(Photo Credit: Alissa Anderson)
Last year Ethan Miller found himself in a dark place. For the last 14 years he had been working non-stop as a career musician, fronting Bay Area noise rock band Comets on Fire before shifting his primary focus to more of a classic rock sound with his Howlin’ Rain project. Between both bands Miller maintained a prolific output of recorded material all while touring regularly. Howlin’ Rain’s style of psychedelic blues rock was a natural fit for massive stages, and before long the band attracted the attention of famed producer Rick Rubin, who signed them to his American Recordings label. Ethan Miller didn’t resent success, but he was resistant to subject himself to the pressures that come with being on a major label. Howlin’ Rain’s 2012 album The Russian Wilds received mostly positive reviews but left Miller feeling disenfranchised by the whole experience of making it. Suddenly he found himself without a band or a label, examining where he was at after years as a musician and not sure how or even if he could pursue such an unpredictable life. Somehow, though, Miller continued writing at a constant pace, and after taking a good look at his life over the last 14 years point he decided to head back into the studio.
The best art often comes as the result of darkness and despair, and on Howlin’ Rain’s new album Mansion Songs Miller has crafted a beautiful collection of personal songs that are at once heartbreaking and uplifting, but most of all honest. The album sees Miller moving away from the wild rock and roll of his earlier work and toward a sound that is more subtle, nuanced, and rich. Many of the songs are filled with vivid lyrical imagery of Miller’s home base of San Francisco, as much a reflection of his beloved city as they are of himself. Slowing down and taking stock of your life can pay off, and Mansion Songs is proof of not only that, but just how dynamic Ethan Miller is as an artist.
You’ve said that you were in a dark place when you started recording Mansion Songs. Can you talk a little bit about where you were at?
I guess I had just landed a new [record] deal and that was a positive thing, but I didn’t have a band and I was just kind of on the back end of a long involved major label deal, which always has its ups and downs and complications. I knew I wanted to make a lot of music and [keep] writing, but I didn’t know exactly what was going on, how to capture it, exactly what kind of record I wanted to make or with whom. I didn’t have any band and a lot of the artists and musicians were sort of fleeing the Bay Area because of the skyrocketing rent and stuff, so I was having a tough time putting together a new group. That, coupled with generally the life of a starving artist and musician, has its ups and downs. I think in any given month or corner of a year you probably find some dark moments about what you’re trying to prove day to day. All of that together just made an interesting environment. I’ve had other challenging times since I first started making records in 2000, but here [I was] 14 years later and I guess this [was] one of the first moments that I stopped to catch my breath after being on a crazy roller coaster. Sometimes if you’re on a roller coaster for 14 years and all of the sudden you stop and have a second to see what you’ve been flying over, around, and through, it can kind of make you reel a little bit. I guess that’s where I was, just taking stock of things for the first time in 14 years.
You’ve talked about this idea of redemption. Is that something you were seeking going into this record?
I guess part of the thing [about] that roller coaster ride is that in this career and artistic path, if you choose the life of a musician, it’s not one of those more normal, go work the week with your coworkers and have a beer with your friends on Friday night kind of things. It’s a different thing, and in the end a lot of people and things come and go through your life. At some point it’s like, am I emptying out more than I’m filling up here? I don’t know, but I guess redemption’s got something to do with that. Maybe it’s just redemption of your own character. I look to refill the cup with music, ironically, because it emptied me out all the way [laughs]. A couple doses of poison cures the first dose of poison.
That being said, has your attitude towards making music and being a career musician changed in the last 15 years?
It’s changing all the time. I never knew what it was or what it is now. I’m not Bruce Springsteen or someone that can financially and literally in the annals of history see substantially what my career is. It’s the career of a starving artist by will power and grind. You go out and maintain a career and it’s got some moments that are positive and some that are in the red, and all through that what you’re trying to do most of all – because you can’t count on money and record sales – so what you need to do at the foundation of it all is make sure you’re making records that you’re happy with and proud of. [You can’t] lose sight of that thing or give up on it. At no point is anything a sheer bet or did I have a full comprehension of what was around the corner. I think creating albums, making music, and being out on tour somehow makes you very present, it takes you out in the rest of the world. At the same time it’s often hard to see exactly where you are in that present moment. I know that’s a bit of a paradox there.
You worked with different musicians for this album than you have in the past. Is it freeing to collaborate with new people?
