Mason Howard

Mason Howard will tell people he’s been performing for about seven years, but his first paid gig was actually when he was eight. His impressive range of ability is embodied in the amount of instruments he owns, his natural knack for composing melodies, and the people who have taught him along the way.

ARTICLE BY VANELIS RIVERA AND IMAGES BY ANDREW BAILEY

MUSIC FOR MASON HOWARD wasn’t always communal, especially when he was younger. There was a time when he would plug into headphones, mount his bike, and trail around his neighborhood. “Which wasn’t very safe, but I had this hack,” he says. He would ride in the left lane, so he could see anyone coming toward him, and anyone driving behind him would just pass him anyway. “That’s what I did for at least six to seven years just to get away from the stress at home and later on in college with some of the stress from classes.” Even as a student enrolled in the University of Louisiana’s music program, music maintained an element of getaway. He considered the bandroom one of the safest places he could go, when he couldn’t be anywhere else mentally. “It could dig you out of a hole if you let it,” he says. Now at just twenty-five, Howard’s stepping into his own and leaving the growing pains behind.

When they ask, Howard will tell people he’s been performing for about seven years, but his first paid gig was actually when he was eight. Young for most, but not so much when most of your older relatives are fully immersed in bluegrass. “Grandma Josephine Poole had a lot of brothers and sisters. I had an uncle John who played the mandolin and an uncle Ray. He cut his left ring finger off at a sawmill and was a banjo player. He’s one of those three-fingered banjo players that you hear about,” he says. Out with his grandparents to see his uncle’s gospel group perform, they asked young Howard to sing a song with them on stage. Before it happened, he was all about it, but when they pulled him up, he didn’t realize it was going to be in front of people. “I just didn’t think about that part,” he laughs. “I just awkwardly stood there.” Afterward backstage, the lead singer gave him a five dollar bill. Too young to understand the transaction, he went to his grandmother confused. “Uh, one of them gave me this,” he recalls saying. He didn’t realize until much later that it was, in fact, his first paying gig.

When in fifth grade, Howard first picked up a guitar. “A lot of people don’t really know that because they see me on the horn all the time,” he says, referring to the saxophone, which he first picked up at Good Hope Middle School, and which was also the instrument of focus for his music degree. Around town, he has been mostly known for his sax playing, often backing Doug Duffey or performing with other groups, but with the increase of live streaming becoming a norm for many musicians, he’s been able to show off another strong talent. “There just isn’t an immediate need for saxophone,” he says, adding “nobody wants to sit there and listen to a saxophone by itself for three hours.” His impressive range of ability is embodied in the amount of instruments he owns: “I’ve got cases of instruments stacked by my door. It’s embarrassing because they go down the wall.”

Somewhere along his former journey of teaching, he was making enough money to invest one of his first checks into a pedal steel guitar, which he has had for a year. Unlike the guitar sound most commonly used in rock bands, the pedal steel has pedals and levers that enable playing more varied and dynamically complex sounds that have been historically associated primarily with country music. His girlfriend has told him that steel guitar sounds like it was his soul, probably referring to the lyrical variety the instrument offers, a feature that Howard deeply connects to: “With guitar you can play a few notes, but in a steel guitar you’re playing with ten strings and you can spell out all kinds of stuff with it, not really putting much effort into it.” It’s an intimidating-looking tool. Even Howard’s well-intentioned explanation would only make sense to seasoned musicians: “You’ve gotta know that the middle pedal brings the third of the chord up to the fourth and the outside pedal brings the fifth of the chord up to the sixth.” He was drawn to the instrument after going down a torrent of YouTube clips. In one video he saw Brian Blade, drummer for the Wayne Shorter Quartet, playing alongside a musician playing a steel guitar. “When would Brian Blade ever play with a steel guitar player?!” he thought. The guy playing was Daniel Lanois, known for producing albums for a variety of artists like The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Emmylou Harris. “He played that instrument and made it sound like I never thought one would sound,” says Howard.

Though Howard’s music bent is currently well formed, while in college he was still discovering his own tastes. “The problem with being nineteen and being a musician is that you don’t know enough. No matter how good you are, you’re kinda guessing,” he admits. At the time, many of the music faculty at ULM, including Dan Sumner who would later become a colleague and mentor, were also working musicians, which deeply inspired Howard to play outside of his academic requirements. That became an easy feat living with musicians at N McGuire Avenue, “in this big fat house.” His style developed by way of playing house parties and listening to a lot of Miles Davis, Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Charlie Parker. Presently, he’s been gravitating and creating the kind of sounds he describes as study music or “stuff that you would hear on the home menu of a really fancy game console.” Howard adds,“With that you have to be careful where you stick it in a set because it feels like you’re sitting in a funeral parlor after a while.” Ultimately, it’s music that evokes pondering and reflecting. “And this is such a huge time for that,” he says.

