“Shakes” Singer/Songwriter Stevie Howie

Stevie Howie played music since he was a young kid, picking up piano when he was about 5 or 6 years old. He didn't necessarily think that I had a particularly "special" connection to music primarily because he thought that understanding music as a fundamentally powerful, immutable force of the universe was just a fact. Stevie couldn't imagine not seeing that. It wasn't until he knew that other people didn't quite see things the same way that he did that Stevie began to see my love for music as "special". Mr. Howie continued playing music, picking up guitar when he was about 9 years old. He spent countless hours in my room playing along to Green Day and Paramore videos on YouTube, imagining that he was in the music videos in their places. This all lasted for a while, until the end of middle school, when the desire to be "cool" trumped my desire to pursue music. So he put down the guitar and piano for a few years until his junior year of high school. Stevie started listening to lots of blues music, mainly the three kings (Albert King, BB King, and Freddie King), Stevie Ray Vaughan, and John Mayer, as well as a lot of Fleetwood Mac. Soon he started playing music constantly. Stevie was obsessed with guitars and everything about them, and probably watched every single live performance of "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room" that has ever been played. Stevie graduated from high school to go to The University of Alabama, where his white Fender Strat was the one constant thing in a life full of changes, drama, and lot of emotional desperation. Then, he discovered music production near the end of my freshman year of college. Once that happened, it was all over. Stevie was heartbroken and had nowhere else to put all of my emotion, so he fully dove into creating songs through the beginning of my sophomore year of college. In fact, he spent so much of his time making music that he almost lost his scholarship. He had locked himself in his room making music for so long, had skipped so many classes, and had spent so little time a