Howlin Rain: An interview by Jiah Carron

Petal Motel is pleased to introduce Jiah Carron, a Canadian music journalist and label executive who’s a huge psych and private press junkie. I thought Jiah would be the perfect person to interview Ethan Miller of Howlin Rain and it turns out, I was right. Their conversation was deep, long, and literary. Thanks for reading!

I had the privilege of conversing with the legendary Howlin Rain’s frontman, Ethan Miller. I’ve spent the last few weeks getting absolutely lost in their upcoming album The Dharma Wheel, a sprawling psychedelic folk-rock monument featuring the band at their most fluid and dynamic, carving an irresistible and endlessly engaging path through the treacherous mountains and breathtaking valleys of this epic. Rounding their sound on this outing are excellent session players Scarlet Rivera on violin and Adam MacDougall on keys, both of whom are veterans of the genre with Rivera having been an integral part of Bob Dylan’s 1970’s output and MacDougall having worked with artists from The Stroke’s frontman Julian Casablancas to The Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh. Every element that Miller has alchemized for this occasion performs with an elegant groove. The music grins unmistakably, making no effort to hide how much fun the band is having which makes the folklore-esque album that much more enjoyable.

With their new album, Miller has taken the band in an exciting new direction that marries elements from across nearly 20 years of studio recordings and live performances, resulting in an experience that will feel simultaneously familiar and unpredictable. The sheer grandeur of the record is unparalleled in the band’s discography and the effortless melding of each melody with its rhythm counterpart expresses an assembly of artists with intoxicating chemistry. Howlin Rain has become the heir apparent to the folk-rock throne left vacant by artists like Bob Dylan, The Band, America, The Grateful Dead, and Van Morrison. As is tradition with the genre, Howlin Rain’s live performances are the crucible in which they forge their studio material which is blindingly apparent on this record as each track moves with electricity and charisma that is rarely captured offstage, yet they manage. With a gritty elegance and undeniable tenacity, The Dharma Wheel is Howlin Rain with nothing to prove except that they’ve still got it and just won’t quit.

Jiah: I’ve read that often you go straight from a venue where you’ve just performed to the studio. What is the crucial element that drives a live performance that is difficult to conjure in a studio if that momentum is lost between performing and recording?

Ethan: It’s a little bit like, I assume, making a movie. As opposed to doing theater where you’re on stage, you can hear the audience gasp and you can tell when you’re lighting it up with a monologue and the audience is electric, transferring that energy back towards you. Now, when you’re shooting a love scene in a movie, it’s two naked people with all these crazy lights and 15 technical operators. This isn’t real romance. How do we make it seem like it is once it’s in the midst of this cold technical, scientific engagement that we’re doing, trying to capture the essence of human energy, which is the whole trick of studio recording from the first moment.

I think coming from off the stage the night before into the studio helps a little bit because, by the middle of the tour, you’ve got the set, you know how to perform. You’re going to have a better night if the audience is amazing, but you’re still probably able to just light it up and do what needs to happen. So that’s a handy thing to take into the studio because when you write in the studio, when you go in cold, a lot of what you’re doing is second-guessing the scientific, technical environment as to whether you’re really expressing, capturing, the human energy properly. 

Jiah: You’re absolutely right, that is the magic of a real show, when you can feel that energy and the intimacy of a performance where you’re right there next to the artist, experiencing it live is real romance.

Ethan: Anything could happen, the outcome is unknown, and to go back to that ‘lovemaking for the camera’ analogy, that isn’t real romance, but then when we see it in the movie in the end, hopefully, it’s like, wow, that really nails it, just as it is in the studio. So it’s a bit of a magic trick.

Jiah: Something I find refreshingly unique about this album is how you channel your influences. It is not uncommon nowadays for bands that harken back to the glorious heyday of 70’s rock and roll to unabashedly but flatteringly imitate their heroes, however, Howlin Rain seems to be the outlier. While the era of influence is clear, you expertly draw from your influences without parading them, preferring instead to meld them into something original and distinctly Howlin Rain. As a musician with a long history with the Bay Area, arguably the birthplace of the golden age of folk-rock boasting acts like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, how do you manage to balance influence with originality?

