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On the Carousel

When Will Hoge graduated from high school, he enrolled in classes at Western Kentucky University and had a life plan roughly mapped. "I left high school with the intention of becoming a history teacher and coaching high school basketball," he recalls. But he got a guitar before he started college, and he began writing some songs. Then he began playing out a little. He put together a band here in Nashville and booked his first serious local gigs in 1999.

For more than half of the two years since, Will Hoge has been on the road with his band. He has two self-released CDs to his credit: last year's live document, Live at the Exit/In, and the early '01 release Carousel, which translates Hoge's blood-pumping performances into a studio setting. While his goals may have changed, he's followed through on his post-high school intentions in a roundabout way: Hoge is involved with athletics--though he's working out onstage rather than on a court--and he's teaching history, only it's that of the passionate rock troubadours whose work he now emulates.

Carousel finds Hoge dancing in the same shoes as Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, and every other sweaty pilgrim who looked for the meaning of life between the scratches of a flea market 45. From the rousing opener, "She Don't Care," the album hops and roars, blasting forth with purposeful energy and the joy of music-making. Kirk Yoquelet's propulsive percussion--unafraid of the backbeat--powers 10 cuts that lean toward the expression of pouty romantic dissatisfaction, but they do so in such bright, colorful arrangements that the bitterness ends up blending with other, tastier flavors. Hoge has a way with a bridge, using the time-tested pop song construction to shore up his compositions and to draw the listeners' attention skyward; and he tosses out marvelous throwaway lines like, "She had a tattoo of a butterfly / because that's the way it goes" in soulful, swaying tunes like "Heartbreak Avenue."

All of this from a man whose interest in self-expression came late. "I was never a poetry guy or a big reading guy," Hoge admits. "The writing process is something that I've had to catch up on." Even now, he says, hedoesn't exactly keep a stack of books by his side. "On tour, I don't spend time reading anything but a map."

Hoge is having this very conversation on the phone from Atlanta, in the middle of an extended road trip that will bring him back through his hometown on Saturday, June 30, for a show at 328 Performance Hall. His voice is wracked and ragged, but Hoge insists, "It's always kinda like that." Nevertheless, his itinerary can't help his vocal health. Hoge and the band have been playing clubs, doing radio shows, performing at big outdoor events--"on the big stage with the big sound system," he boasts--and sometimes doing more than one of these gigs per day. They've headlined countless dates that have been opened by their friends in the South Carolina quirk-rock group Jump, Little Children; and at a few outdoor festivals, Hoge's outfit have themselves gone on before such major modern-rock acts as Vertical Horizon and Sister Hazel, who play the sort of punchless mid-tempo drip-pop that Hoge's own act is designed to incinerate.

The heavy workload and intense, voice-shredding commitment to giving the crowd high-energy entertainment has cost Hoge one of his premier collaborators, guitarist Dan Baird. "Even without this album, we had maintained a fairly ridiculous touring schedule," Hoge explains. "Right before we recorded this record, Dan decided that he didn't want to tour as much as we would be." So, though Baird lent his chops to Carousel, he bowed out of the band by amicable mutual agreement before the 2001 touring began.

Thanks partly to Baird and partly to producer Scott Parker, Carousel has a polished, fully realized sound that belies its self-financed origins. Several songs are repeated from Live at the Exit/In because, according to Hoge, "We felt that maybe we hadn't gotten the mileage out of all the songs that we should." Additionally, the loud-but-distinct vibe that Parker achieves proves the benefits of rerecording the tracks. "We got really lucky in that Scott Parker, he told us we have to approach this as if we're making a major-label record. He did four demos with us, and we liked them so much that we put them on the [finished] record." Midway through the recording process--which consisted of about 10 days spread over several months--Hoge signed a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell Music. He was just about out of money when Carousel was finished, but he says that "on the back end, [Warner/Chappell] helped us."

Despite storming the local scene as a neophyte, Hoge did have a strong connection to music before he started dabbling with the guitar after high school. "Music was very important to me from a very young age," he says. "My father has great musical taste, and music was maybe the first thing I fell in love with. I remember when I was like 13, my father snuck me into a bar to see Bo Diddley. Afterward, he said it sounded terrible, but I thought it was great."

Hoge can't say if it was that night in particular that taught him the value of showmanship, but he acknowledges that he does pay attention to how his favorite acts come across onstage. "I saw Bob Dylan at Municipal on one of those rare nights when he looked like he was having a great time," he says. "He danced a little and got silly at times." He chalks that up as one of the best concerts he's ever seen. "We all sort of talk about it," Hoge says, referring to himself and his bandmates, "those shows that have really blown us away. I saw Blues Traveler once, and I wasn't even really a fan, but it was like one of those nights where they could do no wrong." He goes into a reverie, talking about that magical place that a band can get to, where they're directly in touch with the crowd's collective emotions; and for a moment, his scratchy voice over the crackling phone connection begins to smooth out and take on the thick-as-honey tones of his singing voice.

When asked if his band has ever hit that stride he describes so fervidly, Hoge pauses. "Yeah," he says. "It almost sounds too braggart to say. But we're not making enough money on the road to do it for any other reason than for the thrill of trying to be a great band."