My new single Forgotten Roads evokes a sense of quiet exploration and open spaces, with a hint of nostalgia and the beauty of the overlooked or untraveled.
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Tag Archives: Mike Howe
Sadness for the real Mike Howe
I couldn’t help noticing this week that my website was receiving a huge (and unusual) increase in hits and views. It set me wondering why that might be.
I’ve known for a long time that I had a namesake who is a more famous music artist than me. Mike Howe, lead singer of Metal Church. Fans of his often mistakenly arrive on my pages from google searches for him that have inadvertently directed them to me.
So I googled him too and was really shocked and saddened to learn that he had just taken his own life. That explained the unusual traffic to my website.
I just wanted to say how sorry I am for Mike, his poor family and his thousands of fans around the world. I know how the shock of that loss feels.
Over the years I’ve lost 3 good friends to suicide, or more accurately, depression. The loss of each one was a complete shock. Each impossible to comprehend at the time and, years later, still mystifying and sad. There was no warning. They were just gone. And the shockwaves and grief that were left behind for their close friends and family will, unfortunately, stay forever.
We miss them and we are left with the guilt of wondering what we might have done to save them, if only we’d known. Perhaps we should have known. That’s part of the guilt.
I obviously didn’t know Mike but I did once listen to an interview he gave, just out of curiosity for this other famous musician who’s fans used to land on my social media pages. He struck me as very intelligent, interesting, articulate and kind, as well as obviously being very talented. He and I are the same age.
It’s such a sad thing. We all imagine the pain that drives a person to that point of apparent submission and helplessness, and we all hope that we never have to suffer in that way, although many of us can relate.
Time will be up soon enough.
My sincere condolences to all of you who land here on my site looking for the real Mike Howe. I’m so sorry for your loss.
It’s brilliant to have this many monthly listeners, thank you
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Enjoy clips of every song on the album in the order they appear.
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Approaching Storm
On a trail out of the Grand Canyon in stifling heat the storm approaches…and then passes by to the west
Apparently They Play This On Delta Airlines…Hopefully It Helps…
“A Long Way To Go” from the album “Round River” by Mike Howe
“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.
Inspirational places….
This is the place, according to Welsh legend, where the red dragon of the Celts fought with the white dragon of the Anglo-Saxons. Both fell into the lake, but only the red dragon emerged, and this is why the red dragon is the national emblem of Wales and appears on the national flag. But that’s only a story, albeit a nice one. I have written the management plan for this place and this will hopefully help to conserve the wonderful wildlife and the cultural landscape for the future. And it in turn has inspired some of my music.
Spring on the Pembrokeshire Coast
After 6 months of perpetual grey skies and torrential rain, spring has finally arrived on the Pembrokeshire Coast, and today our local beach looks like this. It’s so nice to finally feel some warm sunshine, although admittedly there is still a chilly north-easterly wind coming down from the arctic.
The sea birds have arrived back from the South Atlantic to breed on the offshore islands of Skomer, Skokholm, Grassholm and Ramsey. These puffins nest in dis-used rabbit burrows on the islands, which are free of predators like rats and foxes, although the threat from the Great Black-backed Gull is still very real for the offspring of these little fellas.
The gannets have returned from their winter feeding grounds in the south to breed in huge numbers (32,000 nesting pairs) on Grassholm Island, and can be seen diving into the sea wherever they spot shoals of fish on which to feed.
In the next few weeks all of the spring flowers will emerge as the land awakens from its winter slumber. The most familiar birds to be seen from the cliff tops are razorbills, guillemots, kittiwakes, fulmars and various species of gull, as well as shags, cormorants and the rarer choughs and peregrine falcons.
A 6000 year old submerged forest that reappears from time to time
Although it is rarely seen, the remnants of a past forested landscape, where there is now sea and beach, is a very interesting feature and teaches us about past sea level rise and our recent glacial history, and makes sense of some of the archaeological remains we find around our coastline in West Wales.
At the end of the last glaciation the sea level was much lower than it is today because so much water was still locked up in the ice sheets to the north of Britain. As the climate warmed forests became established on land that had been tundra for thousands of years, and this forest extended far out beyond where sea level is today. Gradually as temperatures rose, the sea ice to the south of the arctic circle melted and sea levels rose, submerging much of the coastal forests.
In some places this action was very rapid and sand covered and then preserved the remains. After heavy storms and at very low tides, peat or the stumps of these forest trees may be seen at places along the Welsh coast, particularly, in Pembrokeshire, at Newgale and Freshwater West.
The remains of animals and Mesolithic tools have been found in these deposits. These include an Auroch, which is an ancient cow and is the ancestor of all modern cows, a pig, a roe deer, a red deer antler and a brown bear jaw.
At Lydstep Haven, a pair of broken flint microliths were found by the neck vertebrae of a pig. Â This pig may have been injured, but not caught by its Mesolithic hunters and subsequently died in the forest. Â A tree trunk fell on its remains, preserving it, and the microliths in situ. Â This find has been dated to about 6000 BC.
Geraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales ) noted the uncovered submerged forest, during his tour of Wales in AD 1188.
‘We then passed over Newgale sands at which place a very remarkable circumstance occurred. The sandy shores of south Wales laid bare by the extraordinary violence of a storm, the surface of the earth, which had been covered for many ages, reappeared, and discovered the trunk of trees cut off, standing in the very sea itself, the strokes of the hatchet appearing as if made only yesterday. The soil was very black and the wood-like ebony. This looked like a grove cut down, perhaps at the time of the deluge, or not long after.’
We cannot be sure whether the marks he saw were made by a stone axe. It is certainly possible, since stone axes were in use before the forests were submerged between about 6000 and 5000 BC.
He made these observations 800 years ago and similar observations are the basis for medieval traditions about the Cantref Gwaelodd – ‘the lost lands of Wales.’
This is what the beautiful coastline looks like today….
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Mike Howe 