Hataałii

At 21-years-old, Hataałii — the singer, songwriter, and poet born Hataałiinez Wheeler in Window Rock, AZ, the capital of Navajo Nation — arrived just in time to witness American collapse. Not a galvanizing, grand explosion of empire but a paralysis-inducing decay and alienation that infects the American body politic. Zealotry repurposed into a new cultural crusade every week. Reality-building and delusion affirmation masquerading as liberty. The show-horse ladder of success. Pandora’s Box purchased on credit, driving everyone mad in different ways, algorithmically determined to suit your unique neuroses.

It’s from this vantage point that Hataałii brings us Waiting For A Sign, a heady collection of ghost town anthems, short story mirages, and brain fog-clearing personal reckonings. At times it recalls the playfully languid puzzlement of Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, the trickster melancholy of Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask, the economical yet winking earnestness of Blaze Foley, or the softer Spacemen 3 songs that cast awe and mystery against a droning, endless atmosphere. But, as easy as the tempos can get, Hataałii operates with purpose: the obscurantist details come into focus, giving way to trenchant observations about paranoia, accountability, and post-colonial fallout.

Waiting For A Sign is Hataałii’s second album for Dangerbird following 2023’s Singing Into Darkness and, counting an array of self-released projects, his sixth album since 2019. Early on, Hataałii’s DIY home recordings had built some organic goodwill, attracting love from the likes of Aquarium Drunkard (who called him “a master at conjuring a kind of Southwestern saudade”) and Mac DeMarco. Singing Into Darkness built his profile further: He won plaudits from SPIN (who called him “2023’s breakout star”), FLOOD (“Hataałii is utterly charming, disarmingly approachable, and delightful in his playfulness”), and KCRW. He chatted with Rolling Stone about Cormac McCarthy and Okkervil River’s Will Sheff about Neil Young. He published a poetry chapbook, and got some love for that as well.

Operating for the first time with something approaching expectations, Waiting For A Sign doesn’t overhaul the Hataałii sound — Hataałii still plays every instrument, including slide guitar — but instead distills it further, accentuating the eccentricities and building towards broader horizons. Culled from an initial collection of over 40 demos with help from producer / engineer Alex Simon, the twelve songs on Waiting For A Sign feel muscular, assured, and judicious — the work of an artist, operating from a place of strength, stretching themself into subtle new shapes.

The initial heat-check: album opener “Alex Jones,” a slyly sinister desert-country tune that invokes everyone’s favorite right-wing supplements peddler. Says Hataałii: “The song isn’t really about Alex Jones. It is a malevolent song, but also sounds very fresh to me. I tried to do the deep voice thing like Waylon Jennings, but it didn’t really turn out that way at all. But I like the result.” It’s a fitting soundtrack to the banality of fluoride scares and gay frogs: part Courtney Barnett, part King Of The Hill, part Thomas Pynchon.

“Brown Fool Eyes” is a slacker’s soliloquy, post-Salad Days guitars giving way to a delectable opening couplet: “I think that maybe / we should start to try.” Written during the waning days of Hataałii’s stint at the University of New Mexico Albuquerque, it yearns — practically howls — for a fresh start, a modicum of control.

As on previous records, Hataałii also confronts the nuanced challenges and perceptions around the indigenous community. Whether it’s the bureaucratic run-ins of the twangy “In My Lawn,” and the urgent goth-pop exhortations of “Something’s In The Air” (“Sometimes life ain’t easy Sioux / For people who look like me and you”), or the elegiac “Burn,” which gazes, resigned, into the ouroboros of destruction that colonialism has wrought, Hataałii exhibits a sophisticated and measured approach to indigenous malaise.

Says Hataałii of “Burn”: “I’m proud of who I am and where I come from, but I also want to make it clear that I literally don’t know anything, and that I’m constantly at odds with myself. I’m not sure if being Navajo has anything to do with that, but I do know that I’d rather not be lumped into being anything. But hopefully this song can help some others figure themselves out. Or if not, scratch some existential itch or something that has to do with being “indigenous”, whatever that means to you.”

Waiting For A Sign is not shy for highlights, from the dusky streetwise noir of “Ballad Of Athabaskan Theory” and the wounded Waterboys-evoking “Minds Didn’t Show Alike,” to the propulsive desertified new wave of “Buckskin Boy,” about as captivating a 2024 recasting of Echo & The Bunnymen as one can ask for. But it’s Hataałii’s careful, artful, perhaps unconscious topicality — his ability to write songs that don’t proselytize or scold but prioritize depth and uncanny particularities and the desire to know the unknowable — that marks him as a genuinely thrilling songwriter, someone whose prolific and imaginative output demands close appreciation.

In reflecting on his songwriting, Hataałii is humble and somewhat sheepish — it’s clear that he’s uncomfortable with didacticism or retrofitting lyrics into certain narratives.

“I’ve been feeling reluctant to dive into the lyrics of the more abstract songs. I just feel really stupid when I try talking about them, probably because I don’t know what they actually are. Or I still lack the vocabulary to accurately express the things I think about. But I’ve continued writing the way I do because something about it is beyond me, and that’s what’s magical about it. Sometimes the music I make reveals things to me that I wouldn’t have learned or found anywhere else, all the while remaining completely mysterious to me. These things are beyond language as we know it, but somehow they’re still possible which is absolutely fascinating to me on its own.”

Hataałii continues: “There is a prominent figure in Navajo religion referred to as “Talking God”, which I personally interpret as a reverence for the phenomenon of language. As well as “Changing Woman,” i.e. constant divine, feminine flux. Or “imagination” itself.”

I do consider myself to be a spiritual person, and something about creating has always been my way of practicing or dabbling in that “magic.” But with all that being said, I’m still not sure what it is I’m doing exactly. I have a few ideas, but I’ll keep those to myself for now.”

Despite his reticence in romanticizing or interpreting his own music, he is pleased with the results. “What I will say is that I’m proud of this album and I’m happy to present it as the next of many more to come. I’m grateful for those who had to put up with my awkward and strange behavior in order to get this thing off the ground. I had a lot of fun.”