Hamish Hawk has released Money, the third single to be plucked from his new album Angel Numbers, set for release on 3 February. It's a wry, smart, idiosyncratic slice of indie chamber pop from an artist who creates pen-portraits wrapped in melody. He plays a hometown gig on New Year's Day in Edinburgh's Princes Gardens ahead of his biggest headline tour to date in early 2023.

Hamish has enjoyed a tangential career to date, leaping from one recording to the next: "The songs keep coming" he says. The one constant has been a commitment to crafting lyrics that resonate.

Things took off while he was at the University of St Andrews: "I really enjoyed it there but it was a peculiar, tiny place. We called it the bubble. In the absence of nightlife, people would have parties and try to bring like-minded students together to put things on themselves. I became part of that and we would invite indie musicians to come play. One of them was King Creosote and I met Kenny Anderson who ended up producing my first album."

This debut was followed by an EP recorded on Mull, produced at An Tobar in Tobermory. The Hebrides is part of the landscape behind Hamish's songs. "When I was at school, there was a charity that offered places to teach abroad for a year. They had a training week on the Isle of Coll.

"I went there, didn't end up teaching abroad in the end but it was the most extraordinary place. I'd never been anywhere like that before. It was barren and beautiful and desolate. It looked like the moon. Being there definitely did something and I've recorded on Mull since then and spent time writing in the Western Isles. When I'm touring I make a point of going to Lewis and Harris, then travelling up the coast to Durness or across to Thurso and Wick if I can.

In 2017, he spent six weeks travelling through 16 US states on a ramshackle tour, playing gigs in peoples' houses. "When I look back on it now, it's the stuff of dreams" he says.

"There's nothing more inspiring to me than seeing new places and faces. It's the mother of invention. That DIY tour which had us performing in living rooms was fruitful in that sense, I came back with quite a few songs written on pianos across America. They continue to be some of the favourite songs I've ever written."

Having spent most of his career as a solo, acoustic performer Hamish has found a new satisfaction from performing with his backing band: "There's the pleasure you get from writing a song when you're just in it and then when you are not completely consumed by the process you can perform the song with the band and it can achieve a significance and a resonance that you might not have understood before when you were writing it."

Edinburgh is a featured character in his tuneful repertoire. "I had quite an ordinary upbringing on a surburban street with lots of kids running around and images from where I grew up crop up in my songs a lot."

"There was this woodlands nearby and we all knew every tree within it when we were growing up. We'd be running around with a sense of adventure. I think from a young age I had an active imagination and a curious nature. There was quite a lot of world building with my brother and my sister and our friends from the street. The music can take me back to those experiences in my head sometimes."

hamishhawk.com