Andrew Howie

Scottish music maker. Prison/School/Youth Arts Practitioner. MA Songwriter. Home Recordist Ex-Calamateur. Grand Gesture. www.andrewhowie.bandcamp.com

[andrew-howie]

Judith Kerr: ‘I’m still surprised at the success of The Tiger Who Came to Tea’

The creator of Mog on learning how to draw a tiger at the zoo, heeding the advice of her cat and still working at 94

[andrew-howie]

Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, makes fun of the “busy man” for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the night and realise that you’re lonely in your marriage, or that you need to think about what your level of consumption is doing to the planet, but the next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you have another million things. As long as there’s no end of little things, you never have to stop and confront the bigger questions. Writing or reading an essay isn’t the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean, but it is one good way. And if you consider how laughably unbusy Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen was, compared with our own age, those subjective tweets and hasty blog posts don’t seem so essayistic. They seem more like a means of avoiding what a real essay might force on us. We spend our days reading, on screens, stuff we’d never bother reading in a printed book, and bitch about how busy we are.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/04/jonathan-franzen-too-late-to-save-world-donald-trump-environment

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No art is possible without a dance with death.

Kurt Vonnegut, quoting Erika Ostrovsky’s ‘Céline and His Vision’ in ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’

[andrew-howie]

So you want to be a writer? Essential tips for aspiring novelists

How to write a killer opening line. Why Google is not research. When to rip it up and start again. Whatever you do, just write! Lessons from acclaimed novelist and creative writing professor Colum McCann

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Tim Parks: ‘The athlete has a training schedule, the actor a script, the writer has nothing'

The author on guilty time out, online distractions and getting into ‘the zone’

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Whenever I listen to anything that I've done I think, "I would do that differently now". I've never heard anything that I've done and thought, "Oh, that's absolutely perfect and it could not possibly be improved". What normally happens is I listen to something I've done and I think, "OK, well that could have been a little bit better in this respect and that respect" and I start thinking that through. And then I realise that I'm actually imagining the next piece of music in that series. So that's actually how I get new ideas, by trying to improve old ones.

Brian Eno, ‘Brian Eno: What Makes Us Human?’ ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04nghzd )

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Here’s a slightly geeky blog post about how I made ‘I Can Sing A Rainbow’, an ambient album I just re-released. It’s a Free/Pay-What-You-Want album over on Bandcamp: https://andrewhowie.bandcamp.com/album/i-can-sing-a-rainbow

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The talking about the thing isn't the thing. The doing of the thing is the thing.

‘Yes Please’ by Amy Poehler

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"You have to care about your work but not about the result. You have to care about how good you are and how good you feel, but not about how good people think you are or how good people think you look

‘Yes Please’ by Amy Poehler

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Matt Haig: ‘At times I am Philip K Dick, minus the amphetamines, bashing out 6,000 words a day’

The novelist and children’s writer on running, hypochondria and his territorial Maltese terrier

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PWB Can I ask you, Kate, writer to writer: do you ever write something and go, “Smashed it, that’s brilliant, I’m keeping that, that’s amazing.” Does it get to the point where you can step back and go, “That’s a really good piece of writing” or, “That’s not such a good piece of writing.” Or do you just write it all down and not think of it critically? KT It’s not like, “Wooh, I’m smashing this” but sometimes everything else disappears, and that happens very rarely. The rest of the time, it’s you writing when you don’t feel like writing, writing when you hate everything that’s coming out, forcing yourself to engage with the idea that it’s going to be shit no matter what you do, and trying to kind of break through that because of a deadline, or because you know that it’s very important to continue. This is what enables you to be a writer. The difference between a writer and someone who dreams of being a writer is that the writer has finished. You’ve gone through the agony of taking an idea that is perfect – it’s soaring, it comes from this other place – then you’ve had to summon it down and process it through your shit brain. It’s coming out of your shit hands and you’ve ruined it completely. The finished thing is never going to be anywhere near as perfect as the idea, of course, because if it was, why would you ever do anything else? And then you have another idea. And then these finished things are like stepping stones towards being able to find your voice. The thing is, everybody’s got an idea. Everybody wants to tell me about their ideas. Everybody is very quick to look down on your finished things, because of their great ideas. But until you finish something, I’ve got no time to have that discussion. Because living through that agony is what gives you the humility to understand what writing is about. PWB Shit, you’ve just articulated what I’ve wanted to be able to say for so long about the agony. KT But it’s also elation. It’s obviously also the most beautiful and incredible feeling. I’m in love with it – I can’t imagine life without it.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/26/phoebe-waller-bridge-kate-tempest-conversation-fleabag

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Turning Encounters, Experiences and Feelings Into Songs

If you’re the kind of person who immediately feels that your life experiences could or should be expressed in song, you’re a natural songwriter. But just because that’s true, it d…

[andrew-howie]

Mark Haddon: 'I'm not a terribly good writer, but I'm a persistent editor'

The author on self-doubt, Scandi crime and throwing away three quarters of what he produces

“ I don’t think I would keep writing without being driven by a constant nagging voice at the back of my head, saying, over and over, “That wasn’t good enough … Write more, write better … Time is running out … ”. On the rare days when I’ve written 1,000 words I enter a state of profound contentment which I rarely feel at any other time. I close my eyes, let out a long, deep breath, listen to what’s going on in my mind and hear … absolutely nothing.”

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‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times

We may be living through times of unprecedented change, but in uncertainty lies the power to influence the future. Now is not the time to despair, but to act

“We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.” 

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But the man who creates music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air.

James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues (via tiedyeheartofwords)

[andrew-howie]

Open Arms, by Andrew Howie

from the album Flight

New song alert! Here's a brand new tune of mine which is on the Refuweegee 'Flight' EP I posted about yesterday. It was inspired by a letter from a 7-year-old Glaswegian boy to a newly-arrived refugee/asylum seeker. The lyrics of the song discuss the clichés often associated with Glasgow (in particular: bad weather, violence & sectarianism) and how we can transcend them, in the hope of making Glasgow an even more welcoming city than it already is.

Curiously, despite the song's weighty subject matter, this is *easily* the most poptastic tune I've ever written. Must be all that Taylor Swift I've been listening to ;-)

As I said yesterday, all the money raised from the sale of the EP goes directly to Refuweegee. You *can* buy the song on its own, but seeing as the other songs (by Ross Clark of Three Blind Wolves, Donna Maciocia,Lucy Cathcart Frödén, Kim Edgar & Dave Frazer) are all AMAZING, it kind of makes more sense to buy the whole EP :-)

Enjoy!

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Replacing Songs with Silence

Censorship, banning, blacklists: What's lost when governments stifle musical expression?

“Why do tyrants fear the singer? Why do those who would control institutions and culture fear artistic expression often as much as they fear a free press? Because music has power to influence emotions, thoughts, and behavior. Anabaptists facing severe persecution in the 1500s wrote and sang a prodigious number of hymns—despite the fact that to be heard might result in death—celebrating their faith and preparing them for the possibility of martyrdom. U.S. civil rights protesters and South African freedom fighters used singing as a vehicle of unity, courage, and defiance as they faced down dogs, guns, and mobs. And, lest we forget that any power can be used for good or evil, Rwandan radio broadcast songs encouraging the killing of Hutus by Tutsis before and during the 1994 massacres.”