Bobby Hawk spent years helping other artists build their worlds; on Nocturnal Diaries, he disappears into one of his own.
It's the clearest expression yet from a musician who has always resisted the easy lane – a small-town Illinois kid raised on fiddle tunes and bluegrass festivals, shaped by jazz school and New York’s working-musician grind, and drawn toward whatever sounds weird, open, and alive. More than a reinvention, it’s a fuller reveal – the side of Hawk “you’re not going to get sitting down at coffee,” but that comes spilling out the moment the music takes over.
Hawk’s name may already be familiar to anyone reading album credits. A highly sought-after violinist, arranger, and collaborator, he has recorded with Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Jack Antonoff, Doja Cat, Sabrina Carpenter, and more – bringing an instinctive ear for texture, emotion, and atmosphere to some of modern music’s biggest names. His latest solo record turns inward, opening up a unique cinematic universe where fiddle lines get dirt under their nails, folk melodies drift into outer space, and late-night experiments become candid confessions.
Written and largely produced alone in his New York apartment, Nocturnal Diaries captures the multi-dimensional musician at his most unguarded and unpredictable – not just as a violinist, but as a songwriter, producer, arranger, and sonic world-builder. Gritty, cosmic, and otherworldly, the record plays like a private transmission from somewhere deep inside him. “I wanted to make it sound like it’s from Mars or something,” Hawk says. “I don’t want it to be any genre… more of a weird soundtrack for a David Lynch movie.”
New York still leaves its fingerprints all over the record. In many ways, Nocturnal Diaries is a love letter to the city – written after Hawk found himself stranded in Florida during the COVID years, and born from the second honeymoon that came when he finally returned to the place that had always grounded him. Hawk could have taken a cleaner, more expected path – gone to Nashville, leaned into the fiddle world, played the same polished solo night after night. Instead, he stayed in the city, played the $50 brunch gigs, weathered the lean years, and let the place reshape him. “I like that I stayed in New York, and I kept it weird, and I stayed broke, and I toughed it out here,” he says. “You stick it out, and it turns you into a different kind of musician or artist.”
“The city molds you in a different way than if you just went and played the same fiddle solo every night in a stadium.”
That transformation gave Hawk a rare creative range – not just technical fluency, but a deep curiosity about how far a song can go when nobody tells it where to land. Even as the violin became his calling card, he never wanted to be flattened into one role. “Even though I am a violinist, I think I’m more into songwriting and creating,” he says. “I like thinking of a person more three-dimensional, where they have all these different things that they can do, or they’re curious about.” Such curiosity is the heartbeat of Nocturnal Diaries: The sense that every track might open a different door, but all of them lead back to the same restless mind.
Long before New York, that mind was already being stretched. Hawk grew up two hours south of Chicago, the son of a musician father who brought him along to gigs and festivals throughout the Midwest. He spent his early years around country and Americana players, then found himself at Nashville camps where each day might bring a classical lesson, an Irish tune, a jazz approach, or a brush with players like Béla Fleck. “It was a crazy thing to grow up around all those people and be like, ‘Oh shit, I need to practice,’” he remembers. By the time he arrived at William Paterson University for jazz school, he had already learned to hear music as a wide-open field rather than a fixed address.
Still, it took leaving the practice-room mindset to understand what he was really chasing. While in college, Hawk landed a touring gig with Blue Merle, a pop-leaning band that pulled him out of the cerebral headspace of jazz school and into something more immediate. “I was like, ‘Oh, I just want to play pop music,’” he says. “I just want to make up melodies and hooks.” Around the same time, a teacher in Nashville gave him a piece of advice that would stick: “Just be yourself.”
Years later, that lesson clicked in a new way when a last-minute call from the Bleachers camp sent Hawk into the studio at the end of February 2020 – the beginning of a working relationship that would soon place him, unbeknownst to him at first, on Taylor Swift’s folklore. “That was always what I was aiming for, even if I wasn’t aware of it,” he says. Suddenly, the fiddle kid, the jazz-school player, the songwriter, the arranger, and the downtown working musician were not separate identities. They were all part of the same language.
