Hamish Hawk – Interview

Hamish Hawk with his new album A Firmer Hand has taken a major step forward artistically, with a deeply honest album, full of songwriting and performances that have real depth and a very compelling authenticity. To accompany our review of the new album, Louder Than War had a conversation with Hamish in the relaxed setting of an independent artisan coffee shop and cafe in Edinburgh’s Southside. We chatted in depth about the genesis of the new album, Hamish’s take on songwriting, playing live, and other related subjects. It was a fascinating conversation and provided interesting insights into Hamish’s artistic vision.

LTW: What were the ideas and emotions that translated into the development of the new album?

Hamish: The first song that was written that went on the album was Questionable Hit. I really enjoyed writing that song and it came very quickly. I was struck by its attitude, it’s sort of petty, a little bit embittered. It was definitely one of those songs where I wrote it and thought who’s going to hear this, is it going to be someone that was maybe an inspiration for the song itself. Is that going to get me into hot water. I noticed what that song sounded like quite quickly after writing it. This was around the time Angel Numbers was getting put together and it could have been put on Angel Numbers, but we felt no that’s the next generation. So, I sat on that for a little while. The next song that reared its head was Machiavelli’s Room. Stefan Maurice, my drummer and collaborator sent me this piano loop and I was absolutely consumed with writing that song. With those two songs I felt okay, this isn’t Angel Numbers, and not Heavy Elevator. These songs I felt deserved to sit on an album of similar sounding songs or songs of similar intensity.

Angel Numbers and Heavy Elevator are the kind of albums that I loved writing, in that the thing that makes them cohesive, is that they are one voice, but there is actually quite a few faces, in terms of different characters in songs and different expressions. This felt more like, what I need to do is lean into the attitude that is showing itself in these two early songs. The whole album needs to be from that palette, because if you were to put Machiavelli’s Room next to songs from Angel Numbers it just wouldn’t sit. We are already finding with putting set lists together that there are some interesting interactions between songs. I noticed that these songs were essentially darker. I was confronted by the fact that I wasn’t trying to be quite so arch in the songs, not quite so ironic, where I had been almost sort of friendly in some sense. Angel Numbers and Heavy Elevator are the kinds of albums my parents could happily listen too.

A Firmer Hand is the sort of album, which is a little trickier, a little bit more intense, darker, and aggressive, and I felt it was just time for me to lean into that. So, it became an exercise in how honest I could be with myself and therefore how honest I could be with the audience. How bare faced and direct where I had grown used to being smiley or sugar coated. So, A Firmer Hand as an album, was a test for me to see how much I could push myself into new and slightly uncomfortable territory.

You have a well established partnership with your band and producer Rod Jones, how did that work in the studio, when you were working on the new album?

Heavy Elevator and Angel Numbers differ from A Firmer Hand. I started out as a solo performer and a solo musician, and I would spend a lot of time sitting on the end of my bed playing songs on the acoustic guitar and writing that way. When I essentially began an official collaboration with my guitarist Andrew Pearson and my drummer Stefan Maurice, I wanted to relinquish some kind of control and say look I’m maybe not as capable right now of writing the songs I have in my head musically. I want to hand some of that responsibility over, I want to relinquish a certain degree of control, and say if you spend time on the music, I can maybe spend more time on the lyrics and the vocal melody. And so Heavy Elevator and Angel Numbers was the beginning of that in earnest. Heavy Elevator has a few songs on it that started essentially as acoustic guitar songs, Angel Numbers has them as well but fewer of them.

A Firmer Hand has none of them. I didn’t write the music for this album; I handed this over to Andrew and to Stefan. So, they were able to not only provide me with demos and I would then sing over the top of them. But with each demo the sound sort of got to know itself better and they got to know what I was trying to attempt lyrically. So, they were able to lean into the world of it a bit more. That was what was asked of them essentially, I kept coming back with these songs where the lyrics had similar themes, similar feels, where if you take Angel Numbers there is a diversity of themes. In the studio it was a different dynamic in that I was focusing entirely on vocals, and they were focusing on the music, and you know it was an odd experience. Because I think anyone in my position… I think its common in performers, anyway, is to want to feel like they have fingerprints on everything. I think that it was really useful for me in the studio to not have such direct …I mean obviously I did have direction, but not such direct involvement in the recording of the music, because I was actually still writing some of this in the studio.

