MAY 2004: "RETROSPECT" - A double CD of collected songs from 1982 - 2002, for single CD price. Containing Goanna and Shane Howard recordings, including many that have been unavailable for many years. Includes 24 page colour booklet and three previously unreleased recordings.
	AUGUST 2004: "Howard's eighth solo album is the work of a master songwriter at his peak. " . .Tony Hillier ANOTHER COUNTRY - A new studio album. Recorded with the band that had everyone talking at the Port Fairy Folk Festival. Produced by Phil Butson and Shane. ANOTHER COUNTRY is the eighth solo album for the Australian singer/ songwriter. Recorded in his home studio in the wilds of Southwest Victoria, this new band album takes us deep into the Australian landscape on a trance-like musical journey spanning the lifetime of Howard's work, An uplifting album of great songs and deep folk and country soul grooves, this is Howard's most stunning solo album to date. It rocks, rolls, is full of light and laughter as well as deep humanity and tender folk and country moments. A masterwork by one of Australia's most enduring independent singer songwriters. His new songs are as vital today as the GOANNA classics SOLID ROCK and RAZOR'S EDGE were 20 years ago. Read the review by Tony Hillier/Rhythms Magazine "Paul Kelly excepted, no contemporary singer-songwriter has penned so many genuinely great songs or made a more enduring impact on the domestic music scene." " As environmentally and politically aware as they are, they are the work of a poet rather than an activist - songs imbued with an inherent sense of humanity and spirituality as well as superior musicality." ...Tony Hillier
	NOW AVAILABLE: "SPIRIT OF PLACE" - GOANNA's classic album, 'SPIRIT of PLACE' has been digitally re-mastered from the original tapes by Don Bartley, (who mastered the original album in 1982), and re-released by Warners. Compiled and edited and overseen by Shane, the album includes 6 bonus tracks, including 'Let The Franklin Flow', which was only ever released as a vinyl single, and several previously unreleased Goanna tracks. The artwork has all been lovingly re- done and includes liner notes by Billy Pinnell and Shane. A collectors edition of a legendary album.
	TROY CASSAR DALEY 'FACTORY MAN' Australian country music legend, Troy Casser Daley released his album "BORROWED & BLUE", in May 2004, which featured the Shane Howard song 'Factory Man', as the first single. 'Factory Man' was one of the songs from the legendary album, 'Spirit of Place'. Troy's version features Shane on harmonies. Shane also sings harmonies on the old Elizabeth Carter song that Willie Nelson recorded some years ago, "River Boy". Read More... www.nucountry.com.au/articles/diary/april2004/280404_troy.htm

Media Stories:

Media Release June 2006 - 2songmen

Shane Howard & Neil Murray, Together in concert on tour nationally - August 2006

Read the full Media Realease

Shane Howard is Artist of the Year

Shane Howard has been proclaimed 2005 “Artist of the Year” by the Port Fairy Folk Festival.

Howard has been awarded for his outstanding contribution to songwriting and to Australian and indigenous music for almost 30 years.

“Shane Howard bridges the land between poet and song-writer; between prophet and singer; even between white fellas and indigenous artists,” said Jamie McKew, Festival Director in announcing the award.

-Port Fairy Folk Festival

Top duo link up for a few crowd-pleasers

THE overflowing audience that witnessed Australian country star Troy Cassar-Daley's Saturday afternoon performance got a welcome bonus.

Cassar-Daley was joined on stage by one of his heroes and Port Fairy Folk Festival Artist Of The Year Shane Howard for renditions of Willie Nelson's  Riverboy and Howard's own Factory Man.

-The Standard

Maintaining his solid ground

Celtic roots are a key to Port Fairy's artist of the year, writes Andra Jackson.

Songwriter Shane Howard considers the way a song can take on a life of its own to be as "mystical as ever . . . you just never know where songs end up".

Three decades after he wrote what has become a landmark recording in Australian rock, Goanna's Solid Rock, there is an American Indian recording of it.

-The Age

The rebel voice
December 2, 2004

Passionate and personal affinity has drawn one singer-songwriter to an event of historic importance, writes Liz Gooch.

Shane Howard was only 18 when he wrote his first song about the Eureka Stockade, but his passion for the event began long before then. He remembers looking at picture books about Australian history when he was at school. There were stories about explorers such as Burke and Wills, but a book about Eureka really captured his attention.

Still searching for the spirit of place
July 3, 2004

 

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/06/30/1088488018927.html

Singer-songwriter Shane Howard looks back over his career and to the future, writes Warwick McFadyen.

Shane Howard is back on the road in September with a new album and retrospective collection.

Picture: Simon O'Dwyer

'They're all little rooms in a house."

The speaker and builder of this house is Shane Howard. The rooms are his songs. Open a door and you enter a part of his life.

Howard is speaking about his recently released double-CD Retrospect 1982-2002 . After two decades in the music business, Howard feels the compilation serves as a "marker" to his career, both for himself and the audience.

For someone who rarely looks back on his work, selecting the songs has been an "interesting and strange process". In the self-examination, some songs came back as a "little painful and some joyful". In the looking back, Howard says, two aspects came to the fore: musically among the good moments, there was also "plenty to cringe at"; and second, the framing of a man's spiritual world.

"From a lyrical point of view," Howard says, "you can see your moral universe that you've built and you can hope there's some sort of consistency there."

It speaks to the songwriter's analytical nature that he offers up this reflection. It isn't only emotion that goes into the songs, but history and experience, both his and that of other people's.

