What Were You Hoping For? is the third studio album by American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Van Hunt. It was released on September 27, 2011, by his independent label Godless Hotspot in a joint venture with distributor Thirty Tigers.
The album is the follow-up to Hunt's 2006 record On the Jungle Floor and follows a period of label conflict and mainstream obscurity for Hunt. Written and produced entirely by the singer, What Were You Hoping For? was recorded in sessions at the Los Angeles studio Santa Fe Tracking Station. Hunt applied a minimalist recording approach and worked with a backing band comprising drummer Ruth Price, percussionist Melissa Mattey, and keyboardist Peter Dyer.
The album expands on his previous music's blend of R&B and rock music forms. Hunt sought to achieve a rawer musical aesthetic and incorporated rough rhythms, rock dynamics, and studio effects. Inspired by his experience in Los Angeles at the onset of the late-2000s recession, the album's subject matter deals with contemporary societal issues and dissonance in modern life. Music journalists have noted the album's predominantly rock style, incorporation of funk and soul, eccentric songs, varying musical structure, and Hunt's eclectic vocal range.
What Were You Hoping For? received rave reviews from critics, who praised its musical direction, Hunt's performance, and his songwriting. However, it received some backlash from Hunt's fanbase for its stylistic departure from his past work. The album produced one single, "Eyes Like Pearls", and performed modestly on music charts, reaching number 50 on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums. Hunt promoted the album with a nationwide concert tour from September to October 2011, accompanied by Price and Dyer in his live band.
Background
In 2006, Hunt released his second album On the Jungle Floor to critical success, but little commercial notice, despite a costly marketing campaign by his label Capitol Records. After corporate restructuring by Capitol's parent label EMI, his contract was taken over by another EMI label, Blue Note Records. Hunt subsequently went to work on his first project for Blue Note, entitled Popular. Characterized by him as "an edgy, funk kind of rock record", Hunt approached the album with a more aggressive, rock-inspired direction, with music that was less conventional than on his previous albums. Upon the album's completion in 2007, Hunt decided to relocate from his native Atlanta, Georgia to Los Angeles, California in order to advance his career in the music industry, as well as pursue a relationship there with a woman.
Scheduled for a January 2008 release, Popular was promoted with five months of concert performances by Hunt, press coverage, and the release of promotional copies, including the four-song EP The Popular Machine (2007) and advance CDs for the media and radio people. However, weeks before its scheduled release, the album was shelved by Blue Note, with whom Hunt had been experiencing differences, and they subsequently parted ways. Blue Note had felt that the album was not profitable enough to release. Hunt could not release Popular himself without repaying the project's costs back to EMI and obtaining rights to the album's master recordings. According to him, EMI requested twice the original costs, and in his opinion, the money for promoting Popular was not "strategically spent well" by the label. Hunt discussed the situation in an interview for Creative Loafing, saying that "They opted to not sell it to me at a price that I could afford. They've got it and I'm sure they'll come out with it when they deem it necessary and profitable." Of his decision to relocate to Los Angeles, he later quipped, "Here I am, and the relationship has done much better than the career."
With his career on hold, Hunt continued recording new songs and demos, posting them on his MySpace page, while Popular gained exposure among listeners through online music sharing. In 2009, he released the compilation album Use in Case of Emergency as a free download through his website. It featured previously unreleased material recorded by Hunt prior to Popular. He also continued touring, worked on an autobiographical book of short stories, entitled Tales of Friction, and studied classical piano. Hunt also took up photography after his girlfriend purchased him a camera. He started out on the streets of Los Angeles, where he photographed subjects on street corners and discarded objects, including furniture and numerous couches he found abandoned on the streets. In an interview for PopMatters, he explained how his photographying of people there inspired him: "It's sad as you can quite imagine. It's also kind of welcoming to me. Sometimes I do get a chance to talk to them and hear a bit of their story. I'm not the only one out here who had an idea of trying to make it happen. Some of us are luckier than others. Some of us are more prepared than others. That's just the truth of the situation." Along with photography, he was stimulated creatively after reading Legs McNeil's 1997 book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and relating to its themes of artistic frustration and rebelliousness.
