Review – Rebekah Hawker
Album: Rebekah Hawker
Release Date: August 23, 2019
Genre: Folk, Country
Barrie, Ontario’s Rebekah Hawker has just released her newest EP, Careful Women.
Careful Women is a striking piece that showcase’s Rebekah’s powerful lead vocals and talent at songwriting. Featuring drums, acoustic and electric guitar, mandolin, classic and electric piano, organ, and pedal steel guitar, the arrangement of ‘Careful Women’ creates a delicate balance between modern sensibilities while still having an air of nostalgia.
Leading the listener in slowly with only Rebekah’s voice and guitar, the first track “Round of Fools” with the darkly comedic lines “I count 7 days since last Saturday I’ve been keepin’ them like they’re my sobriety chips.” In other words, seven days is how long since the singer lost a heady and intoxicating love she is still sobering up from. The piece then builds with its full complement of sounds to this melancholic mood, adding richness and depth to the feeling of loss. In the following lyrics and arrangement though, there is a feeling of exhausted expectation of this bad outcome, as if the singer was a fool to ever try to love and even the band is teasing her about it. The track contains a careful hope, though, as the band swells and Rebekah admit despite the pain, she’s still willing to “try [her] luck at the next round of fools” – that is, to try to love again, even if it is a foolhardy endeavor.
The tracks following “Round of Fools” keep similar tones of that bittersweet mood – touching on love with its accompanying pains and hopes.
Careful Women as a whole is as much a collection of songs as it is a collection of poetry: a must for any fellow world-weary lover looking to commiserate.
Connect with Rebekah Hawker:
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I grew up in Alberta, but spent most of my life in British Columbia – I also spent a lot of my summers in Britain as I was lucky enough to have immigrant parents with the capital to go visit our relatives. The amount of time I spent overseas makes it hard for me to say I feel fully Canadian, but it does make me feel typically Canadian as so many of us have mixed parentage. My parents defined another divide in me as I feel inexorably pulled to both science and the art; my father being a doctor and my mother being a school teacher. I studied both in university and now work on making healthcare software during the day, then write/read/draw/paint/dance in my evenings. My global wanderings, my education, and the fact that my appetite for media could be described as ‘voracious’ means my frame of reference is pretty varied. It’s hard to say that I have a favourite music genre, rather I am always seeking sounds that convey a sense earnestness an honesty.
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