Retrospect includes Let the Franklin Flow , from 1983, which was written in protest at the proposed damming of the Franklin River. The song was only ever released as a single, but here it has a time and a place. A belonging. It follows Solid Rock and Razor's Edge , when Goanna were in the mainstream in the early '80s. In a remastered CD of Spirit of Place, Let the Franklin Flow is a bonus track. After the boom came the bust. The band broke up, Howard went bush, literally and metaphorically. He and corporate music parted company.

Two decades later, a new Howard album, Another Country , is due for release. It is self-financed and is distributed by independent company Metropolitan Groove Merchants. After the past few albums exploring his Irish ancestry, Another Country returns to the wider landscape of his country. The trouble is, he doesn't like what he sees. "We're living in anAustralia I don't recognise any more," he says. "The country I grew up in, the country I love, never invaded countries pre-emptively. I thought it was a nation egalitarian in nature - it's not any more. So many values have been squandered by this country.

"I remember Paul Keating saying years ago that the prime minister is responsible for the moral health of the country . . . and I think we're seeing the truth of that. John Howard is squandering the moral health of the nation incrementally.

"But, in a funny way in the midst of everything, I'm more optimistic than ever before. The Africans have a saying about life,that the cycle leads from innocence to experience to chosen innocence. I feel like I'm entering the era of chosen innocence."

The album also explores the inner landscape; of what it means to be human. The opening track, Coopers Creek , sets the scene when Howard sings "let's go deeper into the soul".

"Dad had a major stroke a year ago - he's 88 this year - and still going," Howard says. "There's been time to prepare forthe finality of a life, as prepared as you think you are, but when something major happens, you realise how unprepared you are.

"It made me think about mortality, love, family and values."

The cold shadow of death floated into his dreams about four months ago while he was sleeping. It woke him with a start, and gave an insight into what lies ahead. "I remember waking up about four months ago in the middle of the night and realising, 'It comes to an end'. I mean, we know that, but it was like a moment of revelation.

 

"But in many ways it's a joyful thing to get to this age (He's 50 in January). There's a lot of friends who didn't."

 

Howard looks to his father as a light by which to lead his life. "My father gave me a strong view of a good life fulfilled," he says. "He's a very simple and honest man."

The relationship between father and son, man and God and humanity is examined in the song Abraham on Another Country . Howard was fascinated with the story of a father, the love of God and son and which loyalty would win out and why. To Howard, love of a son would triumph over obedience to God. "There's a humanism that goes beyond religion," he says.

 

Another Country takes Howard back into a band setting and pairs him up again with longtime collaborator, guitarist Phil
Butson.

 

"When I listen back to Retrospect , I've been struck by the fact that all the beautiful guitar lines are Phil's and how connected he was to what I've done."

With a new batch of songs coming into being, Howard persuaded Butson to abandon the recording console for a while and bring his guitar down to the "Killarney shed", Howard's name for his home recording studio near Port Fairy. "Thealbum just grew from there," he says.

That he has been able to keep nurturing a career in music, he puts down, in part, to good fortune. The Irish singer Mary Black has recorded many of his songs and taken him on tour through Europe, Ireland and the US. "I owe my creative existence to Mary Black and other artists, just through the flow of royalties through the leaner years," he says. "If you're an obscure artist in America, you can still make a living, whereas if you're an obscure artist in this country, you better get another job."

Still, would Howard live in another country when the life of this one flows through his art? It's impossible to think of him moving his house of song.

 

Sweet and Dangerous Music: Soundtrack For A Secret Country

By Aziz Choudry, ZNET Commentary, November 07, 2002

Music has moved many of us to act, and inspires us in our work for justice and liberation. Close friends and comrades tell of how music has helped form, frame and inflame their political consciousness and hunger for justice. While much of the world is being colonised and doped up with formularized vacuous corporate pop/pap, music and the other arts still communicate with our hearts, minds and spirits, to sustain, nourish and move people in ways that articles, books and speeches perhaps donŐt.

Read the full article.

 

Photos from the HOLLAND/BELGIUM TOUR with Mary Black, OCT. 2003

Thanks to Mark Von Setten for these photos

Howard to join Black on US tour

By Andrew Brasier, Irish Echo, February 14 - 27 2002, p12

Australian singer/songwriter Shane Howard is set to join popular Irish vocalist Mary Black on a tour of the United States.
Howard, who has written several songs for the Irish performer, is scheduled to appear on stage with Black as she and her entourage embark on a three-week national tour beginning this week.
Black and Howard are due to perform at venues in cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Savannah.

Read the full article.

 

View a slideshow of Shane's perfomance in the Spiegeltent in Melbourne and listen to a little of 'Farewell Dan & Edward Kelly'.

On solid ground

By Warwick McFadyen, The Age, Sunday 4 November 2001

"It's the simple things that matter.

The wild black swans are drifting by, their quiet dignity unruffled by the boisterous southerly buffeting the dunes, sweeping across the long grass and roughing up the surface water of the lagoon. The swans, about a dozen of them, are a stone's throw away; the ocean just beyond them. Shane Howard is looking out over his backyard. "I'm the king of the swamp," he laughs, and takes another sip of tea."

 

'In the spirit of reconciliation'

By Lara O'Toole, The Standard (Warrnambool, Victoria), 9 March 1998 

"The Imagine Reconciliation concert was a tear jerking performance hosted by Port Fairy Artist of the Year Margaret RoadKnight and Catholic priest and legal adviser to Aboriginal communities Father Frank Brennan. It featured south-west musicians Shane and Marcia Howard, Richard Frankland, Tiddas and Andy Alberts as well as Ted Egan, Nigali Crawford and Frank Yamma."

Read the full article.