Comin' Straight outta Eureka
An interview with a crazy muthafucka named Ethan Miller

Ben Allen, staff

I stare down from the balcony, shocked. What had started as a disagreement between a music fan and the police had escalated into a full-blown riot. The police had responded to noise complaints and decided to shut down the concert. The first band, Couch of Eureka, had already played. While Hookah, another local band, was setting up, the Eureka Police Department literally decided to pull the plug. Now I watched, horrified and fascinated as the police punched local punk rockers and attempted to subdue the whole scene.

The year was 1994, I was 16, and this was my initiation into rock and roll.

We had come to see Hookah, fronted by Ethan Miller, one of my closest friend's cousins. The band played stripped-down dirty rock/punk rock music and I had become an early fan. Ethan was visibly upset and kept apologizing to us, as we had made a two-hour drive to come down to see him and his band. We retired to his house as he went to the Humboldt County jail in an attempt to bail out some of his friends.

Since that time, I have closely followed Ethan's musical career, perhaps closer than any other artist. From the early, simple music of Hookah, to the mostly solo four-track recordings of "The Philistine Swine" while in college, to the more popular and critically acclaimed Comets On Fire and Howlin Rain, Ethan has had an incredible evolution as a singer, songwriter and artist. While he's lived in various parts of the state, his music has always had a distinctly "California feel" to it, especially the more recent material with Howlin Rain.

After signing with Rick Rubin's American Recordings in 2007, Ethan was finally able to quit his day job and focus solely on life as an artist. I used to marvel at the fact that he would tour with Sonic Youth while in Comets, then return home to the Bay Area where he worked at a floral shop delivering flowers.

So what happens when you're not touring, not recording but living day-to-day life as a musician? I caught up with Ethan recently and discussed what he's been up to, why the Grateful Dead matter, his Humboldt roots, and how obsessively listening to Miles Davis can drive your spouse nuts.

BEN: Your last album, "Magnificent Fiend", was released more than two years ago. Howlin Rain has played only a handful of shows in the past year. Where has most of your creative time and energy been focused in the past 12 months?

ETHAN MILLER: Ninety-five percent of my time and energy has been focused on writing and rehearsing the next album. I jog some days and watch some television at night and read in the morning over tea. Cook dinner, buy groceries, shower. The rest is writing, arranging, rehearsing, listening back meticulously to every rehearsal (which I record), rewrite, rearrange, rehearse, record, listen back, make changes, rearrange, rehearse, record, listen back — OK, the arrangement sounds pretty good; let's just keep rehearsing. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Some days feel like a bit of a hamster wheel and other days are full of “A-Ha!” moments or “Eureka!” moments, perhaps more appropriately. It is an experiment in a highly structured regimen to enhance the quality and scope of our creative output.

B: Not having a "typical" day job, do you ever wake up and wonder what you're going to do that day?

E: Unfortunately no, I haven't really woken up and really wondered what I would do today since I was in my early 20s. That's not to say that some extraordinary things that I never could have imagined or some strange trip haven't filled out the hours of a day that otherwise seemed normal when I awoke. But sadly I believe most of us rely on the order of our working lives to make sense of our lives as a whole. Those of us who don't have a forced structure create our own born from the same impulses and work ethics. It is the most sad and interesting part of the American dream to be willing to work yourself to death in an obsessively ordered fashion to try to obtain the right to break that work regime and break that order that constricts your life. We all work our whole lives to try to get to a point that we don't have to work. In true American form, it seems to be a cycle that runs on perseverance and change in the short term, and yet in the long term continues to yield cyclical results. When I was younger I was much more of a free spirit and did awake some days and wonder, "What will I do today? What will happen of all the infinite roads in front of me? I'll just walk out onto the street and let the wind catch me." Those days are long gone. What I do now when I awake is follow and build upon structure that I have created.

B: Is it ever hard for you to remain motivated to do so much writing and arranging?

E: Usually not; I am a very motivated person, especially when it comes to my own art. Arranging sometimes can bog you down if you are chipping away on a song that just won't work right for you but you believe it is good and just won't sit down right. That can become a little obsessive and a bit of a drag — an extended boxing match. But I love to write; the initial burst of inspiration and the song flowing out onto the page in front of you ... sometimes hours can pass like seconds if you are writing a good song that is writing itself and just spilling out. Many days I have awoken to a song and sat down with my tea and robe and slippers in the morning while the fog is still burning off the hills and all of a sudden I look up and the sun is going down outside and I'm still sitting there with my robe and slippers on and a cup of cold tea and a lot of sheets of new lyrics and chords across the floor and table. That is one of the most wonderful feelings a songwriter can have. The "runner's high" of the songwriter's world.

B: So, would you consider yourself a prolific songwriter?

E: Yes, I would. Fairly prolific anyway.

B: Although the band has only been together four years, you've lost five members. Do you intentionally approach projects focused on yourself as primary songwriter/frontman with a rotating cast of collaborators, or has it been difficult to keep a solid group together?

