Richard Hawley: "I Sleep Alone"

For some reason we here at CMG still haven’t covered Richard Hawley’s excellent Cole’s Corner. The album is Hawley’s fourth solo outing, but he’s perhaps better known as a touring guitarist for Pulp and, along with Jarvis Cocker, a founder of the ill-conceived Relaxed Muscle (if anyone out there actually has this record, please send me a copy of it). With those sorts of qualifications and professional connections, I certainly wasn’t expecting the sort of Scott Walker meets Frank Sinatra crooner record that Cole’s Corner so unabashedly is. Then again, I never expected to like a crooner record so much.

While the first half of the album is somewhat monumental and homogenous, Hawley starts to open things up with “I Sleep Alone.” Riding in on a surf guitar, the song shifts over to more of a soft country feel after the first 10 seconds or so, later building up with a series of pretty little guitar parts. Hawley, who’s got easily one of the best voices I’ve heard all year, plays it a little more Johnny Cash than Sinatra on this one, playing the forlorn lover with down-home sorrow rather than flair. The lyrics aren’t anything brilliant (mostly just repetition of similar phrases), but Hawley delivers them with a gravitas that could sell damn near anything. It’s hard to deny the man’s grief as he sings, “Deeper, I'm going deeper / seeping below the darkest thoughts of man.”