We had been so busy over the past few years that its meant that there has not been the downtime and that nigh on boredom that it takes to just muse on things and develop new songs and take yourself off in different lyrical directions. I was quite short on that. So, when it came to the studio, I was able to write better in the studio than I ever had before. So, the album did feel like a departure, the atmosphere was different. We were a bit defiant in the studio and that defiance has continued now towards the release of the album. Because as I said about my parents, I could play those earlier albums to my parents and this one not so much. I think in the past I might have been concerned that I couldn’t play it to my parents and now I am less concerned with making people happy and more concerned with being true to myself.

What are your personal hopes for the new album?

A third album is a particular point in time. The first one is a statement of intent, the second is a honing of that, or a continuation but a development. Then most of the time when it comes to bands and third albums, you will see either a volte-face, a complete sort of ‘oh now they are making a jazz album’, or maybe serving themselves a little more, and I think that’s definitely true of us. A band I keep thinking about whenever I talk about this is the Arctic Monkeys. With their third album they go away to America and record in a different place, and record with different people, the songs change. At the time when it came out it was no one’s favourite one, but it was absolutely necessary for them to have that before they moved on to their fourth and fifth albums.

I don’t know where this album will take me and take the band. It honestly could go either way as far as I am concerned. I get very nervous before the release of any record. You could tell me that absolutely everyone is going to hate it, and you are never going to hear from me again. You could tell me that about any record and I would probably believe you.

Well, I’m not going to tell you that.

Bless you. I think I needed to expel whatever is in A Firmer Hand. I think it is something of an exorcism for better or worse. It felt absolutely necessary when we were recording it, and I am looking forward to it coming out so I can essentially close the door on it and push forward to something. Objectively, practically, I am so grateful for all the success the previous records have had, but those around me seem to suggest that there might be bigger things on the cards. I want to stay humble and say I am grateful for anything that comes my way.

I was reading the biography piece written by Graeme Thomson and was intrigued where he quotes you as saying “I don’t tend to invent things out of nowhere. I’m not that sort of writer, I’m more of a diarist”. Could you expand on that a little?

That statement is absolutely true. I am not an inventor, it comes from my real life, it really does. I am not saying that everything I have ever sung about, and every song is strictly autobiographical, but every symbol, every image, every shape, and colour in these songs, is informed by something that really happened. Everything that I have put in my songs is a device I use to either explain whatever happened in my life to someone else or understand it myself. I am a diarist, and I think with A Firmer Hand especially, it is holding up the pages of the diary, and where with previous records I think I have gladly moved towards the florid side of lyric writing, what I was challenging myself to do with A Firmer Hand was to speak poetically but as plainly as possible. There are fewer places to hide behind vagaries. And that’s why it has felt so …I am not going to lie, there are parts of it that have felt uncomfortable, parts of the promotion have felt uncomfortable. I am still learning how to talk about the record. All of the words A Firmer Hand required me to say about it, suddenly were showing me maybe I am not equipped for this yet. Maybe I don’t know enough about it myself. I think as we move forward, with greater distance from it, it will reveal even more of itself.

My writing, in that it is diaristic, has always been a tool to understand myself. If you asked about any particular lyric, I could tell you exactly where I was when I wrote that and exactly what I was thinking, and the reason I used that was…I don’t invent things out of nowhere. It’s all me. All of the time the protagonist in the song is a heightened version of myself, so its autobiographical in one sense, and larger than life in another.

In the same biographical piece, you are quoted as saying “We don’t deal in genres”, and “I give the listener fair credit: whatever this album is, they’ll hear it”. I really liked the respect for the listener that comes through in those words. I’d like to ask what artists give that to you as a listener, and have had an influence on you?