In a 2009 interview for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hunt discussed working as an independent artist, stating "Creatively it is certainly liberating, but the rest of it is really not that fun. I wanted a happy medium between the system of recording, marketing and distribution which I think is very important to any product you want to bring to market ... but I never had that with the record industry. Now that I'm on the other side of it trying to be the artist and the industry, I realize what the importance of the system was, but I also realize there was a lot that was missing since it is basically dying now." He also said that he intends on recording another album "at least one more time and then go on tour, and then I don't know."
Recording and production
Hunt began working on tracks for a follow-up project in 2008. Two songs from those sessions, "Moving Targets" and "Eyes Like Pearls", were included on What Were You Hoping For?. After setting up his own label in 2009, Hunt began a new process for What Were You Hoping For?, writing and recording songs for 10 months. In an interview for the Chicago Tribune, he said of his expectations for the album's recording: "I really wasn't sure what it would wind up being sonically. I love Bach cello suites, I love punk music, I love old blues, negro spiritual quartets, Muddy Waters' 'You Need Love.' There is a simplicity but also a bite that connects all that music, from the growl in the cello to the timbre in Muddy's voice. I wanted simple music, but with bite, over which I could lay my lyrical shenanigans."
Hunt played several instruments, including guitar, keyboards, drums, bass synthesizer, and the electronic drum. When he finished writing and recording the demos, Hunt began the album's primary recording sessions at Santa Fe Tracking Station in Los Angeles. With What Were You Hoping For?, Hunt pursued a "harder edge" and rawer aesthetic than featured on his previous work. He also wanted to explore a self-described "gnarly" guitar sound inspired by the work of Muddy Waters and The Stooges' 1973 album Raw Power. Hunt attempted the sound in the past, but encountered discouragement from management. He discussed his direction for the album in an interview for The Boombox, stating "[I]t wasn't necessarily punk music. It was more about trying to capture the growl of a cello. That to me is as nasty as it can get. That's a beautiful sound to me. When people talk about the distortion on the guitar, I hear the same thing with that growl of a cello." Hunt wanted to take advantage of his newfound feeling of artistic freedom and lack of concern over marketability.
Hunt approached the recording sessions differently than on his previous records. Rather than guiding personnel through replicating his demos for the album, he allowed members of his backing band to improvise their parts. For most songs, Hunt recorded with drummer Ruth Price, percussionist and engineer Melissa Mattey, and keyboardist and programmer Peter Dyer. Price and Dyer had auditioned for him at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood and had previously toured with Hunt. He rehearsed with Price for approximately two weeks before recording the final tracks in order to adjust to more rock-based dynamics, including a different set of tempos, chord changes, and faster time cadences, that he wanted for the songs. Price was adept in playing both loose and tight drumming styles for certain songs. Hunt and his band were inspired by recording artists Curtis Mayfield and Iggy Pop, who he said "brought this kind of intelligence along with the rawness. It was really bold. They just didn't give a shit. I was like, that's the attitude that I'm feeling right now. I feel like I've finally shed the music that I grew up with."
They subsequently recorded basic tracks, and Hunt approached Peter Dyer to create a backing soundscape for the tracks. What Were You Hoping For? was later mixed by Melissa Mattey. Hunt has cited its minimalist recording process as his "most hands off approach ... thus far on an album", calling the approach "musically adept but also stringently unique. People might describe it as futuristic."
Music and lyrics
Expanding on his previous work's blend of R&B and rock music forms, What Were You Hoping For? incorporates hard rock, lively funk, sparse ballads, and elements of soul, punk rock, and progressive rock. The music has a loose feel, with grittier guitar and more low fidelity production than on Hunt's previous albums. The album's songs are primarily guitar-based and contain jagged, rumbling rhythms, loose guitar riffs, funk licks, and studio effects, including an abundant use of reverb. Their musical structures are characterized by eccentric arrangements, shifting melodies, and rhythms that vary at offbeat intervals. The songs also feature tense, aggressive soundscapes with sonic influences derived from 1960s psychedelic music and 1970s rock music. Jim Farber from the New York Daily News notes the prevalence of rock music on the album and describes its music as "a surrealist's notion of soul: prog-rock swayed by R&B ... Lots of songs have the skewed melodic structures of '70s Zappa, tempered by '80s Red Hot Chili Peppers." Geraud Blanks of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel characterizes the album's music as "an amalgamation of Prince's psychedelic funk, Jimi Hendrix rock and Curtis Mayfield soul". Hunt's falsetto vocals on the album feature silky timbre and style. He sings in a variety of musical modes on the songs.