If you've ever noticed the same sequence of numbers popping up more frequently in your everyday life, then you've encountered angel numbers. Some believe that the repeated digits have spiritual significance and are meant to guide us along the correct path to our destiny. Scottish singer-songwriter Hamish Hawk explored the concept on his 2023 album,
Angel Numbers, the follow-up to his breakthrough 2021 album,
Heavy Elevator.
"The idea is that certain numbers convey certain information about how you relate to your own destiny and whether you are moving in the right direction, or whether you're going against the grain and doing yourself a disservice," he told the
Songfacts Podcast. "And if you took the other fork in the road, then that is the more successful path."
The title track (and lead single) challenges the societal expectations that pressure people into making certain choices to fit in, like getting married or buying a house, instead of forging their own path.
"'Angel Numbers' is an ode to the life less traditional," Hawk explained in a press release. "It takes a look at the sacrifices we all make in order to feel we belong. It's a song that asks questions of accepted wisdom - it looks for get-out clauses in mortgage contracts and pokes holes in wedding dresses. It lives in the twists and turns in the out of the ordinary. If there's no blueprint for any of this stuff, how are we supposed to know we're doing it right? Are we all just kids in suits?"
The album serves as a companion piece to Heavy Elevator, which used the title image to convey the inability to move forward when we're bogged down with baggage from the past. He told Songfacts:
"Angel Numbers is sort of the remedy to that, which is, okay, the world went into a standstill, and we were all spending a lot of time indoors. But you had a lot more time to look forward into the future and ask yourself, 'Am I moving in the right direction? Am I making the right choices? Am I serving myself? Am I doing what I ought to be doing?'
Angel Numbers is an exploration of that idea, which is looking into the future, dealing with ideas of ambition, potential, success and failure, and those great leaps of faith."
The title is also a nod to the people who show up throughout our lives to teach us important lessons. "Either in an instant or you spend weeks or days or years of your life with these people, and they can tell you a lot about yourself and teach you a lot about how to live your life," Hawk explained. "The album itself is a collection of angel numbers - songs about angels."
Hawk is typically a perfectionist who pores over his lyrics for a long time until he gets them just right, but the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into his usual process. Working remotely with his guitarist, Andrew Pearson, he wrote most of the album during lockdown in a song-a-day fashion. He told Songfacts:
"When the pandemic hit, I thought not only was the live music industry gonna struggle and might have been dealt a fatal blow, but I was also thinking, How am I gonna write? I don't feel I'll be inspired in this context at all. Then after a few weeks, things quieted down and a lot of the panic blew over. And what set in was this environment in which I could really focus and really didn't have much excuse to not write. I thought, Every hour of the day is up for grabs here, I'll just give it a go.
So Andrew Pearson, my guitarist and collaborator, would send me music demos and I would try to come up with something and sing over the top of it, and by that evening would send something back to him. We did that every day. It wasn't like we said, 'We'll do this every day and we can't stop.' We just did it naturally. And for about three solid weeks, it was just a song a day. And I have never experienced that sort of creative flow state."
Pearson also directed the music video, which plays with the song's religious imagery with strange demons wielding measuring tape to literally size up the singer.
"I wanted to capture these two ideas: the biblical and the material," Pearson explained. "So we have angels and demons, heaven and hell, Jesus and the Jezebel represented by cheap nylon sheets and overly rough seamstresses. It's a bit Phantom Thread meets Twin Peaks, Project Catwalk meets Ingmar Bergman but I hope it picks up the metaphorical and literal threads in the song as well as emphasizing it's strange, jerky rhythms."