Someone like Bob Dylan is incredible at just handing it to you on a plate and saying there is plenty for you to deal with, you can listen to it at different levels, but I’m not going to tell you what these songs are about, I am perfectly happy for you to muse on what they mean. One of my favourite songwriters is Bill Callahan and he famously said my songs you can listen to them on this level and if you want to chip away at them and listen to them another five times, maybe that fifth time you will hear something different and if you chip at away them again and again, you will maybe get to the tenth, twelfth, fourteenth listen and you will discover something new. Those are the songs that I want to write. I have just realised in saying that, that something I am concerned with in my writing is a certain degree of immediacy. I like the songs being easy to understand, not verbose. I am not a fan of purple prose, essentially that kind of cluttering things up and muddying the waters. People describe me as a literary songwriter, and it’s not really how I see myself. Its more real life, and real-world ways of…that’s how I see it.

Joni Mitchell, Dory Previn, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, they are uncompromising lyricists. In the sense that they say I am not going to do anything for you, if you like it that’s great but I am not going to guide you through it. As you move forward in music, as you work in the music industry for long enough things start seeping in. People saying maybe this song could be shorter or the chorus could be stronger. If my songs have hooks in them great, if they have little sing along choruses in them great, and if they are immediate all the better, but I am really looking to give the listener something that they can properly engage with and sink their teeth into and not feel that once they do sink their teeth into it, it dissolves into nothing. I want it to remain substantial and stand up to the kind of scrutiny that I give to songs I like, and I think that when you get a band or singer or artist who is very highly sophisticated musically and yet completely listenable, they usually go further. I always think of Abba, you couldn’t hope for Abba to be played at more weddings, the true definition of pop or popular music, it couldn’t be more popular. And yet there is enough in there to write a thesis about it. They are so impressive. So, I am interested in writing the kind of music that you can engage with on many levels.

There can often be a sense of resonance about place in your writing, and I wondered what impact you feel growing up in and being based in Edinburgh has had on your writing?

Huge, place is a big thing for me. I would say that there is no pursuit that is more inspiring for me than travelling. I absolutely love Edinburgh, I have lived here all my life, bar a few lost years at university. It’s a very special place. This medieval citadel on top of the volcano, and the seven hills and the closes in lines and cobbles. It’s absolutely magic to me. I am spoilt rotten with Edinburgh when it comes to aesthetics. I am an aesthete through and through, I am maybe something of a dandy. That’s the thing with Glasgow and Edinburgh, as much as I love Glasgow, and I have spent many years in Glasgow, it’s not my place. It’s not my city. Though all of the criticisms leveled against Edinburgh I am sure are probably accurate, but you feel as you walk around, you are part of something, there is a history in the air. Maybe I am a bit of an old head, I think I do look at the world like that.

On stage, I have the sense of you being immersed in and living each song, rather than performing a song. I think audiences sense that and connect with that authenticity. Can you describe how the experience of playing live is for you?

Since I was tiny, even if I didn’t know what my career would be I always knew it would involve a stage. I did drama at school and absolutely loved it and was inspired by my teachers. I loved performing, I loved reading plays, discovering new playwrights. I loved hearing about different methods of acting, learning about different theatre practioners. The theatre space is something I take very seriously, and I feel very inspired by it. I am of the opinion that when a performer walks onto a stage, and the audience are there ready, the space changes. It becomes a completely different world, and so when I was going to a lot of concerts when I was a teenager, I was completely enamoured by the quasi-mystical front men and women crashing onto the stage. Transforming the place which previously could have been a dank club or even a nice big theatre venue. But it becomes this other thing. So, when it comes to performing it isn’t as simple as getting up there and singing. You are larger than life when you are up there. It is not real life. That’s what theatre is to me. I completely understand a more realistic, naturalistic approach, but for me it’s about bringing something that isn’t commonly seen in the real world and putting that on the stage. That’s the beating heart of it for me.

