Caleb Hawley Breaks Away | Ticket Giveaway

(Editor's note: This giveaway and feature previews Caleb Hawley's show at The Sydney on Wednesday at 9 p.m. with All Young Girls Are Machine Guns. Cover is $5, and the show is 21+.)

by Steven Ashford

Like a musical surgeon performing microvascular operations on the guitar, Caleb Hawley’s rapid, intricate finger-picking gives the body of music between folk and soul a corporeal tune-up.

Hawley broke into mainstream success with a valiant run on the 2011 season of American Idol. The shaggy-haired, youthful crooner impressed the judges, and may have even left Steven Tyler’s seat a little damp with his vocal range. Even though Hawley was grateful to have landed time on American Idol, he says his musical talents can't be construed by presumptions Idol sometimes leaves with its veteran performers.

“Since I had been doing this music thing for a while already, I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy being branded by a reality TV show,” Hawley says. “Don't get me wrong, I love the show and its singers, but I think the whole thing is more about TV than music.”

Naturally, Hawley prefers the latter. After all, music has played a vital role in his life, with his hard work taking him to Berklee College of Music, where he received a degree in jazz composition.

“As soon as I finished up at Berklee, I hit the road to see what I could do.” Hawley says. “I had no clue what I was doing, and played a lot of very strange gigs.”

Today, Hawley feels comfortable with his musical status and is fortunate to play gigs all across the country.

Hawley says his most recent album, We All Got Problems, is a concept album that is derived from living in a household in which both of his parents are therapists. He made the album partly to feel closer to his family while he is away and touring.

“In most of the tracks, I took on different characters and tried to imagine what they might tell their shrink,” Hawley says. “It was a lot of fun to write, but by the end I was pretty much schizophrenic.”

You can catch Caleb Hawley this Wednesday at The Sydney in Omaha at 9 p.m. Read on after the jump for our ticket giveaway question.

Hear Nebraska is giving away two tickets to the show for the first person who can answer this Hawley trivia question. Please leave your answer in the comments below with your full name:

What song did Caleb Hawley perform at last year’s American Idol auditions before Jennifer Lopez, Randy Jackson and an excited Steven Tyler who table drummed with him during the performance?

Good luck, everybody, and enjoy the show!

Steven is a Hear Nebraska intern. If Steven Tyler can jive to the crooning, so can you this Wednesday. Reach Steven at stevena@hearnebraska.org.