Hamish Hawk has a pen in his hand for the duration of our interview. Occasionally he flourishes it to make a point but mostly it’s just there; a prop perhaps, or just in case lyrical inspiration strikes and he needs to scribe. This Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter is one dedicated wordsmith. His song titles alone are evocative, poetic-idea capsules. You may have heard previous singles ‘Calls To Tiree’ and ‘The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973’ colouring the 6 Music airwaves; the likes of ‘Dog-eared August’ and ‘Elvis Lookalike Shadows’ soon will once he releases his vivid new album Angel Numbers.

‘I go as far as I can to make sure that my songs have real content and they are not full of platitudes or generic observations,’ he says. ‘It’s very much an effort on my part to put me in every line of the song, and to have something to say that’s not necessarily an overt socio-political message; it’s about putting things in a particular way.’

And what lies behind these titles? Give Hawk a few months and he’ll let you know. ‘The songs reveal more of themselves to me after I’ve written them,’ he says. ‘Six months down the line I can listen and realise that a song understood more about where I was and what I was feeling than I did at the time. It’s the mystical side of songwriting to me.’

^{Picture: Gabriela Silveira}

Hawk didn’t start writing his own songs until his late teens. He grew up in a household which loved music but didn’t make it. At school, he gravitated to the drama department but spent most weekends wielding fake ID to attend gigs in Glasgow. As a St Andrews University student, he helped promote live music, facilitating a fateful meeting with local hero King Creosote who liked his demo and welcomed Hawk into the Fence Records fold. No need for a trademark Fence alias: Hamish Hawk is his real name.

Fast forward through a couple of albums, EPs, musical collaborators and mentors, and Hawk hit a rich seam with 2021’s Heavy Elevator. ‘As soon as I landed on the lyrics, I knew that this was the title of the record,’ he says. ‘I could feel that all of the stories, characters, voices, all of the emotional content of the album, tied in perfectly to that central image of the desire to move upward in your life while simultaneously feeling like you are being weighed down by baggage of some kind.’

For Hawk, Heavy Elevator explores a sinking feeling while Angel Numbers is about starting to move upwards. ‘It’s about notions of success and fame and rampant ambition, and the positives and negatives that might fall out of that. I’m setting sail in ways that I haven’t done before. These days, every time I write, it’s an attempt to move forward on that journey; musically, lyrically, vocally and emotionally.’ 

Angel Numbers is released digitally on Friday 3 February, and by Post Electric on Friday 24 February; Hamish Hawk plays St Luke’s, Glasgow, Thursday 16 February.