Mark Alan Hagar

Mark Alan Hagar is a singer-songwriter who released two albums in 2013: "Mando Mike" and "Montaya's Wanting." Both are available on major streaming platforms and represent the core of his documented recorded work.

"Mando Mike" is an eight-track album, and its opening song, "Crush," runs just over five minutes, a generous length that suggests a songwriter willing to let a piece develop at its own pace. The album also includes "All My Worries Gone Home," "Do Ya?," "Bye Bye, Stranger," "So Close," "Where Nothing Grows," "Your Body Against Mine," and "Birds 'n Trees." The titles carry the specificity of someone writing close to lived experience: relationships, places, and particular emotional states rather than abstract ideas.

"Montaya's Wanting" is a twelve-track collection running around fifty-one minutes, the fuller and more expansive of the two releases. "Lead Me On," "For Later," "Happy Hour," and "Hub City Games" appear here, paced and sequenced across an album that feels committed to the long form. "Hub City Games" has the quality of a title rooted in a specific place and its particular rhythms. "Montaya's Wanting" itself suggests a character, a name that carries its own weight, which speaks to a songwriter drawn toward the particular and the named rather than the generic.

Singer-songwriter music at its best is about the specific: the one true image, the exact detail, the thing that communicates because it is precise rather than because it is broad. Both of Hagar's album titles carry that quality. Names, wanting, the texture of a life as it is actually lived. That instinct runs through the track listings of both records and marks a consistent approach across the two releases.

"Mando Mike" and "Montaya's Wanting" form a body of work built from careful, specific song titles and a clear commitment to letting songs and albums breathe. What that sounds like in full is available on the streaming platforms where both records live.