Derek Hoke just might be Nashville’s best-kept secret.

Until recently, he was hosting $2 Tuesdays at the 5 Spot, where he says everyone in town has probably seen him play. After 12 years of that, he’s ready to “do something crazy, like play on a Thursday!”

Hoke, who recently released new album Electric Mountain, calls in from East Nashville’s 3Sirens studio, where he recorded the LP.

“They’re really supportive of the East Nashville music community,” he says. “They have an open door policy for people that they like.”

The artist wanted to make a feel-good album that could be enjoyed all at once or in chunks. He also knows that his music is difficult to categorize – not quite country, not Americana.

“The best stuff kind of doesn’t stay in the box,” he says. “If you’re holding an album and you’re trying to restock the record store, but you wouldn’t quite know what category to put it in? Those are some of my favorite records.”

To Hoke, the idea of Electric Mountain means bluegrass music, but with synthesizers – “like Devo playing country music.” Melting those two elements together interested him. Instead of using cellos and violins, Hoke used old mellotrons. But he kept them at the back of the mix so listeners wouldn’t think they were clubbed over the head with cleverness. What makes it all gel is the pedal steel.

“It’s like the secret ingredient that pulls it all together,” he says. “There’s just something about it. It’s a beautiful instrument, and super hard to play, but it’s so haunting and it can encapsulate a sense of space and time like no other instrument, making it sound wide open. Like you’re driving through West Texas. Or, it can sound really simple and sad, like you just lost a loved one.”

Hoke doesn’t have a regular band. Instead, he and producer Dex Green, a regular contributor, recruit musicians like they’re casting a movie. Mike Daly, a pedal steel player who also plays with Hank Williams, Jr., is a regular on his recordings and is fun to play with because Hoke always pushes him in different directions. Session musician Lillie Mae, who plays fiddle on the new record, added a song that Hoke describes as high and lonesome. The fiddle and pedal steel guitar ground the album, Hoke says.

While he made Electric Mountain during the pandemic, it’s not a product of that time. Hoke purposefully avoid dark themes and looked ahead to better days. What the pandemic did give him was more time to accomplish his mission. There was already too much darkness on his previous album, 2017’s Bring the Flood, which he wrote while under a deluge of negative news on TV. Thematically, the new album is more like his previous honky-tonk music, which “feels good and is easy to dance to.”

Green helped focus Hoke on the sound of the record. If one of Hoke’s song ideas didn’t fit with the others, the producer called it out and the two would abandon it.

Hoke moved to Nashville from South Carolina. He’d visited Nashville before and loved the big city excitement with small town vibes. So he sold his guitars and packed up his station wagon.

“I didn’t come here to make it. I just wanted to live here,” he says.  He was content to wait tables and build a new life, and didn’t concentrate so much on gigging back then. “I played a few times around town when I first moved here, and I found out what I was doing wasn’t very good. I knew that immediately, because I was watching people that I’d never heard of blow my mind.”

This realization led Hoke to start over musically. He got a job selling merch for bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs, and spent a few years on the road with him.

“ I just absorbed every minute of his act,” Hoke says. He learned a lot from Skaggs, but most importantly, his professionalism. “It didn’t matter if it was a performing arts center or a county fair in the middle of nowhere. You went out there with a suit on, and you dressed like you were supposed to be there.”

Hestays in touch with many of the members of Skaggs’ band from those days, and says he hopes to record a bluegrass album with them all.

“That would really be full circle for me,” he says.

Hoke has worked with a lot of other musicians through the years, and he has a reputation in Nashville for making space for others. That might make one wonder how he came up with “Hush your Mouth,” a stinging rebuke of Nashville Johnny-come-latelys. He says he’s met plenty of musicians like that at his $2 Tuesday shows. He was annoyed by those who showed up to play once, and then never returned to support others.

“Some people want to be famous immediately, and they have a terrible attitude,” he says. “They just moved here, they’ve lived in town for five minutes and they think we owe them something!”

The song could have been about himself after he first moved to town, he concedes. Previously, he’d been playing noisy bars where he wasn’t paid much mind.

“In Nashville, everyone in the audience was paying attention, like you could hear a pin drop, so you’d better have something to say. And I did not,” he says.

Hoke says he learned to play guitar by studying the likes of Tom Petty and Neil Young—rock artists. But after spending time in Ricky Skaggs’ orbit, he learned to play older songs on an acoustic guitar and began writing quiet songs.

“That really helped me find my own voice, instead of relying on the crutch of having a loud band behind me,” he says. “There’s so many great musicians around town, I realized, I need to step my game up.”

He had amassed a number of songs over the years, and one day, Green, his friend, told him he should make a record. He’d been so unsure of himself as a musician and played around town so rarely that some people didn’t even know he was a gigging musician. Once he started writing songs he was proud of, that began to change. At first he favored songs that were easy to sing and easy to play. Eventually he began to wonder what else he could do to stretch his sound.

“I’m not gonna make a Radiohead record. I’ll still sound like me,” he says. “But let’s take a little bit of that and see if we can stick it into this Americana genre and keep it interesting.”

He says it blows his mind that he now works with the musicians he’s looked up to even before moving to Nashville, such as Robyn Hitchcock and guitarist Kenny Vaughan

“I wanted to belong here, I wanted to be a part of this thing and over time, I guess it worked out,” he says. “I don’t know how it happened, but I’m glad it did, and I guess I did something right.”

Follow Rachel Alm at Twitter.com/thouzenfold and Instagram.com/thousandfold.