Ethan: I think maybe Billy Childish had a quote that I like that kind of boils this philosophical conversation down a little bit. I think he said that you don’t need to try to be original. You need to try to be authentic and the idea is that there is no original, unless you believe in Adam and Eve, even at that point, if we’re to believe they were the first humans, I still believe that they came from Stardust and that everything is energy transfer. There is no original thing. And that goes for Little Richard, the inventor of rock and roll, Beatles, the birth of artistic pop music. They’re innovators and they harnessed an incredible amount of energy in that transfer, but all those people were influenced by their environments and other music.

So the trick is the depth of their authenticity. That Little Richard maybe had the church on one hand and the aesthetic possessed vibe of the preacher influence and on the other side, you had blues and R&B playing. It’s not just a wholly original thing, but the authenticity in which he re-expressed influences, it shook the foundations of the earth on its axis and changed history. I think imitation is when you’re not taking a risk with your own expression and not being vulnerable. At the core of creativity is the opening up of one’s self, the risk of opening up a vulnerability of a personalized expression of the influences and energy that you’re transferring.

It’s what makes the Grateful Dead so, so great. They lived in a state of pure artistic risk. Hendrix too. You see that stuff up there where you’re like, wow, he’s just going for it. I don’t know if you call that failing, but he’s throwing things out that crash and burn and hit the mountain a little bit when they’re flying too low.

Jiah: I admire artists like that because it is difficult to be a risk-taker and it’s something that actually brings us back to your new album. Do you feel like you’ve refined the skills that you’ve accrued over the past almost 20 years and combined them to create this monolithic ultimate statement, something where you can never listen to the same song twice because there’s so much to get lost in? 

Ethan:

Yeah, I think it’s true that with this record we weren’t trying to take the biggest leap in, like, “let’s do something completely different”. I think at this point, the nice thing about doing what Howlin Rain does is that a fan doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen when they drop the needle on a new album and even if it sounds like, “Wow, this sounds like classic Howlin Rain”, that may be as big a surprise to hear. The fact that we’ve come this far and laid that precedent is a little bit freeing. 15 years in, you can do things that have a certain element of overview or summary of the different factions and the different paths that you’ve gone down. This record feels accomplished to us because we managed to do that. It has a little bit of the ingredients of every Howlin Rain incarnation and every Howlin Rain record before. I think it’s very recognizable as us. It’s kind of quintessential us.

Jiah: And with this new record, you also have two session musicians who have such a diversity in the people they’ve worked with, specifically Scarlet Rivera being a Bob Dylan session alumni. Her strings that open the record are beautiful, like a haunted bayou, it’s stunning. And of course, you’ve enlisted Adam MacDougall on keys. I personally love keys but they seem to be an instrument you don’t typically see in a lot of music these days, in the traditional sense at least. Upon listening to the album it seems you’ve sort of renewed the vigor and purpose of keys in the context of this sort of grand sprawling statement. What is it about keys as an instrument and as an ingredient to your music that is so imperative and how do you feel they lend to the world you’ve achieved with this record?

Ethan:

Well, Adam’s playing is brilliant. He specializes in the blend of funky virtuosic playing, not speed playing, not showy, “Oh my God, this guy’s, like, Guinness book of world records, you know, maniac with 10 fingers”, but his melodic expression is his power. His groove and his mastery of synthetic effects all into lightning improvised performance. That is incredible. The way that he plays when you see him with CRB (Chris Robinson Brotherhood) or with Circles Around the Sun or anything that he does live, a lot of his solos and a lot of his performances, they’re so unflashy that they feel like he worked them out on a studio record or something.

