Name: Hank Tree
Members: Fergus MacDonald, Roy Shearer, Bart Owl
Interviewee: Fergus MacDonald
Occupation: Singer, songwriter
Nationality: Scottish
Current release: Hank Tree's The Big North is out via Olive Grove.
Recommendations: I'm always keen to recommend Henry Green's novel Living as I think he is really undervalued in the UK. Living is an unusual and tender book that has a lot of the characteristics I like in art (space, experimentation, elusiveness etc).
I've been mildly obsessed with Marc Chagall since encountering his work at 17 and since our EP was inspired by his life and work, I feel I should recommend him. Some of the song titles are titles of his paintings, such as Anywhere Out Of The World.   

If you enjoyed this Hank Tree interview and would like to know more about the band and their music, visit them on Facebook and bandcamp.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

These days, the times when I listen to music the most are when I'm driving or walking, so my eyes are very much open. Listening to the music I love makes me feel a sense of connection with other people which I find very reassuring.

The experience of giving complete concentration to music while listening with eyes closed is something I enjoy but I tend to do mostly with my own work when trying to analyse it during the creative or editing processes, say for example when I need to make decisions about details during mixing.  

I recorded some (to me) incredible pieces of music when I had almost no idea what I was doing. What were your very first steps in music like - and how do you rate gains made through experience versus the naiveté of those first steps?

One of the benefits of having played guitar for many years is that playing now feels very natural to me which is a great help for creativity. I see playing guitar now as more of a physical or meditative activity than an intellectual one, and try to avoid thinking of it as a deliberate creative act.

I find it much easier to create things when I've just sat down to play, rather than when I've sat down with the intention of making something. This helps me avoid putting pressure on what I'm doing and often leads to me coming up with musical ideas that I am proud of without thinking about an objective.

I first started writing little bits of music when I was around 10, but since I'm sure all of these efforts were terrible, I don't mind having left the naiveté of those first steps behind.

It is generally believed that we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between 13-16. Tell me what music meant to you at that age, please – and how its impact has changed since then.  

I still listen to some of the artists I first got into between 13-16 (particularly Nick Drake, Grandaddy, Robert Johnson and Elliott Smith). At that point, growing up in a village in north-east Scotland, which wasn't exactly a cultural hotbed, discovering music from other places made me think that the world outside of the local area was an exciting place that I needed to explore as soon as possible.

You often hear of people forming life-long friendships after bonding over music at school but to be honest I felt at that age that I didn't have much in common with my classmates (including my musical interests) so I largely kept my love for these musicians, and any dreams of creating music, a secret.

I don't expect people to like the same things as I do now either, but that doesn't matter as much any more.  

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and how do you think has working with them shaped your perspective on music?

I first began recording music on 4 and 8 track cassette machines. Generally I like musical arrangements that are quite bare bones and I liked the limitations that these devices enforced on the creative process, not allowing for the possibility of adding infinite parts.

Getting a loop-pedal around 10 years ago has been a really helpful tool too. Though I don't use it a lot in recording, it's really enjoyable creating hypnotic chord progressions and trying to interweave a few more guitar lines into them.

In a shameless attempt at pointing people towards music that's available to buy, in the Hank Tree album there are several songs that started life on the loop-pedal, such as Company Town, that began as a 15 minute ambient piece and has ended up with a more standard structure but with many of the original guitar lines still there.   

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

As a guitarist and songwriter I'm motivated by a desire to improve the work I do by increasing self-sufficiency, experimenting with new ways of playing, and exploring ideas outside of music that inspire me to write. When composing music I want to present an unusual combination of sounds by drawing on elements of different genres.

I hope that the music I make is comforting to the people that listen to it and that it provides some kind of positive companionship while they go about their lives.

Paul Simon has been quoted as claiming that “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

I like to try and find a combination of clean and harsher sounds, so that it feels like pieces are being pulled in different directions. A lot of the time this involves classical guitar being the foundation and layers of distortion added after.

I probably shouldn't ignore that exploring different guitar tunings is pretty important to my personal sound as, to date, no Hank Tree songs are in the standard tuning. In terms of vocals, mainly because of my limitations as a singer, my singing tends to be fairly hushed. I don't belt anything out!

