Meet Aaron Howard

Today we’d like to introduce you to Aaron Howard.

Aaron, before we jump into specific questions about your work, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I grew up in a rural Montana town of less than a thousand people. My Dad played the ‘60s and ‘70s folk songs from the likes of Paul Simon, Kris Kristofferson, and Bob Dylan. Even though it was kind of uncool at the time, the music my Dad played moved me deeply and defined the direction of my life. I became obsessed with the power of music and started spending hours a day learning to play the violin. It was serious from the beginning. I skipped important events and time with friends to practice.

For the first couple of years, as I started to play violin obsessively, I always felt like something was missing. I didn’t want to sing initially, because my dad sang and – well – singing was for dads. But I wanted to reach people’s emotions in a really deep way, and learning the compositions of other people via classical violin never felt like quite enough to do that in the way I craved. The problem was that I didn’t grow up with any examples of great records because I wasn’t allowed to listen to rock n’ roll. My religion was against any music with a beat. It was a serious tenet of my faith, and it kept me in line for a long time.

When I finally got old and rebellious enough to stray from the straight and narrow, I discovered rock ’n roll. Everything changed. There was something about a three-minute song that made sense of my life in a way nothing had before. It was like the world had gone from black and white to color. I had discovered who I was. Songwriting became the center of my world. I dove into the music of the radio artists of the late nineties (Matchbox Twenty, Alanis Morissette, Third Eye Blind, Foo Fighters, Lifehouse, etc.) and learned everything I could from them about writing my own songs. By the end of high school, I had released three collections of original songs – 2 EPs and a full-length album.

I had also started to excel as a violinist by then, and I appeared to have a real future there. That complicated things, because everyone who’s opinion mattered to me, expected me to study violin in college. Instead, I decided that I was going to forego higher education in favor of taking my first handful of terrible songs on the road. That wasn’t a popular decision, and based on the quality of work I was capable of at the time, it was also an insane decision. But I’m so glad I made it. It started the long and winding road that led me to being a full-time musician.

The next seven years were wonderful and painful all at once. After a lot of bouncing around the country, crushed dreams, and empty shows, I ended up here in Phoenix, playing hotels and wine bars while writing songs on the side. It was an apprenticeship of sorts. I learned to be an artist during those years. I made several records that ended up being more meaningful in terms of experience than having something to say. I apprenticed in a studio. I produced a couple of records for other artists. I lived in Chicago and had a short stint street-performing on Michigan Avenue for a living. I composed music for two short films and a shoe commercial. I wrote well over a hundred songs. Somewhere in all the chaos of those years, I had enough failure, love, pain, skill development and life experience to come up with a sound that brought my work to life in a different way. Audiences started to respond.

From there, I started touring. Most of the shows I played on the road were infinitely more fulfilling than anything I had done before. They were listening rooms. People were there for music, and for the first time, I got to really experience what it felt like to have an impact on people with MY music. The songs I’d poured my soul into actually had an outlet to be heard. That changed everything. I’m thrilled to have the privilege of doing what I love for a living.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I don’t know if there’s any such thing as a smooth road. The broad strokes of my story include a seven-year period of floundering around the country trying to make something work. Even for me, it’s easy to read that and think: “it all worked out.” To some degree, that’s true. But actually living through those years was another thing entirely.

A lot of people say music is a tough industry to be a part of. I don’t think it really is. I think any industry would be tough for someone who started trying to knock on locked doors before they’d had any real education or skill development. I think people see music and art differently than any other profession. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, you’re expected to put in more than a decade of higher education and residency before it starts to pay off. Why would it be any different for music and art? That was really the core problem of my early career, as it is for a lot of artists.

I overestimated the quality of my work. I got rejected a LOT. I attempted to tour with records that weren’t worth touring. I put effort into promotion when the most common response my work got was a shrug. The public isn’t kind to mediocre work. But when you pour your heart and soul into something, you don’t really want to look at it objectively and ask: “does this work? Does this stand up when played against the records I choose to listen to?”

In the early days, I worked construction, painted, and was a night janitor at a school. I ate a lot of ramen and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I lived on the couch at a friend’s house for a year for $150 a month so that I could spend every spare dollar on a recording. Whenever I finished a record that had nearly cost me my sanity to make, I would think, “This is the one! I’m finally going to get somewhere with this!” Six months later, I would be just objective enough to realize it wasn’t even close to the quality I needed to thrive, and I would restart the process. Throw in a few moves across the country to try to “find myself”, and it was a tough series of years.

Additional objectivity changed everything. The more aware I was of the failings of my work as I was working on it, the more dedicated I became to shoring up those weaknesses. Once I could see a major project as a part of my schooling in art, I became much more patient. I’m still trying to shore up weaknesses in my work, but it’s a lot more fun now, and it’s become my job, which is its own kind of validation.

Can you give our readers some background on your music?
I’m a performing songwriter and music producer. As a writer, I lean toward folky pop music. My specialty is emotional impact. The thing I value most about songwriting is that I can talk about something deeply personal in a song, and it can immediately connect to someone else’s story. There’s something about being able to reach across space to someone I don’t even know and say with a song: “Hey. I feel you. I’ve been there. You’re not alone.” If the song is good enough, the listener believes that.

As a music producer, I simply try to serve the song when we’re recording and mixing. It’s always my hope that we end up with something special that makes the song better than it was with just a guitar/vocal. I’m an old school producer to some degree, meaning that my role is to bring musicians and parts together to build a song that’s already written. The modern definition of the producer has morphed into basically beat-makers. Most modern producers – especially in pop music – are integral to the songwriting, because they’re building the entire track before the melody or words are written. I have enormous respect for those folks, but that’s not what I do. What I do is more like arranging and recording a song so that it comes out sounding like a record.

I’m really proud of the records I’m making for myself and others at this stage, and I can’t wait to share the last two years of deep creativity. And I’m so stoked to play this music in listening rooms and share it with people across the country.

Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
This is an overwhelming question because it deserves more words than all the other questions combined. I am standing on the shoulders of giants. I don’t want to get into specific people, because if I put down one name, I’d need to put down hundreds. Let me just say that without the support, encouragement, and guidance of friends, family, mentors, and partners, I wouldn’t still be doing this. I pounded my fists against hundreds of locked doors, and the few that opened were due to people who believed in me before I was worth believing in. I can think of a dozen conversations that pulled me back from the brink of quitting in the early years. Every bar owner whoever hired me, every house concert host, every venue person who took a chance on someone who wasn’t really ready to play their venue, every listener, every supporter on the internet who I’ve never met, everyone who ever came to a show… they create a cumulative energy that I couldn’t live without. I can only do this at all because of other people.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://aaronhowardmusic.com
• Email: aaronhowardmusic@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aaronhowardmusic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AaronHowardMusic/
• Other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=KOCMSqZCQCE

Image Credit:
Brooke Oliphant
Hunter D’Antuono
Kacie Quesenberry
Sarah Price
Jesse Barney

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