The HawtThorns to perform in Buffalo

East Nashville husband and wife duo the HawtThorns will bring songs from their recently released album, “Tarot Cards & Shooting Stars,” to the Sportsmen's Tavern in Buffalo on May 12. 

Saving Country Music named the record one of the “most anticipated releases of 2022.” The HawtThorns were also a “Daily Discovery” in American Songwriter. Watch their video for “Let’s Get Together” here. This was the band's first week at Americana radio, and the album was No. 4 most added, while cracking the Top 60.

An Americana band whose sun-kissed songwriting, versatile guitar work, and lush vocal harmonies evoke the California coastline as much as the Bible Belt countryside, the HawtThorns are rooted in the collaborative chemistry of husband and wife duo KP and Johnny Hawthorn.

That chemistry reaches a new peak with “Tarot Cards and Shooting Stars,” the pair's second collection of country-rockers, acoustic ballads and southern soul songs. Written and recorded during a global pandemic that brought the HawtThorns' touring schedule to a halt, it's an album the finds its creators counting their blessings and finding silver linings during an otherwise dark time.

Recorded in both L.A. and Nashville, the album nods to both sides of the group's geographic and musical roots. The Nashville sessions took place in KP and Johnny's home studio, sandwiched between walks around the couple's new neighborhood, with cicadas chirping outside the studio doors. The southern culture and Tennessee humidity seeped its way into the music itself, adding gospel-soul grit to "Let's Get Together" and Allman Brothers-worthy swagger to "On The Way." Described as “a lush, layered album with diverse arrangements,” “Tarot Cards and Shooting Stars” finds the group embracing its new home without forgetting its roots. 

"There's been so much darkness lately," says KP, who found herself unable to tour behind album “Morning Sun” due to the global pandemic. "I understand why artists feel compelled to write about that, but I wanted our record to feel like a light at the end of the tunnel. It's a happy-ending story to a tough year."

KP and Johnny are musical lifers, having weathered more than a decade's worth of the music industry's ups and downs. They've tapped into a new beginning with the HawtThorns, a band whose music blurs the boundaries between genre and geography.