Heading West, which marks Howe’s fourth journey with Real Music, features some of his most sublime music to date. The guitar is central on this release, featuring warm, carefree strumming that is accented by keyboards, piano and rhythm. Songs like “Old Wooden House” and “American Travels” have a pensive beauty to them — the guitar harmonies bear a reflective essence, as if Howe is wandering through old haunts reminiscing of past joys. “Badlands” ups the tempo a bit and adds a bit of bluesy groove, while maintaining Howe’s signature laid-back flair. A must listen for fans of relaxing guitar music.
Tag Archives: acoustic guitar
Moments Lost In Time Like Tears In Rain
This song is from my second album “Round River”
Edge Of The Trees
I wrote a piece of music about a dream, a bad dream, not a nightmare as such. Each instrument and rhythm is a metaphor for the different elements of the dream. It’s about standing in the light but on the edge of darkness. My heartbeat starts the music and continues throughout. The acoustic guitar is my calm inner voice, talking and comforting. Half way through the piece the electric guitar conveys a rising panic, doubt and fear, but all the while the acoustic guitar, the inner calm voice, keeps talking and assuring me that it will be ok, there’s nothing to fear….beyond the edge of the trees….
Thinking Like A Mountain
This is one my personal favourite tunes that I have written. My first arrangement of the melody was grandiose and elaborate. But then I just sat down and played it on the acoustic guitar and it’s simplicity spoke far more clearly and purposefully to me, so that was it!
It’s a song dedicated to the amazing thoughts and writings of the great Aldo Leopold, who forever changed our thinking about our impact on the environment around us.
Last Goodbye….
For all those sad moments in life….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=454RjoAUoYM
Song available for download on the sidebar links…
Happy Music News….I Made It To #8 In The Itunes Charts in Portugal
I’m rather happy to learn that my track “The River May Rise” from my first album “Time Stands Still” made it to #8 in the Portugal Itunes New Age chart this week….
ITunes Music Chart Archive – Portugal New Age Songs Chart Archive – 8 June, 2013
Portugal New Age Songs Chart Archive – 8 June, 2013 | ITunes Music Chart Archive
Here is the track in question…it’s available on all the links above if you fancy having it on your ipod or phone…! 🙂
Name That Tune…
I sometimes get asked how I think of titles for my instrumental songs. I suppose it’s a fair question when I think about it, after all there are no lyrics, so in theory I could call a song or tune anything I wanted.
It doesn’t really work like that though. Most of the time a piece of music comes as a result of having something to say about something in particular. It’s how I feel about something that gets the creative process moving, so that by the time I’ve finished the composition, I know exactly what the song should be called.
This song has one of my more direct, not very abstract titles, and it’s exactly about what it says it’s about. Hopefully the listener can here the regret?…..
“Sorry For What I Said conveys humility, sincerity, and regret — a heartfelt beauty (Kathy Parsons, mainlypiano.com)
A Love Song….
This is a simple song about those times in your life when it feels like someone who is very dear to you is always close, inside you almost, no matter where you are…..
The Music of a Landscape – Part II
This song is dedicated to the Earth, the “Pale Blue Dot”…
“Hope” – the great photographs of Dorothea Lange
My fourth album “Heading West” is an interpretation of the landscape and peoples of the American west through the senses of a travelling Brit. I wanted to express the emotions of my experiences and to convey the character of the places that I visited, although some of the music I composed turned out to be more abstract than that.
One example of this is my song “Hope”. I’ve had some really lovely comments about this song which is always nice because you never know whether or not what you are doing is perhaps a cliche – the listener always decides this of course. “Hope” is not easy to describe, which is why I gave the song that title after I had composed and recorded it – if one word can describe an abstract thing like a piece of music, then “Hope” was it in this instance.
When it came to putting together a video for this song, I started trawling aimlessly on the internet looking for inspiration. It wasn’t long before the amazing photographs of Dorothea Lange jumped out at me as the perfect representation of what the song is about.
Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965) was an amazing American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her depiction of the Great Depression era which affected the world in the decade immediately preceding World War II. Lange’s photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression in the American west and documented the migration of so many people intent on finding work and a place for themselves and their families.
In 1941 Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her excellence in photography.
The picture on the video thumbnail is entitled Migrant Mother, and the woman is Florence Owens Thompson. Look her up on wikipedia, the story of how the picture came to be taken and of her life is fascinating. I hope you like the video and the music.
Mike Howe 