Singled Out: Cherylann Hawk's Love & Gratitude

06-11-2024

Indie folk pop star Cherylann Hawk just released her brand new single "Love & Gratitude", and to celebrate we asked her to tell us about the track. Here is the story:

I am absolutely thrilled to finally be releasing Love & Gratitude into the wind. I say finally because I wrote it in 2012 after a friend from Pittsburgh called me up from Nashville saying that he was working for a record company, and they had signed a new gal who needed more material for her debut album. He mentioned that he felt that many of my songs could be countrified with a little fiddle or pedal steel, so he asked me to send him a few, which I did, and then I wrote 2 more songs as well... songs that sound country without any other instrumentation, one being "Love & Gratitude."

I had been practicing finding gratitude in everything, even the tough stuff that one might find the most challenging to find anything in it for which to be grateful. So, with the thought in mind that the Beatles said "All You Need is Love," I decided to add a little gratitude to that statement of necessity. Well that country gal must have left Nashville without making her mark, but I got a couple of wonderful songs of healing and dealing out of the connection. You will here the other song, "You Show Me Love," inspired by a Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness called "ho'oponopono," as my next single release.

So, eight years went by before I finally considered recording "Love & Gratitude." In December of 2020, I had been performing it with "John Vento & Friends," which was an acoustic trio consisting of John, Bob Zigerelli and me, and sometimes various others, and John encouraged me to get into the studio to record it with David Granati, who I had been recording with since 1998, and John had been recording with since we met there at Maplewood Studio in 2017.

After I laid down my vocal and guitar scratch tracks, Bob Zigerelli recorded some incredible guitar tracks. My high school classmate and former Clay Band percussionist Tracey Whorton played drums and shaker, and then David called upon Charlie McVay to add some pedal steel. I had played with Charlie, inventer of the McVay Bender, which makes an electric guitar sound like a pedal steel guitar, back in the 80s when he was a part of Wheeling's Capitol Music Hall house band. What a wonderful full circle kind of happenstance that he would play on my first country release in 4 decades! Well then David called upon his brother Joey, who I call Uncle Joey, to lay down the bass and piano tracks. By the time we were close to having a final mix in December of 2021, my mom passed away, and everything was put on hold...

Well, a year and a half later, we finally finished the mix in July of 2023, then did a video shoot in October with Jim Pitulski of Face 4 Radio Productions, and Skipp Barr did a photo shoot of that video shoot... the cover art and lyric video shots are his handiwork. I made the lyric video so I would have a video to release with the single on June 8th. Our "Vento, Ziggy, Hawk & McCarthy" group, which our former acoustic trio had become in August of 2023 with the addition of the amazing Kevin McCarthy, has just been keeping our videographer and sound engineer too busy to focus on the "Love & Gratitude" video LOL! We plan to have it ready to share when the leaves are as colorful as they were last October when we captured the beautiful footage that is sure to inspire that feeling of, yeah, all you need is some "Love & Gratitude."

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here