Sam Griffiths is The Howl & The Hum, a solo effort that started as a band some ten years ago in Yorkshire. An Essex native, he moved to the North to study English at York University. Two acclaimed records later, he moved down to London. A brilliant songwriter, he creates gorgeous songs for himself and others.

How do you like to define yourself these days? Is The Howl and the Hum still the main thing?

Yeah, it's definitely my main thing. It's how I define myself, I guess. I think I've tried both through effort and a lack of effort to not be a songwriter, whether that be through having absolutely no ideas, and losing all faith in being a musician in the music industry, to just not having the time for it. And I always just end up sort of crawling back on my hands and knees back to songwriting. 'cause it's kind of the only way I can make sense of the world.

So it's less even a career these days, it's almost like a weird little philosophy. If things happen to me, I have to write songs or dumb little poems that eventually turn into songs about those events. So these days it's just an existence really.

So yeah, I definitely feel most like a songwriter. I perform less, which is a shame. But that was one of my New Year’s resolutions. So I'm going to perform more this year and in following years because I really miss that. I really miss being a show off and being like a dumb kid in front of a microphone.

And I find performing really invigorating. It's really exciting and I always feel better after doing it. So that's one thing that I want to do more for sure.

It is a different thing. I remember you being a terrific performer so I’m glad there will be more of that. Is the project still a band or is it mostly your solo thing with some regular musicians?

That's a good question. Album one was definitely a four piece band. Then things sort of disintegrated over COVID, but I wanted to keep things going 'cause I needed sort of a project, and it felt right to keep the same name.

But these days? I'm in my studio now and I've been writing all day with Arun, our guitar player, who's been our guitar player for the last couple of years. I do a lot of writing with my friend Matthew, who's the sax player in my band. And when we all band practice, it's been five of us for the last sort of couple of years almost. Is that right? Wow. So that feels quite solid. Like we've had one solid lineup for the last two years, which feels great. Everyone sort of feels a part of the band and stuff.

But it is and always has been, not to sound too egotistical, but I've been the songwriter. I've been the one who brings the songs in and then everything gets built up from there. So it's probably like a solo project that has a full band element. But a lot of the new stuff that I've been writing is a little bit folk, so some of it is feeling a little bit more stripped down. Who knows how that music will be released.

At the moment I haven't quite made the decision on it, 'cause it might be a new Howl & the Hum record. It might be an EP or it might be a solo record or something under a different name. 'cause there's a few songs with a very slightly different vibe, which I'm really excited about. It's still me at the core of it, but it'll probably have some different kind of identity attached to it.

Lovely, looking forward to it! How do you pay the rent these days?

I got a job teaching. I teach guitar in a school in North London, which I love very much. So yeah, I'm down here now. I'm no longer in Leeds, sadly. I miss it a huge amount, but I go back all the time. I see friends and I've got a lot of reasons to go back, the Brudenell being one of them.

It felt quite strange to leave after 14 years or so. It feels like it's the first time I've almost moved away from home because Yorkshire definitely felt more like home than Essex did.

Was guitar your first instrument?

Well, I first learned the piano. My gran was a piano teacher. I've got her piano in my room here, that I learned on. But my sister was much better than me and I couldn't be bothered being competitive with her.

So instead I learned the guitar, and that's sort of been my primary instrument for the last however long. And I now teach it, which is very strange because I learned classical guitar first. So I did all my my grades and learnt Spanish flamenco guitar and stuff like that. So I have an odd way of playing, but these days I'm more interested in primitive guitar playing and open tunings and fingerpicking and thumb picking and things like that.

And always trying to sort of teach myself new stuff. But yeah, guitar is definitely a primary instrument, I'd say.

What's on the front burner?

Lots of things really. I mean, I find it quite difficult to keep up, to take too much notice to the state of the world. 'cause it seems more upsetting the more attention I pay.

But I find division incredibly interesting. I just finished a really beautiful new George Saunders book. I'm a big fan of the author George Saunders, and he just released a book called Vigil. It is all about a billionaire on his deathbed, and a ghost visits him, much like a Christmas Carol, and says like, are you not gonna regret all these evil things that you did in your life? Like lying about climate change and stuff like that? And it's about him remaining really stoic on his deathbed and just being like, no, I don't, I don't feel bad about any of that.

It's a really interesting way of viewing divisions through people, but also trying to discover forms of empathy for people that we may never agree with. How people become themselves and how we can't really judge people for being themselves 'cause they are a consequence of their own environment and their parents and, you know, all of these other things.

It's a fascinating book. So I've been thinking a lot about that without necessarily drawing any conclusions. It's been a ponderer. 'cause like I said, the world isn't a wonderful place at the moment, so I find trying to understand why people are making these divisions and sewing more division is something... It is just fascinating to me why people would want that. And so trying to find empathy in an unempathetic world is a really interesting thing.

Was there a defining moment in your career when you knew there was no coming back? That you would always be doing this in one way or another?

I guess the creation of the second album. Looking back, if I hadn't done that, I probably would've stopped making music forever when the band was sort of disintegrating. I was writing songs and feeling not that great about them. It turns out I was sort of experiencing writer's block. But writer's block insofar as I think it was a mental health issue, rather than it was whatever writer's block is. I think they're kind of intertwined really.