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to forces of nature. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

I'm interested in field -recording and as the Hank Tree album focussed on the history of a particular part of the world (El Norte Grande in Chile), I felt that incorporating some of these non-human-made sounds was a good way of evoking the place.

Probably the clearest example of this is in the instrumental song “Nothing” which contains a very rough round the edges recording of a screeching aermotor windmill being blown around by the desert breeze in the abandoned settlement of Santa Laura.

I have a fairly open-mind about what is, and what isn't, musical, and this sound is music to me.  

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

In music, as well as in literature and films, I'm drawn to slow paced things which don't join all the dots for the audience and leave plenty of room for subjective interpretations.

I do have a respect for the people like the Ramones, blitzing through songs in a minute and a half, but I'm more drawn to things that take their time.  

From symphonies and traditional verse/chorus-songs to linear techno tracks and free jazz, there are myriads of ways to structure a piece of music. Which approaches work best for you – and why?

I feel like I'm fairly new to songwriting and I am still trying to work a lot of things out. So far I've tried to not become too overly reliant on one structure, but maybe I'll settle into a particular approach as my experience grows.

I'm keen for all Hank Tree releases to have a mixture of songs with vocals and instrumentals, as I love the purity of instrumental music. Thinking about it, quite a few Hank Tree songs follow a structure of intro- verse – chorus (x2) – extended outro (“Now Your Colours Sing” and “Sweet Saltpeter” are like that).

I do like having an unexpected section at the end of songs.
 
Science and art have certain overlaps and similarities. Do you you think "objectivity" has a place in art and do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

I think an objective valuation of music is impossible so it's probably best to not get too hung up on such things. Beyond one of the songs from the album (“Haber-Bosch Process”) being inspired by historic scientific discoveries and their unintended consequences, I can't say that ideas from science have overlapped much with my music so far.

In terms of experimentation, the closest I get to putting things together in a test-tube to see what happens is probably combining different guitar pedals, which can often bring about interesting results.   

Seeing, smelling, touching, tasting – which of these sense impressions have the strongest points of contact with your hearing/listening experience?

Well, since I said at the start that I listen to a lot of music while moving, I naturally associate music with the places I see when I am listening to it.

Smelling and tasting are not senses that I think to connect with music to be honest. I'd be interested to hear how that connection manifests for people who do experience it though.

Does the way you make music reflect on the way you live your life? And vice versa, can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

Jeez, that's a hard question! I suppose I have quite stubborn and inflexible ideas about integrity which guide my music and my life outside of music, related to a general belief in independence and that it's best to not follow the pack just because that's the easiest, or most profitable, thing to do.

It's these values that will ensure I will always be skint!    

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Well, I'm not a big food and drink connoisseur so I might not be the best placed to make a comparison. But one of the things I like most about writing a piece of music is that you are starting with a blank canvas and creating something that didn't exist before. With making a cup of coffee, a lot of work has been put in by other people already in the production process, so I don't think it would be accurate to compare the levels of involvement.

For me, writing a song, even if it's not autobiographical, is a very personal expression in a way that I can't imagine a more mundane task being.    

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Conversely, many popular love songs leave me cold. Do you have similar paradoxical examples - and why, do you think, is the same piece of music capable of conjuring such vastly different responses in different listeners?

I suppose this can be tied in with your question about objectivity earlier. Since listeners bring so much of themselves to the listening process, and everyone has a different idea of what beauty is, it seems only natural that you get vastly different responses from different listeners.

I imagine that there are plenty of people around who would find something like Richard Dawson's “Nothing Important” completely unlistenable, but it sounds great to me.  

[Read our Richard Dawson interview]

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

Not a revolutionary idea, but I'd like there to still be enough people whose interaction with music isn't focussed on 30 second long clips on social media and are willing to seek out something more unusual that might require spending some time with it before it becomes enjoyable.

I sound more like an old man every day! I don't despair about this too much though, as I'm confident there will always be people who prefer long-form pieces of art.