The world of music lost a true original recently, after the folk icon Michael Hurley, the wily cartoonist and songwriter known to many as “Snock,” passed away on April 1st, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. His passing came just after he put the finishing touches on his final studio album, Broken Homes and Gardens, a farewell that stands as a warm and fitting final entry in one of American music’s most singular and influential catalogues.
Completed in March 2025, Broken Homes and Gardens was crafted over three years at The Rope Room in Astoria, Oregon. For this final statement, Hurley reunited with the close-knit crew that helped shape his 2021 album, The Time of the Foxgloves: Kati Claborn and Luke Ydstie of The Hackles, with Brian Bovenizer engineering. The result is an album that feels both valedictory and timeless, a gentle closing of the circle on a career that spanned more than half a century.
True to form, the album sees Hurley blending new compositions, such as ‘Fava’, the first single, and ‘The Monkey’, with new interpretations of deep cuts from his extensive back catalogue, including ‘Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls’ and ‘Abomidable Snowman’. This mix of the new and the familiar is classic Hurley, an artist who always seemed to operate within his own time signature.
For those unfamiliar with the wonderfully peculiar world of Michael Hurley, an in-depth 2013 feature written by Byron Coley in the much-missed Arthur magazine1 described him as a “wild American treasure”. Championed by “outsiders, loners, stoners, eggheads, and marginal-culture nuts of all stripes”, Hurley’s primary avant-garde technique was his surrealist lyric-writing, which set him apart from more standard folk traditions. He created what the magazine termed a “weirdly personal universe”, populated by recurring characters like the cartoon dogs Boone and Jocko, all under the ornery but charming mystique of his alter-ego, Snock.
Despite his outsider mystique, Hurley’s influence has been profound and quietly persistent. In the 21st century, he was embraced by a new generation of musicians, touring with younger acts like Vetiver and Cass McCombs. His records found new life through reissues by labels like Mississippi Records, which brought his classic, long-out-of-print 1970s LPs back to appreciative audiences.
This late-career renaissance is a testament to the enduring power of his work. His songs, as writer Byron Coley noted, are often “simple on the surface but as deep as anyone would ever care to take them”. He played non-standard venues, including a rug store, and remained fiercely protective of his artistic vision, once halting a documentary film because it didn’t meet his standards.
Broken Homes and Gardens is the final chapter in this remarkable story. It is a last dispatch from the strange and wonderful world Hurley built, a place “as old as American history itself” and as intricate as “the most immaculate post-stoner architecture imaginable”. It’s a warm, idiosyncratic farewell from the Lonesome Snock, leaving fans with one last, timeless, surrealist tune.
Broken Homes and Gardens is released via No Quarter on September 12th, 2025.
Available to order now from all good independent record stores on CD and Vinyl.
Bandcamp: https://michaelhurley.bandcamp.com/album/broken-homes-and-gardens
- Arthur Magazine: https://arthurmag.com/2013/04/27/on-the-trail-of-the-lonesome-snock-byron-coley-investigates-michael-hurley-arthur-no-35-2013/ ↩︎