And so being able to push through that and prove to myself that I could write, and then release another album, and it not going terribly. I was really pleased with that. So then I was like, well, maybe this isn't an issue of writer's block or anything like that. Maybe this is an issue of self-judgment and I've just proved to myself what I can do, so what else is stopping me?

So I think that redefined what I could do as an artist and as a writer, because it turned it into something far more infinite rather than just limited. Rather than just writing one album or two albums or just one bunch of songs, like turning a creative process into something a little bit more eternal. Something that is really quite necessary to who I am as a person, and that was a really positive thing.

It came from a personal place and it was going to a personal place, you know? I think realising that, yeah, that was a big one.

Speaking of which, do you write daily or more like in bursts when you're working towards something?

I now try to write daily. It always changes what I'm doing, whether it's journaling or just writing dumb bits of poetry or stupid jokes or short stories or whatever.

But I try and do something every day. At the moment, I'm doing object writing for 10 minutes in the morning. Whether it's something in my room or something around the house or something that I've seen on a walk. I keep a note of items and objects or there's random object generators online.

And just writing about that for 10 minutes with a timer. And just like constantly write. 'cause especially if you're writing about the senses. If you're writing about touch, feel, and taste, and then all these other ones that I learned about. Apparently we have eight senses, according to people who write books about babies.

And there's these other ones that are to do with balance, and to do with the body through time, like experiencing time and spatial awareness... Don't quote me on that, I'm no scientist. *laughs*

But as soon as you start to allow yourself to write about all these different senses, it's almost like tuning up your senses for the day. So if you do this sort of object writing first thing, you write about a mug or something. Then you start to recall sensory memories about an experience that you had with a mug.

And then you start to remember, oh, it made me feel like this. It was contained with this and it tasted like this, not like this, la la la. It wakes up a part of you that otherwise would stay asleep. And if you take that with you through the rest of your day, if you're in a songwriting session and either you're struggling for a line or you're trying to write an item, suddenly this part of your brain is actually awake.

So it's a little bit more useful to start that. So I'm finding that useful at the moment, which is cool. It's a useful little tool. And I like writing every day. Even if nothing comes of it, I like the act of writing. It's meditative and it's cathartic.

How young did you start writing?

I remember writing songs when I was sort of 11, 10. And they were really bad. I remember listening to a lot of Tenacious D around that time, but like taking it quite seriously. So a lot of my songs sounded like Tenacious D songs if they weren't funny. Which, if you can just imagine that...

But I loved it, I loved doing it. I just loved the ability to sort of create worlds, conjure worlds and create characters and write dumb stories and melodies and steal. I stole so much stuff, just constantly stealing. Like every band that I would get obsessed with, I just rip off all of their riffs and steal all of their stuff. And I've kind of never stopped doing that, to be honest.

But yeah, I was young, it was early. And I've always been a performer. My family are very musical, both my parents are in choirs and my grandma was a music teacher. And on my dad's side, they're all Welsh and Wales is a very musical place.

So it's always been in the family, but strangely, the most musical everyone in my family is, is right now. Everyone's the most musical they've ever been, which is great. I'm very pleased about that.

That sounds lovely. Do you write with other people at the moment?

I do. Yeah, I do that quite a lot. I have been doing some work with Nell Mescal. Some work with a guy called Callinsick, a girl called Charlotte OC. I've written songs for those guys that have been released now. There’s a bunch of different people who go through the studio.

Not everything gets released, but a few have been, and it's always very fun. Some people come in here and write for my projects or their projects, or sometimes we just come in to write a song just for the sake of it. Just sort of like, to keep the knife sharp, as it were.

Where do you think it comes from, all this creative energy?

A lot of it is probably mimicry, like being a bit of a copycat, seeing stuff that you love and wanting to be a part of that.

But I think it's a bit deeper than that. I think it's also about wanting to give other people the feeling that you felt when you first felt that. One thing I've always been chasing is I want other people to feel like I first felt when I heard A hard day's night, when I listened to the Beatles for the first time. I would love to be able to make people feel that. So it comes from a very personal place. But also, if I wanted to just make it for myself, then I wouldn't release music.

There must be this other thing of wanting to connect to other people. So I think it's an innately human thing. It's like a deep rooted human need to want to connect to other people. So I think it's really weirdly evolutionary to want to be creative and artful and try to understand others and try to understand our own place in the universe and stuff like that.

It's so necessary for who we are. Everyone needs a sort of creative outlet, and this one's mine, I guess. But yeah, it's something I've never quite gotten to the bottom of, but I love that. It's also like a weird, dark magic. I study music all the time, like I'm always entranced by it and interested in it and learning new things.

I've got a lot of friends who are really good jazz musicians, and that is a whole world I've yet to really understand and I love that I'll never get to the bottom of it. But I also love that I don't know why major chords are happy and minor chords are sad. It's so simple and I dunno why they do that. I love that. I love that I don’t know. So there's just this sort of eternal curiosity, you know?

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