Greg Howe: Guitar Muse interview


A really excellent interview posted on guitar muse... I recommend you check it out... here's just a snippet.

Give me an example of a song where you compromised and fulfilled your compositional expectations for yourself, and your audience.

A song like “Child’s Play” is a good example of something that sounds really catchy and could appeal to a lot of people who aren’t necessarily guitar aficionados, but at the same time delivers enough for those people who are guitar aficionados that they’re satisfied. There are a number of songs on the Five album that do that as well.

Even on Introspection, “Jump Start” is appealing to a lot of people who aren’t necessarily guitar fanatics. There’s a way to do it, it just requires getting into the mindset of a listener who’s not engulfed in guitar. That’s sometimes difficult for musicians to do, particularly when we start becoming advanced and we start wanting to meet certain challenges of ourselves. I feel blessed in the sense that I’ve have had so many albums. I’ve been able to express myself in a rather self-indulgent manner. I’ve gotten all of that out of my system. Whatever I’ve needed to prove to myself in the past, I’ve done. Now it’s a lot easier for me to not be operating from the standpoint of having to prove anything.

Are you a slow writer?

Not necessarily. As a matter of fact I feel like I have a lot of ideas all the time. If anything it’s just finding the time to organize my thoughts and get them into some kind of cohesive presentation. I don’t really ever run out of ideas, so I feel good about that.

The Extraction CD was different for me in the sense that it was the album where I wanted to push my own limits of my harmony knowledge as far as I could. There was a lot of thought that went into the compositions. There were a lot of counter melodies and chromatic lines that would serve as foundations for re-harmonization. A lot of thought went into that album and it was a good learning experience for me because I got to see that in the end, there are a lot of songs that I’d written that I put no thought into that I like a lot more, than other songs that I had put a lot of thought into.

These days I’m not a slow writer. I would consider myself fairly prolific in the sense that I always have ideas. Usually I can’t have enough time to record the stuff I hear in my head. more

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