Lou Hazel’s Charming Ruminations on Living
Photo by: Cameron Law
Written by: Meredith A. Lawrence
In some sense, a singer/songwriter’s most essential function is observation: to collect and catalogue the ordinary and extraordinary into relatable stories. They’re set to music, and sung out loud just so, so that the listener feelssomething and maybe, if they — or the songwriter is extra lucky — learns something, too. Durham, North Carolina-based musician Lou Hazel inhabits this role as curious spectator, with a particular bent toward minute and absurd circumstances, and evoking with his slightly-twisted kaleidoscope of revealing, thoughtful ruminations, the likes of John Prine and Dave Van Ronk.
“When you have so much anxiety as a kid, you’re just hyper self-aware of everything around you.”
“I've always been really observant of the world, ever since I was a little kid — or very contemplative. I'm deeply contemplative; I just think about everything and all the people around me,” Hazel says. “A lot of my friends went through hard times, and I had not the easiest time either. When you have so much anxiety as a kid, you're just hyper self-aware of everything around you.”
Hazel’s knack for collecting trinkets of human nature appears most overtly in the talkin’ blues numbers and lines sprinkled through his records. “Would you rather be a goldfish / In a plastic bag?” Hazel muses on the psychedelic-tinged “County Clown,” off his latest album, 2025’s Riot of the Red. Idle contemplation devolves into stomach-churning realities as the carnival sours: “Amber loves amphetamines/ Feeds her kids on pork and beans/ And they ride the whirling wheel/ Puking up their meal.”
Photo by: Brian Harrington | Western AF
Talkin’ blues land or flop because of their delivery. And certainly Hazel’s hit home, but he also extends their wry delivery and kernel-sized truths about the human condition to all his songs. “Gone swimmin' in the deep end of sorrow/ Watchin' my mind doing funny things,” he sings on “Nothing Here But Love,” before pulling back to the self-aware assurance: “I know this won't last forever/ But when you're way up or your down/ That's hard to see.” Hazel also reserves the same lightly world-weary whimsy he applies to sad observations for funny ones, as well. “We live way out in the woods so nobody can see/ When we get to jumping naked on my trampoline/ Doing back flips and feeling free,” he sings on “Carnival Cruise, Talkin’ Blues,” a sort of misfit manifesto.
Indeed, Hazel did grow up way out in the woods or, as he puts it on his website: “along the Allegheny River, where New York meets Pennsylvania and Northern Appalachia slips into quiet obscurity.” It is a beautiful landscape and a community of sturdy souls, hardened by a lack of industry or infrastructure to depend on— the kind of place that inspires folk songs.
Of course, growing up outside of town in Weston Mills, NY, Hazel, like so many teenagers, wanted out, desperately. But sticking it out in that place also gave him the steadfast empathy that imbues his songs, and more than a few characters for lyrical inspiration.
“I start with a feeling. My process is I usually just start with a melody and I'm playing guitar a little bit, and I'll just think of a story in my head. And maybe it's a personal experience, and maybe it's a story from another person that I knew," he says. “There's just so many characters where I grew up; it's so easy; I could walk around town and just look at someone and write a song about them.”
When Hazel isn’t writing about characters, he’s often evoking the illusive, abstract feeling of existing at a moment in space and time. In these songs, which he dubs “presence songs,” Hazel’s knack for observation flourishes. “Are you lost again in a maze of your worries/ In the dead end of your mind,” he wonders on “Phone Calls With Mom,” which joins “Nothing Here But Love” as two of Riot of the Red’s most thoughtful and thought-provoking songs.
Growing up, Hazel heard and absorbed music by Alan Jackson, Hank Williams, and Hank Williams Junior, but especially Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, which was on loop in the tape deck in his dad’s old red Toyota pickup truck. Then, when Hazel was 10, the Oh Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack CD he got for his birthday blew the top off the scope of musical possibilities. Hazel tried to learn every song, immersing himself in Gillian Welch’s vocals and the album’s folk melodies.
Photo by: Brian Harrington | Western AF
Then, when Hazel was 18, a friend of his dad’s returned from the Catskills with a burned Felice Brothers CD. The mountain-born band sang about familiar places with an alluring acuity and poetry and gave Hazel a blueprint for the stories he wanted to tell. When he started writing songs of his own, Hazel’s upbringing and laser-focus on the world around him offered devastating song fodder, too.
But even at his bleakest, Hazel observes and writes about the world with a charming eccentricity. Born perhaps of an anxious childhood spent hyper-observant and self-aware, when managed and mellowed in adulthood, his outlook is both intriguing and comforting.
Hazel ends his two albums to date with dual ruminations on the same concept; 2020’s Carolina (Out of My Mind) and Riot of the Red conclude with “Long Sleeve Summer Blues,” and “Long Sleeve Summer,” respectively. Each a reference to the ways drug users conceal their scars, even in the hottest weather. Taken together, the pair of songs offer a portrait of misadventure embroiled in listlessness, and wrapped in the aching, prescient humanity at the heart of any singer/songwriter’s finest lyrics. As Hazel sings on “Long Sleeve Summer”:
My dealer lives off Bishop
Geena lives way down main
It's a quarter of a mile
To the Scoopin' Shack
For a large fry and a shake
I ain't doing one thing
Until' Monday
Baby I ain't gettin' out of your bed
Go on twist the blinds
Until the sun don't shine
Pretend we are the walking dead
I'd love to be alive instead
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