They sound so plump, even when he’s soloing it. It often sounds so fundamental to the groove and the funk of the thing, you know? It’s the psychedelic, acid-fried, mood. It’s just this crazy blend of the essence of the song, the backbone of the song, the foundation of the song, that top-end expression. It’s always this cool world painting. Just painting this world of sound there. That type of player is perfect if you don’t just want a guy to come in and play some licks at the solo section, like “It might be cool to have a keyboard solo there”. A lot of people, when they bring in a session player, don’t want a world builder. But I think we already had that concept that we’re going deep into this world that we’re creating with the Dharma Wheel record and there’s these specific rules to that universe. I felt like having Adam come in and just letting him go to town would be the right thing to do.

Jiah: Something I love and admire about the album is that nothing feels forced. It all feels very effortless in that it is interlocking, everything fits together and it does build this beautiful world. It’s immediately apparent from how you use the music to set the tone for your songwriting that every element on this album functions as a single organism. You write these flawed, intriguing characters that we follow through the record and grow to love. From beginning to end you’ve conjured a musical odyssey. This attention to storytelling I find is increasingly rare in contemporary music. When looking at the folk-rock revival that has been growing over the last decade and a half, how do you weigh the importance of traditional folk storytelling in your music against the groove-centric sensibility of rock and roll and where do you think the balance lies?

Ethan: Well, I don’t know about “grow to love them”. I think of some of these characters as being a little more like Thomas Pynchon characters, like in Gravity’s Rainbow. They aren’t really characters that you become deeply emotionally attached to, but they are ones that you can dive into these abstracts worlds and have adventures with. When you care very, very dearly about a character, there is not the elasticity within a story for something bad to happen to them. You cannot take a character that you dearly love and let them experience the things that happen to the characters in Gravity’s Rainbow. So I kind of take it from that.

I feel like you only have usually about three verses to tell a story. You can go the Dylan route and do nine verses to really tell a story, but for our type of music, I like the Steely Dan method. There’s something incredibly literary, there’s a story there, the names are there, the places are there, the time, the moment, the action. There’s something very deep happening in these lyrics and stories but we can’t quite exactly figure out what it’s in reference to and we’re left with this cool endowed mystery. Your mind goes into overdrive dealing with the resonance of the holes that have been purposely left to engage you, with the resonance of melodic sound, with the words that are happening and your mind goes into overdrive engaging with these stories and filling them out and going, “Yeah, that’s what it’s about, man”. That’s obviously a very powerful way to write music. And when you do that right, you really have the highest form of impact on people’s hearts and ears and minds.

Jiah: This new album is called The Dharma Wheel. From my understanding of Hinduism, Dharma is a governing law of the universe that refers to the natural path, the organic course, otherwise known as destiny or fate. In your album, the characters seem to live their lives in accordance with this universal law. Killers kill, songwriters ponder existence, and nature reclaims the corners of humanity that have been left behind. How did you come across the concept of Dharma and what does it mean to you?

Ethan: I came across it more in terms of its Hindu and Buddhist leanings and whatnot. Honestly, I liked it in a way that I liked the idea of doing this Arthur C. Clark type or, or more like Robert Heinlein-type blend, where you can create, in his case, something like Stranger in a Strange Land. You create a science fiction story in a science fiction world that you borrow from our world’s religious leanings and then let them sort of be elastic to be taken into a new world and repurposed. I didn’t really want to do that in a way where I was just being trite with somebody else’s spiritual beliefs or spiritual terminology or anything but I liked the way that Heinlein blended science fiction, which was thought of at the time as being low art, and presented it in this high-art, literary style. And it is obviously science fiction but we’re reflecting on our reality. It just broke the gateway a little bit so that things are flowing back and forth from fiction and imagination to big religious ideas and things on the concrete side of our reality.
I wanted the Dharma wheel, the artwork, the name, the album itself to also have that, where you go deep inside of this universe. Taking that idea of this cosmic and spiritual truth, something that applies to humanity, that’s a religious idea or philosophical idea and letting that be something of a powerful science fiction object, an emblem, an icon, and portal inside of our created universe.

–Jiah Carron

Pre-order The Dharma Wheel on Bandcamp. Out tomorrow on Silver Current Records!