New Hawks listeners will be struck by this latest phase of the Hawks journey�mixing serious country cred (members have played with Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris, John Denver, Hazel and Alice, and every honky-tonk from Riverside to Malibu) with wild lyricism and surreal story telling. Audra Schroeder of the Austin Chronicle calls it: "Americana, traversing the landscape of the Golden State like Didion on horseback. It's a divine fusion of humor and twang that's definitely high, but not that lonesome."

Throughout their career, the Hawks have mixed traditional bar room musings with other tales: mating dances of agnostic whales; the life Senator Byrd from West Virginia; a Humboldt pot grower's flight to Tibet; a muted lament of a working stiff; boom and bust in guitarist Lacques's Mojave desert homeland; wandering hippie caravans; existential epiphany in Disney World; the imminent collapse of suburban Houston. In 2002 the Hawks were decidedly ahead of the curve in directly critiquing the Bush administration's drums of war.