Though composing melodies comes naturally, lyrics can be a challenge for Howard at times. “It’s the same reason that I’m kind of bad talking to people on the phone,” he claims. At one point, he thought he was losing his hearing because he often would ask people to repeat themselves, but his girlfriend, more keen to his nature, made him aware of his predispositions: “Mason, you’re not hard of hearing. You literally only hear everything as just music. You don’t hear words at all.” So when he writes a song, he rarely hears words first. Instead, a melodic sound develops, which he’ll compliment with a set of chords, and finally work on lyrics that will fit the sound. “It’s easy to sit down and write a song, but it’s harder to keep coming back to it and making it better, and to keep going back to it everyday,” he says, acknowledging that as an artist you should write everyday, even if it’s one sentence.

Most of the time “up in my head,” as he claims mentor and local legend Doug Duffey would say, “it’s just sound effects and garbage” he has to make some kind of sense of. When he does manage to sift through the rubble, the results can be quite interesting. Some of his blues songs are conflict-driven with a comical edge, like “Two Step Staircase,” a song about a man who lives in an apartment just high enough above ground that his staircase is two steps. Constantly failing to remember this, whenever he walks out of the door he falls down: “Two small steps were enough to make me forget / And I spilled my coffee all over the driveway flo’.” Another blues song is about being a saxophone player with two titles–“Nobody Wants You” or “Everybody Wants You Sometimes, But Nobody Wants You All The Time.” Other songs are more personal, like “Driving Down The Outside Mile,” which was written on his steel guitar and recounts the time he was able to find his faith amidst tumultuous relationships: “There’s a mile of road that stretches to the north / Where the wheels have traveled many times before / There’s something sitting out there undisturbed / The same old thing that brought me right to her.” The setting of the song is a nod to the church he plays at in Bastrop, Louisiana. “There’s a stretch of road before you get to the church; it’s exactly straight and exactly one mile,” he says.

Duffey’s music group Louisiana Soul Revival was one of the first “real” New Orleans style bands Howard has played in. “They’re part of a large tribe of musicians that I’m not ever gonna be able to get out of,” he says, adding he wouldn’t want to if he had the choice. Musically, there may be a lot Howard owes his mentors, but one of the standout pieces of advice he has gotten from Duffey was more about grit than craft. On a gig, after hearing some bad news, Duffey retorted with, “Roses are red, violets are blue, they say it don’t be that way, but it do,” which Howard cheekily delivers, in his best Duffey impression. Hoping to become an established career musician, Howard has been wise to keep close to masters like Duffey who constantly encourage his own “natural self and let the past be the past.” He has learned the goal is not so much to move somewhere else, but to keep moving and working. “I don’t care to be famous or have my name on social media, but I do hope to sustain myself and be able to travel and see the nation while doing it,” he says. In such an uncertain time for musicians, it’s easy to get discouraged, but Howard has been able to stay grounded through sage advice. Lucky enough to be at The Eli when Monty Russell and Robert “Guitar” Finley, American blues and soul singer-songwriter, were playing, he learned that hard times are meant to roll in and out of our lives. Finley, coming from a history of being a sharecropper and farmer, informed an attentive Howard that sometimes there will be years you just have a bad crop and there’s nothing you can do about it, except take what you can when you get it. “That’s been the attitude lately in the music community. We’re experiencing a bad crop and hopefully the growth back will be bountiful,” Howard says, expressing gratitude for events like the NELA Couch Concert Series, Brown Bag Concert Series, and Locked Up Live, which have kept musicians working.

“One thing that I figured out in the long run corresponds with a Mr. Rogers quote that I read,” Howard says. “That there are three main ideas to succeeding in life. The first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind. That’s the main thing that I learned out of this.” Performing music has taught him, “the severely, severely difficult way,” how much he owes to everyone, and that no one really owes him anything. Whenever he sees his name on a sign, he begins to think of all the people he has a relationship with, that have contributed and continue to contribute to that possibility.

Follow Mason Howard on his Facebook promo page and make sure to tune in to his live streams.