Andy Hawk tries out the band in his new release, Tin Can Town

January 26, 12:50 PMBaltimore Music ExaminerAndy Belt

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When Virginia’s Andy Hawk released his fourth solo album (Here It Is) last year, he’d begun a shift from pure pop to a Dylanesque Americana sound. With his new album, called Tin Can Town – and the first with his band The Train Wreck Endings – Hawk and Co. find themselves fully transitioned and better for it.

Imagine mid-‘60s Bob Dylan fronting the Old 97s and you get the idea.

Hawk’s songwriting has never been stronger as he takes us on a journey through neighborhood bars and late-night diners and we come out the other side intact and glad for the trip.

The album opens with “Think Too Much”, a mandolin-driven piece of barstool philosophy where the protagonist is “misty eyed and true and tried, alone with all I fear / I can’t go back or forward while I’m here.” This uptempo track belies its serious content, like someone hiding their pain behind a joke.

This leads right into the title track, one that speaks to anyone who’s felt stuck in a hometown rut (most of us?), and the striking “Break Free” a yearning ballad driven by guest guitarist Anthony Schneck’s acoustic slide guitar that would have made George Harrison proud.

The rest of the CD features some straight blues right out of Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan (“Pitchy & Time-Erratic Blues), a Sun Studio and Jack Kerouac homage called “Real Gone Girl” that sounds like a road trip in progress, a ghost-town saloon of a song called “Tombstone” that’ll make you swear you just saw a tumbleweed, and a quick return to Hawk’s old pop roots with “I Never Thought to Ask”. He also digs into his back catalog to update a few older gems, using the strengths of the band to give the songs fresh legs (“Ferris Wheel”, “Maybe Someday”, and “Symphony of 2 a.m.).

Closing the album is the loosey goosy “The Last Two in the Bar”. It sounds like it was recorded at last call – and it brings the project full circle, from the first mandolin strums of “Think Too Much” to the boozy rationalization of “Maybe it’s not perfect love, but for now it might just be enough…’cause we’re the last two in the bar.”

Tin Can Town brings all these elements together into a tight romp of a record. Hawk has assembled quite a band, and the individual talents of its members bring many positives to Hawk’s sharp lyrics and accessible melodies.

Chuck Bordelon provides inventive bass, and Branden Hickman is solid on drums. On lead guitar, Hawk picked up Gary Rudinsky, an old-time rocker who was an original member of the long-ago Ohio band The Human Beinz, who scored a minor hit in the 1968 with “Nobody But Me”. Steve DeVries, a multi-instrumentalist, filled the CD with mandolin, banjo, harmonica, and piano.

Guests included Schneck on guitar, Shawn Heming of Black Friday on backing vocals and mandolin, and Kurt Deemer and Steve Rose of Vulgaria on guitar and drums, respectively.

Andy Hawk & The Train Wreck Endings play all over the Baltimore/Washington area, and they now have a CD to plug that should gain them many more fans in the coming months.

This album and Hawk’s four others – Moth Crazy (2004), Something Farther Away… (2005), Chasing the Sun (2007), and Here It Is (2008) are available on iTunes and most music download services, at www.cdbaby.com, and on his website at www.andyhawk.com.