FOLKER! (Germany) (November/December, 2001) by Michael Kleff

To anticipate my final judgement before going into detail: These are two masterpieces within the innovative art of singer/songwriting….

Less known but not less interesting is Levens' American colleague Doug Hoekstra. Both are connected by their extreme love to the artistic use of words. Hoekstras songs are like shortstories. By that his CDs become anthologies. On “Around the Margins” you find some full of words and romantic. Musically the artist, born in Chicago and living in Nashville, is more experimental than his scottish collegue. Hoekstras nearly whispering voice lays above a difficult to file musical carpet in which the most different styles are mixed together to the “Hoekstra-Sound”. Similar to Leven Hoekstra, too, succeeded in offering surprises on his 4^th CD compared to the ones before. The voices from Colleen Burke Cave, Nirva Dorsaint and Antonio Meeks round off the anyhow consistent overall impression of the offered palette.

Return to Press