We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bryan Howell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bryan below.
Bryan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
The way I “learned” this craft–if anyone really truly learns it, or just gets at a stage where they have it down and hopefully continue to hone it with each song and performance–was by repetition mixed with trial and error. The first time I performed in front of an audience, I got so nervous that my leg was twitching up and down involuntarily, and my hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t properly play the guitar parts I myself had come up with. As I played more shows, I loosened up and realized I was having….a LOT of fun. So I got the courage to look at the audience as I played, and then I got the courage to start moving around onstage. Then one night, it was like suddenly it was like the stage was home. I was moving around on it uninhibited.
I don’t think there is any way to speed up that learning and growth process. There is a period of time where you start to get “used” to being onstage, but there is no shortcut for experience. You have to keep writing songs, keep playing them live, keep going in the studio to track them. Hopefully each time you are improving, feeling more in your comfort zone, which also keeps expanding in scope, and then you can play and express yourself without reservation or fear. That becomes an ideal plateau, where what you want to play and sing just streams out without a filter or any limitation imposed by you from a technical or mental obstacle.
The most essential skill is the element of perseverance. You must accept you will fail, horribly, when you least expect it, but you get back up and do it again with a smile on your face. One show I played, I did this massive jump off a drum riser, and when I landed, I tripped over my own guitar cord and fell onstage, taking the mic stand down with me. The rest of the band were so stunned and thrown off that they stopped playing. The audience just stood there, frozen, looking at me. But I got up and put things back in place with a smile, and then I kept singing and playing, like the dead stop and the mess I made was all an element of the show. Now, soon after that show I got a wireless unit for my guitar so when I move across stage, my cord doesn’t clothesline half the band or something. But the point is to smile when you fall down, then pick yourself up and learn to do it better next time.
Bryan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m originally from upstate New York. I started playing guitar in bands, and then eased further and further from one side of the stage, as the lead guitarist, to the center with the mic as a songwriter as well. A few years ago I made the move from New York to Nashville where I reside now.
The music I make is rock and roll, There’s a bit of hot-rodded country twang, roots rock and alternative rock influences, but at the end of the day what comes out of all that is rock and roll.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Well, I love rock and roll and all the American music that goes into it, and I feel like I’m not the only one. I feel starved for it, and I want to hear it, so I’ll make some. Just honest, loud songs that are played from the heart for all it’s worth, by a group of real people onstage or in a room at the same time. I’m just trying to make some passionate, raw rock and roll that gets in your soul, and you can lean on in good or tough times like I did.
At the same time, I feel we’re in a really divisive stage of human history, and we need a sense of community to return that is missing. It’s becoming clearer and clearer now that social media has only served to make people antisocial, angry and isolated. A few tech companies have gotten super rich exploiting human insecurities and foibles, and dividing us with algorithms and using all our own data against us. But I see making music with other people, and the community and unity aspect of that, as going a bit in the opposite direction in a positive and meaningful way. So in that, I hope that this nudges a few other people to do that in their own fields or whatever, so the pendulum can swing back.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
That just because it hasn’t been linear or constantly ascending at all times, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a huge amount of stuff behind the scenes that needed to be put together. Writing songs takes time, a lot of time, and working in the studio and recording is a long process unto itself. Then there are angles of promo and marketing, mixing and release strategy, booking tour dates and all manner of things like that, which need to be lined up before things go in motion.
So the end result is that it may seem like artists have “disappeared” or are kind of inactive, when the opposite is true. You can be really working hard, and navigating setting up opportunities, or weighing what roads to go down. But that time out of the spotlight isn’t dormancy at all, it’s getting things polished for the next big event. Non-creatives a lot of times don’t see that the end result is just the tip of that iceberg.
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Andrew Hutt, Devon Lancaster, Phil Silverberg