E: People come and go in groups and that is just the way it is. Ask any group on any level, no matter how great or little their ambition, if it is difficult to keep a group together and the answer is always YES. You know when you get together for Thanksgiving with the family and the first three days everyone is on their best behavior? Then days four through seven, people start to nip at each other a bit, then a snowstorm hits and no one can go home, and the second week real ugly fights are breaking out ... and even more dangerous are the quiet strange social subplots that begin to unfold between the different family members. By week three, the airport is still closed and all rental car agencies are sold out for two weeks ... The fights aren’t vocal anymore; each family member is beginning to let themselves go physically — drinking to excess, bags under their eyes, the shakes, swearing that if they ever get out of here they will disown the others. The storm rages on and at some point in week four, the power has gone out and the food is gone and as everyone hunkers over a small fire of furniture in the attic and prepares to freeze to death and starve simultaneously there is one last moment through the shivering and the tears of, “I didn’t mean what I said. I do love you guys. I’m glad we die together.” Take that scenario, put it in a much smaller environment (like a five-seat van for 10 hours a day) and amplify it times five years instead of five weeks, and that’s basically it.

B: Please name for me five albums released after 1990 that you feel are absolutely essential for a music lover's record collection.

E: Jesus, I hate these kinds of questions. I always buckle under the pressure of “name that greatest album.” Plus, I go through phases so quickly that it’s hard for me to remember which I truly think are best, but here goes:

1. Nick Cave, “Boatman’s Call”. Any music lover can just put on the headphones, pour a glass of absinthe and just fall hypnotized into the bottomless well that is Nick Cave’s ballad work. Dylan wrote some great love songs, Lennon/McCartney wrote some great love songs, Roy Orbison wrote some great love songs, but in “Into My Arms” Nick Cave wrote the best love song since those giants walked the holy fields of the immortal love song in their 60s/70s peaks. Like all of the greatest art, it is pure and simple and stunning. Nick Cave is a giant in post-80s music; perhaps not the most influential, but he and Tom Waits arguably share the award for the most artistically fierce and noncommercial artists to hold their footing and, against all odds, expand their influence and position in popular music.

2. Fushitsusha, PSF 15/16. Keiji Haino’s legendary double album (not the only one) from 1991. I suggest this in any music lover’s collection for those awful moments in a hard-core music lover’s life when you just get that wretched feeling that everything in music has been done before and now we are just recycling ideas. That is a totally false feeling and a negative illusion that comes on once in a while and can cause suicidal thoughts in the deepest of the deep music collectors and lovers. This album, and many of Haino’s shocking early Fushitsusha albums, created a kind of music and emotional landscape unlike anything I have ever heard before or since or will ever hear again. This is not “fun” music to listen to but a true music lover will be intrigued and confused by the “foreignness” of this music, and if you stick with it and really let it take you there you will be rewarded as a different sense of rhythm, melody, expression and dissonance all begin to beckon a fully formed world from the shadows all around you. This is my album that reminds me and reassures me that all that has been done and all that will ever been done in music is always a unique expression of the creator and has never “been done before” and will never be done again.

OK, I only got through 2 of those.

B: There has been a huge evolution in songwriting from the self-titled first Comets On Fire record (2000) through Howlin Rain’s "Magnificent Fiend" (2008). Although released within two years of each other, Comets' "Blue Cathedral," and the first Howlin Rain album are drastically different in sound and feel. Was there a certain time where you felt you went through a major transformation in your approach to songwriting? What changed?

E: I’m not sure if there was a big change in me or not. I just wrote what came naturally to me and tried not to think about why too much. Perhaps it has to do with my tendency to consume music I listen to as opposed to hoarding it. Meaning, I don’t tend to listen and be directly influenced by the same stuff over years and years, I usually get obsessively into something, let it completely engulf me and lodge itself in my subconscious and then I walk away at just the moment that my wife threatens to leave me if she has to hear one more Miles Davis complete sessions box set played back to back for the past three months. That thing is still in there now in my DNA and subconscious and it still has an effect, but it’s not as intense because something else moves into the foreground to have immediate influence over my view of how to make music. And of course the type of band you are playing with makes a difference on the way you are inspired to write. The way I wrote in a room with Comets on Fire — with the amps cranked to 10, drunk on beer and hammering away with screaming wah-wah solos — is a whole different influence than the way I might write out in the woods at my cabin or in my spare bedroom in my apartment late at night with a gin and tonic and acoustic guitar. But I have never changed my approach to songwriting. I have only tried to hone it. I still use the same methods as when I first began writing songs when I was 14 and over the years I have simply tried to bring in more techniques to keep the channels open and forward-facing once the songs are in the refining process.

B: Howlin Rain was signed to Rick Rubin's American Recordings for the release of "Magnificent Fiend". Tell us a little about your relationship with Rubin, and how much influence he and the label will have over the next Howlin Rain release.

