Named after and recorded on the street where he grew up, Carl Hauck’s fourth album, Windjammer, is in many ways a reconciliation with adolescence. Hauck penned the songs at college, where all too often he’d find himself sitting at a coffee-stained desk as term paper deadlines approached, unwittingly soaking up the muffled cries of late night drunks, the melodies of waking birds, and the distant crashes of early morning dustcarts. After years of performing the songs in raucous bars and foreign living rooms, it only felt right to record them back home. Yet he wasn’t there for long before he found himself buried in a different set of deadlines, one that he himself had created for his students as a beginning high school teacher. The challenge arose for Hauck to thoughtfully explore, through music, his anxieties surrounding ambition and failure, the selflessness of love, the exploitative nature of personal comfort, and the meaning of home – all while putting on a confident front about the same issues when they surfaced within the context of classroom literature. As this challenge became both more demanding and more engrossing, Windjammer transformed from a labor of love into a labor of necessity.

The resulting sound is that of a man assembling a dream in place of sleep, an effort made more worthwhile by contributions from a talented ensemble of friends. There’s a genuine sense of beauty in that sound, an honest sparseness about it, adorned by richly-deserved moments of cathartic splendor. Whether it’s the triumphant horns in “Martial Riesling,” the wistful strings in the title track, or the delicate interplay of the electric guitar in “Rooster,” each and every note that rises beyond Hauck’s traditional acoustic fare is intended to complement the poignant lyricism for which he has become known. Hauck doesn’t claim that the songs on Windjammer are universal or even widely accessible; in fact, some of them are irrevocably personal. Yet there are still treasures within them for those who share a desire to go beyond the obligatory motions of everyday life, those more interested in anchoring down to create something than in sailing on with the current.