Commissions 2008-2009

Over the last few months I have been putting some free music on this blog as part of a collection of songs entitled Commissions 2008-2009.

The songs include one of the first Calamateur songs ever released, a remix for the folk/indie legend Iain Morrison, a children’s song about the hidden wonders of precipitation(!), an ambient soundscape inspired by one of the streets in Inverness city centre, a soundtrack and, lastly, a hymn!

There are six songs in all and you can now download them as one large file, with artwork included, by clicking here:

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Or you can download them individually here (just right-click and choose ‘Save Link As’ to download):

1. Calamateur – Inhabit
2. Iain Morrison – Folklore & Distant Creed (Calamateur remix)
3. Andrew Howie & Cauldeen Primary – The Bad Weather Song
4. Calamateur – Baron Taylor Street
5. Calamateur – The Other Side of Air
6. Andrew Howie – Love Come Down

You can read the stories behind each song by clicking here.

Hope you enjoy the music – if you like you can send a donation my way here.

Thanks for reading!

Revenge / Forgiveness

Earlier this year Mark Linkous (of one of my all-time favourite bands Sparklehorse) and Dangermouse (not the one who’s the greatest secret agent in the world) teamed up to make the album Dark Night of the Soul, which also featured guest vocalists Wayne Coyne (The Flaming Lips), Nina Persson (The Cardigans, A Camp) & Suzanne Vega among others.

It’s a great album which, due to an ongoing legal disute between Dangermouse and EMI, has unfortunately still not been officially released. If you look hard enough online though you’ll find it

The lyrics of the first song on the album ‘Revenge’ are incredible. I don’t know if they were written by Mark Linkous, Dangermouse or Wayne Coyne (who sings it) but they beautifully articulate how revenge and un-forgiveness can eat away at us if left unchecked:

Revenge

Pain
I guess it’s a matter of sensation
But somehow
You have ways of avoiding it all

In my mind
I have shot you and stabbed you through your heart
I just didn’t understand
The ricochet is the second part

Cause you can’t hide
What you intend
It glows in the dark
Once you’ve sought
The path of revenge
There’s no way to stop
And the more I try to hurt you
The more that it hurts me

Strange
It seems like a character mutation
Though I have all the means
of bringing you fuckers down
I can’t make myself
To destroy upon command
Somehow forgiveness
lets the evil make a loss

No you can’t hide
What you intend
It glows in the dark
Once we become
The thing we dread
There’s no way to stop
And the more I try to hurt you
The more it backfires
The more it backfires
The more that it backfires

Limited Edition Calamateur T-Shirts

I’ve had a limited run of Calamateur T-Shirts made which you can buy now from my shop.

Here’s the design (by the great Moose77) a little bit more up close:

The lyrics ‘I need you to follow me home’ are taken from the song ‘I Can Hear Her Breathing‘ which is on my free album ‘Jesus is for Losers‘.

The T-shirts are £15.

To be honest, they’re a little bit more expensive than I was hoping but that’s mainly because I decided to go down the Fair Trade route -

The T-shirts are all made from Fair Trade certified cotton – you can read more about this on the supplier’s website here.

And you can buy the Calamateur T-shirts here.

Luck

I just read this great quote by Chris Difford (formerly of Squeeze) from an article in M magazine about a songwriting retreat he runs.

“Songwriting can be exciting and fun, but there’s a heap of luck involved in this art of ours.

For me, I’m lucky because of my history with Squeeze and co-writes with Elton and others. But for most up and coming writers, the luck is still to be revealed. We are like those balls hovering in the air above the lottery machine on TV; we might fall lucky, we might not.

The love is there and so is the greatness, but that final piece of luck eludes most of us. But this is what we do, so we soldier on.”

Greenbelt 09: Performance Cafe gig

I was asked to play in the Performance Cafe at Greenbelt this year. I remembered the cafe from when I was last at Greenbelt but didn’t realise how much it had grown in size since then – not something that helped my nerves before going on…

I hugely enjoyed playing the gig and I couldn’t have hoped for a better atmosphere, crowd or response.

Thanks to everyone who came to hear me play and to Ed Richmond and Harvey Jessop for making it happen.

Steve Lawson was kind enough to take some photos. Here are some of them:

And here’s another one I found taken by Helen O’Sullivan:

And another by jackharrybill:

As you can see I was joined by my good friend Mark Hilditch on keyboards. He flew down earlier that day and flew back the next. I’m incredibly grateful he made the effort to be there, as not only does he add so much more to the songs, it’s also a lot more fun having someone else on stage with you.

