ALBUM REVIEW: Jason Hawk Harris Negotiates Grief on ‘Thin Places’

One of the many up-and-coming artists who saw their momentum dashed by the pandemic, singer-songwriter Jason Hawk Harris’ 2019 debut Love & The Dark quickly began garnering him some heady critical acclaim and word-of-mouth buzz despite the pandemic (ND review). A twangy, immediately entrancing Texas singer with classical music training and a stint in the indie folk troupe The Show Ponies, Harris makes his mark with searingly direct lyricism and a masterfully diffuse approach to making country music. He can on one hand sound like a direct descendant of neotraditionalists like Dwight Yoakam and Lyle Lovett, but with the added cerebral classical music bonafides as well as the piss-and-vinegar energy and heart-on-sleeve emotionalism of punk rock. The end result is less a new formula and more a startling new way of thinking about the genre.

On Love & The Dark, Harris had plenty to be emotional about, including his battles with addiction, his father’s bankruptcy, and his sister’s MS diagnosis, but it was the loss of his mother to alcoholism that was most keenly felt. That’s the subject that wisely takes center stage on his new album, Thin Places. Named for the liminal space between earth and the divine or afterlife, the album serves as an elegantly constructed song suite charting the journey of his grief.

And while that might sound like a dour approach, there’s a surprising buoyancy and warmth to much of the record. Harris summons the kind of resiliency endemic to much of the dark storytelling often found in the folk tradition to temper his grief. Many of the songs here, like “Bring Out the Lillies” and “Shine a Light,” are suitably grief-stricken, but also gorged with gospel-tinged pedal steel and piano uplift that soften funeral scenes and tales of drunken despondency, respectively.

That’s not to say the lyricism can’t be painfully direct. Harris repeatedly paints images of his mother’s lifeless body, singing about her sleeping “in a drawer / or some cold metal table” or seeing her die in the ICU. At one point he reveals that he’s been reading her diary, learning in horror of her childhood sexual assault experience.

Jason Hawk Harris (photo by Daley Hake)

Such bluntness might wear on listeners if that’s all that was here, but Harris is just as interested in how we recover and find peace and light. The opening hymn-like “Jordan and the Nile” ponders this notion as it introduces both lyrical themes and a strings motif that reappears during the centerpiece “The Abyss” (which sees Harris coming to terms with his mother’s death a year later) and closing “White Beret” (a tune that imagines the upward march to heaven after death).

The turn after “The Abyss” is telling, with “I’m Getting By” chronicling diminished grief followed by “So Damn Good,” a song about the power of romantic love in this moment (“I don’t know why people die / or what goes on on the other side / I’ve been so lost since I got found / But one thing I got no doubt about / Is you look so damn good right now”).

The inclusion of the lone cover here, Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me in Your Heart for a While,” might seem a bit on the nose, but coming where it does near the end of the record, it not only fits the narrative but also feels earned. It’s a sad and poignant song, for sure, but it is one that believes we can leave our light behind. Thin Places, in Harris’ own inimitable way, is a theatrical album-length extension of that belief.

Jason Hawk Harris’ Thin Places is out Oct. 6 on Bloodshot Records.