E: As far as Rick’s influence goes, he has pushed me to do an incredible amount of pre-production for our next record, meaning writing, arrangement and rehearsal before you begin to actually record the album. Some bands do tons of this and others do none and just record in the studio once they get there (which is a lot more costly obviously). On "Magnificent Fiend" I rehearsed rough outlines of the songs with two of the guys in Rain for about two or three months before we recorded, and then the whole band with all five of us rehearsed for two days before he went in and recorded the album. For this album, the entire band has rehearsed anywhere from three to five days a week for a year and a half so far. So even to this point, Rick has been a pretty influential element.

B: When do you think the band will be ready to start recording the new album?

E: I don't know, but we are close. Not sure what that amounts to in actual moons. That is the one part of my life that is outside the structure, strangely enough ...

B: To me, many of your songs seem like short stories. Does literature play a role in your songwriting? Where do you find inspiration for your lyrics?

E: I take that as a compliment that my songs sound like short stories. I have strived for that in the past much of the time. Literature absolutely plays a role in my songwriting. Language is how we put our own experiences in context of the experiences of the human race and our history. That is what all songs are; one person’s expression of the human experience in relation to the whole history of human experience. How successful you are at expressing this experience can be measured by amount of resonance your expression creates on a universal level. In popular music the tool is language and literacy. You could argue that the music itself is creating the impact but to me when it all boils down it is the words and voice, even if it is just the sound the words create, that is what makes that final invaluable connection.

B: You grew up in the small, tight-knit punk rock scene in Eureka. I have to ask, when did it become acceptable to listen to the Grateful Dead and play what could be considered “hippie” music?

E: My guess is that probably more folks in the punk scene in Eureka harbored a secret pleasure or fascination in listening to the Grateful Dead than was admitted. But yes, the Dead and the fans that we saw around us in that community seemed to represent much of what we found distasteful about '90s burnout bro-hippie culture. Personally, when I was in my youth and running totally wild, my tastes leaned toward punk rock music — music that jives with that constant rush of adrenaline that you feel when you're 20 years old and just eating up the world like a glutton. One of the things that is positive about getting older is that the way you listen, the way you taste, the way you smell and see things begins to have depth and your sensuality doesn’t have to only be about bombast to resonate with your mind and body. In that same way, one of my greatest joys of getting older and gaining some small measure of wisdom is that I have opened myself to all music and found that every bit of it can teach me something. Even if that means learning from someone else’s mistakes or hearing and learning things that you don’t want to do but should for the sake of yourself, or do want to do but shouldn’t for the sake of your listener. The Grateful Dead are a veritable microcosmos of these complexities in their music both live, on album, as a business model, as a social community and as a cultural phenomenon. There really is nothing else nor will there ever be anything else quite as baffling as the Dead. I’d say that whether you “like” it or not there is much to be learned about the way that you want to go about making your own music and the methods that you will use to find your own great moments by listening to that strange befuddling landscape that is the music of the Grateful Dead. Personally, sometimes I love it and sometimes I don’t, but I have learned that it is an exceptional body of work and very valuable to our history. And just for the record I do not make “hippie music”; what is that, some kind of rash?

B: Can you name one person in particular that has influenced you as a musician more than anyone else?

E: No, not really musically speaking. I don’t think these things are easily sorted out; it’s a little like saying, “How did you become you?” Though in psychological terms I’m sure my folks' encouragement to play music from a young age has had the greatest effect if we are to believe that we are basically shaped irreversibly in life when we are children. I know there are those adults in the world that don’t believe that being an artist or a musician is a worthy pursuit in life; they would rather see their children become “normal professionals” and it doesn’t take too much negative influence over a child’s desire to do something to instill them with guilt and negativity in association with that desire. My folks did the opposite. They provided the tools that I could use to learn to be a musician, and through our travels in Europe in my young years and a deep interest that my mother had in the arts and my father in literature, I was raised believing that to be an artist and a creative person was the most important thing you could do with your life and that if you have a sense of your own self and your own direction, you are probably right and should follow it.

B: “Magnificent Fiend” featured relatively accessible songs in comparison with the some of the more abrasive material from Comets On Fire. Has there been a conscious effort on your part to write music that will appeal to a broader audience?

E: Like I said before, I write from my heart, my subconscious and my influences, not from a contrived place. In the back of Charles Bukoswki’s books in the “about the author” sections it said that he had printed on his tombstone: “Don’t Try”. When I was first reading his books in the mid to late '90s, I always thought that was a sort of “beautiful loser” statement about defying ambition. But as I got older and have worked harder and harder at my career and my musical work, it finally came to me what a beautiful artistic statement that was. A beautiful poem about the creation of art. You cannot force real art to be born; the audience will smell a fake like shit on a baking sheet on Main Street on a Tucson summer day. The truest moment an artist can have is when you open yourself up like a birdcage and pour yourself completely and mindlessly into a song — all your molten being. It may be something frightening, something strange, something full of humility, perhaps even humiliating, it will be something resonant and beautiful because of all this. But you cannot manufacture that goo by will. You just can’t.