As the new year begins, I feel like it is a good time to reflect on past achievements and new goals for my music. 

2025 was an incredibly productive year for me:

I consolidated all 3 of my music projects to one website with a full redesign. Be sure to check it out at johnhowarthiv.com
2. The new website now has a store with paid downloads and print on demand merch. My first print on demand product is Acoustic Eden mugs, but there are more products coming soon!
3. I released 2 of my compositions under my John Howarth IV - Orchestral Music project, an orchestral track titled "Armored Car" that I originally wrote in 2010 and a piano piece that I wrote for my wedding back in 2005. 
4. I released a total of 7 new songs under my Acoustic Eden project, including 5 more Christmas songs on the EP "Almost Christmas!" and 2 pieces I wrote for my wedding 20 years ago: "Together" and "Prelude to Love".
5. While I released a total of 9 songs for 2025, I actually worked on many others for all three of my music projects. Several are nearing completion. 
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For 2026, I have several goals for music. 
1. Acoustic Eden - I plan to release a full album of original guitar pieces that are focused on my personal childhood memories. I also have a few more christmas songs to complete, which will be consolidated into one album with my previous Acoustic Eden holiday releases. 
2. John Howarth IV - Orchestral Music - I have several more pieces of music similar to "Armored Car" to release. 
3. Temporal Decay - Look for new merch, including T-shirts on my website this year. I am still working on the new album, which has been delayed due to several circumstances. I promise it will be worth the long wait!

Armored Car is scheduled for official release on Spotify Thursday, May 15th 2025. I originally wrote this piece in 2010. I made some minor changes to the orchestrations, but for the most part the composition is the same as the original. The software and computer hardware I originally used for this is obsolete, so I had to re-create it using modern software with the original MIDI file. 

Music careers have several milestones that make you feel like you have advanced so quickly, you are on the next level of your game. These are points in time that completely change everything for you as an artist. Pieces of knowledge that once felt like many letters of the alphabet suddenly converge to become words, phrases, or entire books that you no longer have to interpret - they can be instantly recalled. I have been playing guitar and writing music since I was about 13, so now that I am in my late 40's, these “level up” events have happened to me several times.

Possibly the most significant advancement for me was my education in audio production at Hennepin Technical College from 2002-2004. I left HTC with knowledge and skills I never thought would be possible. One of the many life changing things I discovered during my tenure at HTC was film scoring, which I spent the following 5-6 years after HTC studying and perfecting. 

This lead to 2010. 2010 was a very important year in my music career, and April of 2010 set things in motion that would shape the next decade for me. In early 2010 I was working as a freelance composer and audio engineer, and one of the many talented people I was working with was the Minneapolis composer Hiram Titus. Hiram gave me his ticket to a composing workshop at McNally Smith college in St Paul since he had other commitments and could not attend. The workshop was called Hollywood Calling, which was an all day class that happened to be on my birthday. Taught by orchestrator Sean McMahon and Hollywood composer Christopher Young, this class completely changed the way I approached writing orchestral music in just a few hours. The assignment for the class was to score an action clip from the movie Spiderman 3. I received a very positive response on my work from Sean, and this convinced me to apply for a residency at Christopher Young’s Tilden House in Culver City. This ultimately led me to Los Angeles in September of 2010.

I have a large amount of music to release in 2025. I will be starting off with “Armored Car” (the orchestral piece I wrote for the Hollywood calling class), several other pieces of orchestral music, and several new nylon guitar pieces for my Acoustic Eden project. Please follow all 3 of my projects on social media and check out my updated website for more details…. More to come soon!