The morning after the show Steve Lawson also recorded a short interview with me for Audioboo which you can hear here:

Greenbelt ‘09: Perfect Moment

On Saturday morning at Greenbelt I was filmed playing ‘Perfect Moment’ for the Greenbelt website.

Here it is:

Or you can watch it on Vimeo.

Thanks to Steve and Rachel for making it happen.

Greenbelt ‘09: Highlights

I’ve just returned home from Greenbelt – a festival of music, art, faith, love, creativity & justice that takes place every year, of which the last few it’s home has been Cheltenham Racecourse.

A recent blog post by Steve Lawson sums up why Greenbelt is so great – have a read here.

Highlights for me this year were catching up with old friends, hearing Dave Tomlinson and Jenny McIntosh talking about ‘So What the Hell Should We Believe?’:

the Sunday morning worship service, ‘Take an Olive Seed’, which focused on the stories of the people living in the land called holy – especially the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories:

having my first cup of chai tea (and another one not long after) at the Tiny Tea Tent:

seeing Miriam Jones at the Performance Cafe:

and having a beer in the Jesus Arms:

(thanks to Jackie for this pic)

I was asked to play this year in the Performance Cafe on the Saturday night – I’ll write about that, plus the other gigs I ended up playing, in my next few posts…..

Commissions 6: Love Come Down

Calamateur – Love_Come_Down.mp3

(This track is the 6th from a new collection of songs entitled Commissions 2008-2009. The 1st one is here, the 2nd here, the 3rd here, the 4th here, the 5th here.)

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Earlier this year I was asked to write and record a song for a DVD being made by Blythswood Care.

The DVD will be shown in churches around Scotland (and possibly beyond) as part of their Shoebox Appeal ‘09 in which people are asked to fill an empty shoebox with items such as toiletries, clothes, stationery and sweets for someone in need in Eastern Europe, India or Pakistan.

Last year 132,000 shoeboxes were sent out, bringing the total since the appeal began in 1993 to 1,122,000.

The song I wrote for the short film (which you can watch above) is called ‘Love Come Down‘.

I also recorded another song, ‘Oh Holy Night’, sung by Heather Jamieson, which is for an alternate version of the DVD to be shown nearer Christmas time. You can see it here.

The super-talented Mark Hilditch played keyboards on both songs.

You can find out more about Blythswood’s Shoebox Appeal here.

Collaborators 6: Richard Vernon and Gareth Saunders

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing a series of posts on people I’ve recently worked with, with particular reference to my Jesus is for Losers album.

So far, we’ve had:

Steve Lawson (bassist, improviser, teacher, writer)
Mark Hilditch (keyboard player, mad cyclist)
Iain Hutchison (engineer, producer, musician)
DUFI (photography, graphic design, spray paint)
and Phil Moir (drummer)

This is my final post in the series and there’s another couple of people I want to mention:

Firstly, my good friend Richard Vernon, who listens to my music before anyone else and tells me if it’s crap or not.

He also writes my press releases, including the ones for JIFL and the new album by my other band, The Trufflehunters.

Richard has also written some great articles for Sojourners magazine, his most recent being here.

So, if you need a good bio or press release written, get in touch with him here.

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And lastly, Gareth Saunders, who has helped me on countless occasions with web design problems, computing issues and basically any time I wanted to punch my PC monitor in frustration.

Gareth is an Assistant Information Architect / Web Manager at the University of St.Andrews and is also a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church. I don’t think many people can say that.

He helped me when I was designing my JIFL website (as well as other websites I’ve cobbled together over the years) and made it look much better than it would have done otherwise. He is a very clever and a very generous man.

You can read his blog here and follow him on Twitter here.

The Trufflehunters – album review

Our local arts mag, the ICA, have reviewed my other band’s new album.

Here it is:

The Trufflehunters – Signs of Life

“More admirable ambition. Local trio of singer Shona MacDonald, painter Allan MacDonald and Calamateur’s Andrew Howie have got together to make a richly textured thing of some beauty, inspired by a combination of Highlands folk, plain song, chant and the strict Presbyterian tradition of unaccompanied psalm singing.

If you saw Phil Cunningham’s documentary on the history of religious song you’ll recognise some of the roots of what’s going on here, but it’s transformed into a genuinely transcendent whole. Check out thetrufflehunters.co.uk for more.”

You can hear some tracks from the album here.

You can buy the CD directly from us here or from CDBaby here.

Or you can download it from itunes here.