In July 2010, Shane Howard releases his new studio album, Goanna Dreaming, and will be touring nationally. Produced by Kerryn Tolhurst, (Dingoes) and Howard, this trans-Pacific recording project began in Tucson, Arizona in Tolhurst’s studio and was completed back in Australia.

The first bars of the album’s opening track, Earth Is Singing, slowly unfold from Howard’s intimate acoustic guitar and the Mexican Jarana of Francisco Gonzales, (one of the founding members of Los Lobos), building to a Goanna-esque rockin’, celebratory, crescendo. The song tells the back story of Howard’s first pilgrimage, all those years ago, to Uluru when he wrote the Australian classic, Solid Rock.

Goanna Dreaming is a promise fulfilled by one of Australia’s most loved and respected singer-songwriters. There’s a lot of history to Howard’s career and it all comes together on this album. All of Howard’s musical and lyrical themes, for the last 30 years, are brilliantly integrated and condensed into Goanna Dreaming. Cosmology, mortality, justice, landscape, love and belonging. It’s a big canvas, crossing from folk to world music to powerful rockin’ ballads, all of it underpinned by Howard’s masterful storytelling and insightful observations of human frailty.

This is Howard’s most cohesive and accessible album in a long time. For long standing lovers of Howard’s work, the Goanna-esque Back In Time and Struggle & Strife will evoke vivid memories of Spirit of Place and the River album. It’s great to hear Howard rocking solid again.

The rollicking Clancey & Dooley & Don McLeod retells the remarkable, hidden story of Australia’s Black Eureka, when 800 Aboriginal pastoral workers, in the Pilbara, walked off the stations in 1946 and went on strike for pay and better conditions and gave birth to Australia’s Aboriginal resistance movement.

From the sublime Come Down Moses, rich with Biblical references and contemporary relevance though to Don’t Give Up On Us, a wryly humourous agnostic prayer, Howard sets the feet tapping and the brain ticking. It’s over three years since the release of his last studio album, Songs Of Love & Resistance and he’s been busy in that time.

As a founding and touring member of the celebrated Black Arm Band ensemble, he’s been travelling to world festivals, most of Australia’s major arts festivals and into remote and regional Aboriginal communities, helping to take the ensemble’s musical message of hope. He produced Archie Roach’s last studio album, Journey and collaborated with the young Street Warriors and Shannon Noll for a new, Hip Hop version of Solid Rock. For 30 years Howard has eloquently pleaded the case for Aboriginal justice.

But Goanna Dreaming takes us beyond, into a deeper appreciation of Aboriginal cosmology. “I’m owning my history”, says Howard, “I’m proud of what we attempted in those heady Goanna days, but back then I was well intentioned but naïve and looking at Aboriginal Australia. After 30 years of solid friendships, we are all in the story together. Much has changed but there is much more to do. At a time when the world is reeling from the dire consequences of climate change, religious fanaticism and the limitations of economic growth on a finite planet, Aboriginal philosophy shows us a new way, via an old way, to relate to our fragile Earth”.

Howard’s also been looking back over his past 30 years of songwriting and performing. He recently released a book, Lyrics, illustrated with the artist’s own painting and drawings, as well as Driftwood, his first volume of rare and unreleased recordings. Last year he returned to Uluru to work with the school children from Mutitjulu, Imanpa and Docker River communities, to create illustrations for a soon to be released childrens book of Solid Rock, in English and Pijantjatjara.

Goanna Dreaming pays homage to the past and talks to the future. It’s a band album that features the masterful Tolhurst, his old Goanna compatriots, Rose Bygrave and his sister Marcia Howard as well as Amy Saunders, (Tiddas), Bart Willoughby, Broome’s Pigram Brothers, Irish-Australian Steve Cooney, daughter Myra and brother Damian Howard as well as US musicians, Ralph Gilmore, (Drums) Larry Lee Lurmer, (Bass), Kevin Schramm, (Accordion) and Francisco Gonzales, (Mexican Harp, Jaranas, Requinto and Quijada – The jawbone of an Ass!).

Howard will be joined on tour with many of the players who grace the album, including his daughter Myra and long standing band members, Ruben Shannon, Rory McDougall, (Black Arm Band) and John Hudson as well as some special dates with Kerryn Tolhurst and Amy Saunders.