Even then, Hawk’s own music was never far behind. His first Bobby Hawk record came together with producer Ryan Hommel, a close friend and former bandmate from their time playing with Vermont country outfit The Sweetback Sisters. Hummel heard something in Hawk’s rough demos – what he lovingly called “caveman guitar” – and helped him understand that those loose sketches could become records. “He taught me so much about making a record, but also recording string parts,” Hawk says. “He just gave me the confidence to be like, ‘Oh yeah, I can do this.’”
Later releases like Ad Hawk and Doppel Hawker leaned further into freedom and instinct. After returning to New York in the wake of COVID, Hawk found himself back in the city’s strange working-musician ecosystem, where low-paying gigs could still become laboratories for discovery. He gathered a handful of favorite players and followed the moment – stretching country-bar sets into loose, psychedelic, open-ended jams that became a creative reset. “We basically became Phish for a day,” he laughs.
Nocturnal Diaries began in that same spirit, but turned the process inward. Hawk did not sit down with a grand plan, a genre brief, or even the certainty that he was making an album. He was home in New York during winter, sitting in the corner of his bedroom with a guitar, a computer, and enough time to let the songs reveal themselves slowly. Sometimes a guitar sound would pull a track in a new direction; sometimes a melody would arrive first; sometimes the right plug-in would become the spark. “I didn’t know I was making a record, which was probably a good way to trick myself,” he says. “Something would hit me where I’d just be at home, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, okay, I need to grab a guitar right now.’”
The more he followed that impulse, the more the record started to feel like a personal breakthrough. After years of being called into fast-moving rooms – three hours here, a last-minute violin part there, a track that might come out tomorrow – Hawk found himself with space to obsess, refine, and care for the music on his own terms. “I turned 40 last year, I stopped drinking,” he says. “It can be like, ‘Oh, this is a midlife crisis,’ but to me, it was the opposite. I kind of found myself, and I found this sound, and I found this voice that really feels like me.”
That sound comes into focus across Nocturnal Diaries’ many turns. “Only Thing,” the record’s first single, is one of its most vulnerable moments – a fragile love song written from the other side of longing. Built from voice memos with producer Mike Robinson and brought to life with drums from Bleachers’ Mike Riddleberger, the track surprised Hawk with its own tenderness. “I don’t really show my cards too much socially,” he says, “but when you’re writing a song, it’s kind of like truth serum.” “Pizza Box” slips into a different type of ache, channeling cold pizza, motel rooms, and the homesick haze of life on the road into what Hawk calls a “sad early 2000s” mood. And then there’s “Cowboy Thriller,” the first song he made for the record – a full-send, country-pop fever dream whose eccentricity becomes part of its charm. “I think this stuff is kind of silly,” he says, “but let me just follow through, and just go all the way.”
Hawk’s willingness to follow a song wherever it wants to go is what makes Nocturnal Diaries feel so wide open. “Humans Ruin a Lot” carries a darker title but a melody Hawk traces back to the hymns he heard growing up, pulling folk tradition into something bigger and more unsettled. His cover of Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” pushes even further into the dirt, stripping away the “rhinestone cowboy production” he heard in other versions and reimagining the song as something grittier, punkier, and more overdriven. Across the record, Hawk lets beauty and ugliness sit side by side; the songs can be tender, funny, haunted, or off-kilter, but they all move with the same open feeling. “My favorite music always just has that open feeling to it,” he says. “Like, just taking a deep breath.”
At its core, Nocturnal Diaries is meant to offer that same breath to anyone who needs one. Hawk made the record during a winter when he needed music to pull him out of his own head, and he hopes it can move through listeners in a similar way – not as escape, exactly, but as a reminder that the smallest creative act can still open a door. “Music is so important, and it can be so therapeutic and so healing,” he says. “I hope it inspires people, even if they listen to it, it inspires them to do something artistic, or to go upstate, or do something little. I hope it’s like a domino for people in some way.”
For Bobby Hawk, that domino has already fallen. Making Nocturnal Diaries gave him what he calls “a deep calm and peace” within himself – a sense of ownership over something no outside noise could touch. It’s expansive and intimate all at once, the work of a musician who has spent a lifetime gathering sounds, stories, rooms, and instincts, only to discover that the most unexpected place they could lead was back to himself. “It’s good to have the right perspective on it,” he says. “Feeling grateful to have made something.”
With Nocturnal Diaries, Hawk does more than step into the foreground; he lets the weird world inside him finally speak for itself.
