Miles Hewitt

The green murmuring of dreams has long echoed through Miles Hewitt’s work, whether in poetry or song. After years leading Boston art-rock collective The Solars, whose debut EP Retitled Remastered landed on DigBoston’s Best Massachusetts Albums of 2017, Hewitt returned to Harvard College to finish his award-winning collection of poems The Candle is Forever Learning to Sing. Following his graduation in 2018, Hewitt made for the sylvan Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, settling in a small hilltown just down the road from a friend’s recording studio and a few miles from where he’d spent his first year of life.

It was there, amidst the cycling greens, browns, and blues, that the songs that would become Hewitt’s debut solo album, Heartfall, emerged. Drawing on British and American folk music, ‘70s songwriter rock, psychedelia, krautrock, and electronic music, Heartfall seeks what the late critic Ian MacDonald called “the chime.” It’s an album for album-lovers, redolent with longing and mystery, magic and dread, wielding the poet’s eye for enchantment, the musician’s ear for the unsayable, and the mystic’s heart of gold.

“Blow wind, blow rain / blow it all away,” Hewitt pleas on the haunting ‘Love Comes to Those Who Ask.’ “I know you know how, just give me any other shape.” This is music on an elemental scale — cycles and wheels, warped and misused, recur, as do fires, rain, heavenly bodies, spirits, and dreams — with Hewitt’s unmistakable silvery voice smiling near the center. Formally spare, few of Heartfall’s compositions have recognizable verse/chorus structures, instead holding patterns that melt away only when fully exhausted. Hewitt recalls: “As I became interested in a less anthropocentric mentality, I wondered if this could be expressed through formally organic songs, built from looping phrases or motifs and evolving at the level of the line.” The effect of these slow changes — a kind of temporal dilation that can make it easy to forget just how long you’ve been listening to a given song — invites a state of consciousness more familiar in drone and ambient music than most rock ‘n’ roll.

Opening track Moongreening arrived “all at once, like a complete transmission” during an uneasy and sleepless night about a month into the pandemic. Ranging from ancient mythology to modern emergency, its chorus (“Days of doubt, nights of dreaming”) was influenced by Robert Graves’ seminal The White Goddess and establishes the album’s liminal, twilit mood, while its instrumentation — building from a naked vocal-and-piano solo performance to a grand production featuring saxophones, congas, and a string quartet — introduces its epic musical scope.

Later, Heartfall’s title track foresees an uncanny autumn, one that has arrived at the wrong time, or is perhaps the last one. Hewitt’s sandpapery vocal — “It ain’t much, but it’s home / out here with everything in bloom” — weaves eerily with Griffin Brown’s chromatic string quartet arrangement, which seems to speak in its own inhuman tongue. The Ark opens with the sound of rushing water that transforms into a tempest of drums and bass, setting up a search for the mythical vessel that can deliver humanity from climatic doom; Vision, the album’s closer, ends with a rainbow — a covenant of ecological balance and safety. Song for Sam attempts communion with a stabilizing Muse, even while suspecting that the requisite rituals and knowledge may have become polluted, the lines cut off:

Take the Lord’s name and a snake egg
And a moonbeam so bright
Deep into the forest
Where she’s dressed all in white
Take all you learned
Though it wasn’t enough
And if you don’t know what to do
With such powerful stuff
Then do like the tough do
When the going gets tough

After relocating from western Massachusetts to Brooklyn in 2019, Hewitt began recruiting a variety of stalwart session players, including members of the bands of Devendra Banhart, Kevin Morby, and Aldous Harding. These tremendous contributors make Heartfall a bottomless sonic feast that rewards careful listening in headphones — from Jared Samuel’s moonlit organ on “Heartfall” and drummer David Christian’s looping groove on “Words Out of My Mouth” to Shahzad Ismaily’s mesmeric backwards piano on “Art of War” and Jack McLoughlin’s ominous storms of electric guitar on the “Gimme Some Truth”-meets-Ege Bamyasi jam “Reporter.” Recording sessions took place during the pandemic at a variety of studios in Brooklyn, upstate New York, and Massachusetts, with Hewitt self-producing and Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Leonard Cohen) mixing the results.

Dense and dreamlike, yet undeniably alive, Heartfall takes up a spiritual quest for unifying “deep streams” amid a fracturing land.

FFO: Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, and Astral Weeks; Thom Yorke and Neil Young; Can and Hissing of Summer Lawns-era Joni Mitchell.

Moongreening press quote

We all know on some level that the world is just something we dreamed. One of my strongest memories of the beginning of the pandemic — those first weeks — was this feeling that humanity, in all our hubris, had finally come up against a force with which there could be no negotiation. For those of us prone to daydreaming, this submission allowed for a flourishing of magical thinking, utopian plans, "nature is healing" memes, and other esoteric concerns. What else could we become? I remember days cooped up with Robert Graves' "The White Goddess," a masterwork of associative thinking and a guide for poets looking to get in touch with the Muse, and Amitav Ghosh's "The Great Derangement," which explores how writers and artists represent environmental cataclysm.

"Moongreening" arrived all at once, like a direct transmission, in this headspace, in the middle of a sleepless night in April 2020. I was living alone in an apartment in Brooklyn, had just left a long-term relationship, and longed to be back in green western Massachusetts. I was very, very emotionally naked. I wrote all the words down one after the other in a notebook in about ten minutes, found the melody on the piano the next day.

I see it as a song about vengeance and mystery, ancient mythology and modern emergency existing side by side. There are many opposites in the song: "black angels," "days of doubt, nights of dreaming," "honor/trap/curse/key," "Manhattan/the freeway" — all are doorways you can step through, one world to another. I see the Oracle of Delphi in the lyrics, as well as the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who tells us, "Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for ten thousand generations." I also remember a college professor who told us about "twilight vision," that when we were hunter-gatherers we relied mostly on our peripheral vision in order to spot the small movements of prey while hunting at dusk, and that we can still access this ancient part of the brain by reorienting our awareness away from what our eyes typically focus on. A pretty neat metaphor. All that is in the song, too.

I knew it was a special song, but had no idea how to approach recording it or even what instrument to play. After meeting and recording with legendary drummer David Christian in January 2021, I brought the song uncertainly to a session and played it on the piano. David seemed to instantly know everything that had to happen — not playing for the first few verses, that svelte hi-hat that drifts in for the first chorus and next verse, and then that incredible groove that he drops into halfway through the song. It's the performance of a master. From there, it was all gravy: Brian Betancourt's bob-and-weave bass part, saxophones and a string quartet arranged by Jared Samuel, and some background vocals I dubbed on later. It was obvious it needed to be the first track on the album, and my first song put into the world.