I am an absolute perfectionist, so the idea of walking on to the stage and not giving it my all is not on, that’s never going to happen. I think the band and I are all of the same opinion that we would never dial it in. We want to feel in it, and I do everything I can to put myself in that position. In terms of being highly conscious of the meanings of the words as I sing them, I am bringing the memories that inspired them to the forefront. It’s something I care so deeply about, and I do live those songs on stage, and sometimes that’s hard. Sometimes it’s not pleasant and in fact with this new album I am already slightly trepidatious about these songs on stage because I know what kind of person I might need to be again or channel singing them. When I am on stage there is absolutely nowhere else I would rather be. When it comes to extensive touring, when it comes to making music, recording, promotion, interviews, and things, there are lots of aspects that can be tiring, tricky or demanding, but when I am on stage there is absolutely nowhere that you could take me too that I would prefer to be. Its where it happens and it’s the most important part of what I do. Likely up there with recording, but recording is a whole other kettle of fish. It satisfies me a great deal to hear if people think the live show is strong. Because I would prefer the live show to be strong over anything else.

The second time I saw you live was at Saint Luke’s in Glasgow. When you came on stage, what is relatively small stage in some ways seemed to completely expand, and you were using all the different spaces available.

Thank you I am so glad, I enjoyed that show a great deal, it was a good one. You are exactly right the stage does expand. When I would go to the theatre when I was a kid, it was the safety curtain coming up, thinking about the actors in the wings, but then when the curtain comes up and the actors are on the stage, they are not actors, there is no one in the wings, there are no wings, that’s not what this is. I love that suspension, its absolute magic. I am so fortunate to be involved in it, it’s the best.

If someone was approaching your music for the first time, what song of yours would you suggest as a good jumping in point and why?

That’s a very good question. The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973. If I had to choose one song that seemed to become the song. I’m glad it was that one. It’s one of the few that I have written, where I’m happy with the placement of every single word in it, every vocal moment, I love the music. The band and I are joint in the fact that we are all very proud of that song. It was everything I wanted the song to be. The idea that a song like that could become in anyway modestly popular, if I could have chosen a song for that to happen to, I am glad it was that one. Because it is certainly odd, it’s so curious, and yet it’s for everyone…it’s a peculiar song. I am very happy with it.

That said, I think there are other songs that are special to me, they speak to me a little more. I always liked the song Calls to Tiree. When I wrote that song it felt like I was breaking new ground lyrically and I was testing myself and testing the limits of what one of my songs could be. Bob Dylan is a perfect example of doing that at various points in his career, his breaking out of the mould he himself made, and Calls to Tiree felt a bit like that. But I do think that Mauritian Badminton has lots of things in it…there is a comic quality to it, and there is pathos in there as well, and there is a certain yearning and yet there is a brashness, a certain kind of confidence exuding from it too. If you were to say there were say five or six composite parts that make up a short song, it has each of them in equal measure. So, in that sense it is a good representation. Honestly it probably is the song I would pick.

It’s interesting you say that, as my partner came along with me to the Saint Luke’s show, and that’s the song she knew instantly when you played it, repeating back some of the lines.

Aw great, please tell her thank you.

I read that you studied international relations at the University of St Andrews, and in an increasing turbulent world, I wondered what your thoughts might be about art/music reflecting or offering commentary on the world around us?

I don’t think anyone would listen to my music and say it is overtly political, and that’s because there is a certain definition of political, we think of when we think about political music. To go back to Bob Dylan again, he wrote protest songs, and then when he stopped writing what other people would term to be protest songs, he was pilloried for it. It sounded like he was being facetious when he said they are all protest songs. Now I am not trying to claim that my music is overtly political in any sense, and it’s not something that I try to shoehorn into my music. That said if people listen to my music I would be surprised if they got my politics wrong. Do you know what I mean, I sort of feel that it’s not political music, but it’s not politically oblivious music either. Singing a line like “Who buys a jacket from a gunmaker” [from the song Money]. I didn’t put that in and think right here we go, I am going to stick it to the elites here, but I suppose that’s what I was doing. I don’t think you need to use the language of politics to be political. My music isn’t political, but I am certainly not frightened if my words sum something up about my political leanings. I’m not scared of that at all.

I think art is political, any decent art is really. Music because it has words, there is a certain expectation from a political song, whereas you wouldn’t necessarily find the same with a political oil on canvas. I often think of Salvador Dali, one of his paintings, Premonition of Civil War. An incredible painting, he’s titled it that so you know, but if you were looking at it you might not necessarily get that from it. I am not necessarily a political songwriter, but I am certainly not trying to hide my political leanings from my music or take them out of the music.