Nature & Creativity – Loie Howard’s discoveries during her solo Song Writing Trip to The Hide
For a long time, I thought my strange and unexplainable connection to nature came from those vague, almost dream-like childhood memories. Like when I was six, for example… I knew for sure that fairies existed. If I scrunched my face up hard enough, I could almost see their tiny little footprints beneath mushrooms, and their tiny wings flicker from within their mossy cottages tucked into the coves of old tree trunks. Or I swore once I saw an entire old woodland take a deep exhale one autumn. I was deeply empathic to wildlife. Every bug had its own personality, and I knew exactly what they felt and read their thoughts like tarot. Like most kids, I wanted to believe there was magic in it all. But as I’ve got older, I’ve realised the connection I feel to nature is much more than imagination.
I’ve grown up in London, but still never felt completely separate from nature. As a family, we’d always find our way back to it, trips to the countryside, Easters in Somerset, or time spent in our caravan in West Wittering by the sea. Even earlier than that, my first words finally sprung out of me, aged 3, during my first visit to my grandma’s house in Tobago. I was suddenly exposed to very new and unfamiliar wildlife… “bug,” “fwog”… “snake.” What I didn’t realise at the time was just how special that house would become for me, the place I would call a second home.
My music has always leaned towards live, organic sounds. And to create my first EP, I went to Tobago to sample the calm waves brushing the shore, and the orchestra of birds and insects that would all come alive at nighttime, which became my lullaby to fall asleep to during my childhood summers there. Even now in London, I pull up my Spotify and listen to “tropical rain falling on a tin roof asmr” to ease my anxiety and help me re-center myself. Being in nature feels like being allowed to just exist, exactly as you are. No judgement, no pressure, just living things co-existing. Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to it, because it reflects something we’re all craving, the ability to just be.
I often wonder why, as humans, we love to gaze out into the horizon. By the coast, I sit and stare at the still, unending blue, and there’s this calm that takes over me, the type of calm that feels hard to reimagine. Not even with my rainforest sleep sounds on Spotify… No noise, no chaos, just space. And in that space, I find clarity. I can see what matters, what I’ve been too busy to notice otherwise. Lately, I’ve been craving that stillness more and more.
What really fascinates me is how deeply nature feeds our creativity. A simple walk, a sunset, even just the way light moves, it can spark a lyric, a feeling, an idea. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talks about the “creative well,” and how we have to keep filling this imaginary ‘well’ up in order to feel inspired to create. Nature feels like the purest place to do that. It gives us colour, rhythm, movement, and stillness all at once.
The Hide was my space to tap back into that. I went on a solo trip and spent two weeks journaling, sitting in the still, writing and recording. I started to uncover what might become of my second project, dare I say album yikes, which I’ve now named ‘North Star’. It was a precious time for me where I could unapologetically just be.
During those two weeks at the hide, a few things became clearer to me…One, the best ideas almost never come when you want them to. Two, slowing down isn’t an act of giving up, it just helps to make space for my voice. Three, nature may well be the ultimate creative resource. And perhaps my most precious thought, whilst I spent much time on my own, a concept I was initially a little apprehensive about, was that I think solitude isn’t really about learning to be alone, but about learning to truly see yourself. And being in nature, where nothing is asked of you, makes that easier somehow. You’re not performing, you’re not explaining, you’re just being. In an industry where being perceived can start to feel like everything, that felt like an important discovery that I’m going to try my best to take home with me.
You can find out more about Loie’s work here:
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website: https://www.loie.org/