NASHVILLE SCENE  (December 27, 2001)

Thanks for the Music - Highlights from the year in local music, from jazz to punk and everything in between

If there's any doubt about whether anything interesting happened this year in local music, the more than 25 entries below should erase them. We know we live in a great city when there's room here for everything from pop to jazz to punk to improvised music to hip-hop--and that's not even taking into account the many country and bluegrass acts making great music in town, Music Row be damned.  Even more significant is the fact that this music wasn't just happening in clubs or on CDs, but on the radio and in the city at large as well. Sure, we'd like to see still more and better things happen here, but that's only because our expectations have already been raised by all the excellence that surrounds us.

Doug Hoekstra, "Break My Fall" and "The Life We Love" Between his canonical Around the Margins and his apocryphal leftovers collection The Past Is Never Past, Hoekstra gave us 28 new tracks this year, and even though both records are full of challenging, thoughtful folk-rock story-songs, the hard stuff wouldn't be as potent were it not for Hoekstra's ability to pop out a sweet song from time to time. Both of these winners are helped by the author's collaborators: George Marinelli, co-writer of "Break My Fall," and Colleen Burke Kave, lead vocalist on "The Life We Love."  -Noel Murray

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