. I feel like if I write the songs tightly and I set up the template of what I’m doing then they should be able to pop into it and expand within that. I mean, occasionally I will have hook lines that I’ll tell people to play but not often. I think you have to get people to relax, to put themselves into it and they’ll be better.

Any immediate plans for a new album?

I’ve got some songs in the can but I think I need to stay out of the studio for a couple months. I’ve been recording constantly for the last year and a half and I want to break that just so I wind up going somewhere different.

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