I’ve always played it loose with Howlin’ Rain for the most part. I think for Russian Wilds we rehearsed and rehearsed with one band, but with all the other records I always played it loose and fast and free with the recording process. I missed that doing the one for American [Recordings]. Then it came time to do this and I was like, I got a completely open slate here. I can bring in anybody I want, so I’m just going to go back to that other thing that I loved, which is not knowing what’s going to happen. I didn’t have musicians but I just booked the time and called some people. In some cases I called up folks that I’d never even met or talked to before up in Portland and asked if they wanted to fly down and be on the record. They thought I was fucking crazy, like some stalker, and I said, we got some mutual friends who recommended you and I’m taking them up on that recommendation. Then it was like, here’s a song, I’ll just play it, and when you play along we’ll roll tape. By the third take we got it, and it was something I basically wrote, but that spontaneity takes it beyond my imagination and control, and there’s something beautiful in that. I also called in old friends and they played a lot as the backing band. Nobody rehearsed a single note for [Mansion Songs]. In some cases I played them a demo I made or something like that, but there’s even a couple songs on there where I was literally like, this is what key it’s in, everyone just set up, and when I count it off just start playing in that key. I think it makes it a special kind of recorded music when you can do something like that. It’s something that almost never seems quite finished to the listener, I think in a positive way. It’s so ragged and never polished to the point that you completely lose the unexpected feeling in it.
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That’s interesting, because to me listening to at least some of the songs, it almost sounds sort of sweeping and composed and a lot more arranged.
That’s the irony of that whole little speech I just gave. Most people’s reactions to it [have been] that they couldn’t tell if it was ragged, so who’s to say? What is the method by which you make a record or a piece of art? Sometimes you get something that’s improvised and it comes out feeling very methodical. Granted, there are moments on the record, like on “Lucy Fairchild”, where it’s me playing everything except for the viola. Something about building things and layering them all on your own does give it kind of a composed, almost layered orchestral feel sometimes.
Your last album that came out was the live album (Live Rain), which is more guitar driven and has a lot more shredding on it, but this album seems more focused on lyrics and songs over guitar shredding. Was that a goal from the start?
With the Live Rain band it was a big sounding rock band with a lot of firepower there, and that was the strength of the thing. When I have a band of any kind I want to play up the strengths, and with that band there’s no way [we were] sitting back and strumming chords on the acoustic all day long. You want to let those guys mow everybody down. Then when that band dissolved I was like, this is the perfect opportunity – the reason why I named [Mansion Songs] what I did, and why I had no band, no rehearsed musicians, the same reason why I had so much guitar on the live album – [was because] I wanted to play up the strengths and capitalize on the elements around me, which was the unknown, unrehearsed aspect and the depressed, dark outlook. How do we take those things and make them the core of the creativity of this thing instead of blazing electric guitars? How do you make sorrow and unpolished vulnerability the core element?
How much does San Francisco play into the sensibility and mood of the music to you?
I’d been running around in Los Angeles and Hollywood and the upper echelons of the major label world and stuff like that. I’ll tell you, the Los Angeles music scene is a different vibe than San Francisco, and what’s going on with making records in that neck of the woods is different than what you have in the Bay Area, which might be the absence of industry. That was one reason why I put my heart and mind here, to go back into the basement and get a bit of that grit. San Francisco’s changing; I was recording the record on the edge of Chinatown, and running around San Francisco was always pretty wild and had a lot of color and flare. [It was] seeing a lot of musicians move out because the rent is too high and seeing a lot of money flood the city – which was already a fabulously wealthy city. In case you’re looking at one of the final chapters of a citywide transition, a legacy that’s changing, I wanted to write about some of those things that may disappear that were still in front of me, but maybe they won’t. I wrote about some of the sights and smells that you get when you’re hanging around in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, and some of these things aren’t changing anytime soon [laughs].
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Mansion Songs is supposed to be the first in a trilogy. How did you come up with the idea for that concept, and is the whole trilogy already laid out?
One of the reasons I stopped and took stock for the first time in over a decade was that I felt spiritually just kind of bottomed out. But I was writing incessantly. Even though I’d written tons of material in the American [Recordings] era, I was just writing new material, and even with Mansion Songs, as I was writing I had more than an album or two worth of stuff. On some days, even though I had planned to do one thing, I would just get up and write a brand new song in the morning in an hour and a half before I went into the studio. I just couldn’t stop writing, almost compulsively. I guess I felt like if I’m questioning where I am and what’s going on, well this stuff is coming out of me faster and more uncontrollably than ever before. Maybe that’s a sign or whatever, but I said I’d like to make a trilogy of records. These songs all have something related so I can connect them by this methodology. I think the other theory was that instead of taking four years between records, I’d make them quickly because I’ve got the vibes in mind. So I’m going to try and make three records in a two year span and have them be close enough to each other to be looked at as a single piece afterwards.
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