photo by Cameron Bruegger
by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
We know the narrator of Brad Hoshaw’s song “New Tattoo” is a character because the artist told us so in an interview that ran Monday on HearNebraska.org.
But the man in the song said nothing. He does not introduce himself in the opening lines of “New Tattoo.” He is not that kind of man.
This is all to say that there’s a boldness to both the courage and the ease with which Omaha songsmith Brad Hoshaw writes. On his forthcoming album Funeral Guns, with his band The Seven Deadlies, he slips in and out of the voices of people in the throes of love, death and destitution, never feeling the need to announce who is who or where the songwriter hides in all these subjects. Maybe in every single one of them and maybe in none.
Funeral Guns is the long-awaited, Kickstarter-funded follow up to Brad Hoshaw and the Seven Deadlies eponymous 2009 album, which was awarded the Omaha Entertainment and Arts crown for Best Album that year. Stylistically, this sophomore album is not such a departure. Once again, Hoshaw is in and around the folk and rock genres, but not to the point of entrenchment. He uses pop structure, but employs verses and choruses the way John Berryman or Robert Frost might use a sonnet. Both form and content are products of each other, which positions the song and its lyrics completely in the driver's seat. Songs like "8 Ball" and "Funeral Guns" are moving somewhere entirely under their own power, stories of people on death beds and people lamenting marriages that don’t feel any anxiety to remind us that they’re stories.
And while interview snapshots of Hoshaw in virtual isolation in a cabin off Lake Michigan divulge some of the artistic and emotional work behind the songs, Funeral Guns does some of its best work when it doesn’t appear to work at all. Just a beautiful medium for much harder things.
See Hoshaw Friday night with The Seven Deadlies at his album release show at The Waiting Room with Kyle Harvey. And listen to his appearnace on HNFM right here:
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is the host of Hear Nebraska FM. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.