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EVANSVILLE COURIER-PRESS (IN) (August 23, 2001) Songwriter's concert to be 'unwoven' by Roger McBain, Courier &
Press staff writer Doug Hoekstra will plug the recording, but he'll unplug the music when he performs in Evansville Saturday. Hoekstra's latest CD collection, "Around the Margins," is a highly produced studio recording, weaving percussion, strings, woodwinds, accordion, keyboards, a bottle, backup vocals and a taped television weather forecast into the fabric of the music. The eclectic Nashville, Tenn., singer/songwriter will perform songs from the album, but he'll play them solo with an acoustic guitar at 8 p.m. Saturday at Penny Lane Coffeehouse. "Most of the stuff translates pretty well," Hoekstra said in a telephone interview. "I write it all on the guitar, then when I go into the studio, I build it all up. "When I do a solo gig, like I will Saturday, I just strip it back down again." He'll probably modify his delivery, as well. He sings most of the songs on "Around the Margins" in an amplified whisper, a technique to make listeners pay closer attention to the lyrics, he said. "A lot of the material will still lend itself to that live, but over the course of the evening, I'll want to build and vary the dynamics." It's the first Evansville performance for Hoekstra, who's played in cities across the country, as well as in the United Kingdom and Europe. He's preparing for a fall tour that will take him back across the Atlantic, he said. His music is an eclectic array of styles that reflects influences ranging from Bob Dylan (the collection includes Hoekstra's cover of Dylan's "Isis") to the Beatles' studio experimentations with George Martin. All of them are tied together with a contemplative, narrative thread. "Around the Margins" has won critical acclaim and is the focus of Hoekstra's current tour. It's Hoekstra's fourth solo album, reflecting his fascination with writing (he's always composing songs, scribbling them on everything from napkins tothe backs of envelopes to airline barf bags) and with musical experimentation. He doesn't know which record-store bin his CDs best fit into. "I think some people put me in rock and some people put me in folk," he said. His model is Dylan, who started in rock, found fame in folk before moving into new territory, incorporating rock, folk and country elements. "Labels are tough," said Hoekstra. "They don't have a category in the record store for Dylanites - maybe they
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