Mitch Rowland, Whistling Pie
For Mitch Rowland, New Year’s Eve used to feel like just another holiday, but as of late, the strike of midnight scares him. Since becoming a father, time passes in blinks, and any reminder of that stirs Rowland to write. “Everyone has their whole life to make their first record. While I was making my second, it felt like time was slipping away.” On his sophomore album, Whistling Pie, Rowland captures little moments before they escape his grasp. A walk with one of his kids in the garden produces a melody; a drive to the grocery store an instrumental interlude. “Life pulls you this way and that, and those things end up in songs more than anything. It’s not something I think about, though, it just kind of happens that way.”
Rowland’s 2023 debut, Come June, introduced the world to Rowland as an artist in his own right. After his star rose penning pop songs with Harry Styles and playing in his band, the songwriting on Come June exhibited Rowland’s introspective, folk-adjacent approach to guitar music. He’s been obsessed with the instrument since childhood, and taught himself to play alone in his Columbus, Ohio bedroom. Come June earned him comparisons to Nick Drake and Bert Jansch. Since Come June, Rowland has performed sold-out shows across the U.S., played to crowds of 80k+ internationally, made his television debut on late night shows including The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel Live! and earned chart-topping positions on Billboard’s Alternative New Artist Albums, American/Folk Abums, Heatseekers charts, and more. Most notably, he and his family have relocated more or less permanently to a small village in England.
The remoteness of this new home influenced the writing on Whistling Pie. “Both records were written in the countryside, less so in cities,” Rowland reflects. “Landscape and stillness are a huge part of why I wanted to pick up the guitar in the first place.” With a young family to care for, Rowland has plenty to do, and he describes Whistling Pie as a “quilt of randomness” that makes up a life. “My family has been the most life changing and constantly changing thing going on.” “One in One Out” is a meditation on the cyclical nature of life that closes with the image of a boy waving through a school bus window as an ambulance speeds past. Rowland conjured the image from experiencing the death of a family friend around the same time his second son was born. “When blood rushes high/ To the brain and you’re/ Dulling the pain/ And you’re doing just fine,” Rowland sings in a lilting falsetto.
While he was writing Whistling Pie, Rowland turned to the legendary guitarist JJ Cale as an inspirational north star. He played Cale’s albums Naturally and Troubadour on loop during his wife’s second pregnancy, and was taken with the use of drum machines. You can hear the influence especially clearly on “Do it For Real” and the spry, propulsive “Really Ready.” That single features a guitar banjo, as does “Honey Babe,” accompanied by a spry piano. “I wanted to dress the songs up a bit. When you hear Neil Young play the banjo, he’s likely playing a 1920s six-string Gibson guitar banjo.”
“Really Ready” was a rediscovery. While he was deleting old content from his phone to make more room for photos of his kids, Rowland found a video he’d made of himself attempting to “hack away” at the song in 2017. The earworm centerpiece of Whistling Pie, “Really Ready” is an optimistic fingerpicked jaunt. The hushed following track, “Be Your Man,” earns comparison to Elliott Smith and was also pulled from a bygone slush pile. Rowland demoed the song in his father-in-law’s home studio where his wife learned to play the drums as a kid.
To make Whistling Pie, Rowland decamped to the storied Rockfield Studios, which happened to be a 20-odd minute drive from his new home. The legend of Rockfield looms large, and the studio’s impressive list of credits includes 17-year-old Ozzy Osbourne cutting the “Paranoid” demo for starters, which only scratches the surface of the hundreds of artists who have contributed to the Rockfield story. “It’s just an old farmhouse, you wouldn’t know it was a studio just looking at it.” Rowland brought back Come June collaborator Rob Schnapf as producer and welcomed a smattering of friends to the pastoral studio. In what Rowland describes as “the middle of nowhere,” Whistling Pie came to fruition and the analog studio contributed to the album’s texture. The swaggering intro to the bluesy “In the Morning” sounds off to outlaw country, while the instrumental interlude “Carrot and Wine” is a soundscape suited to track the early evening hours. Named for a mini mart where you can buy anything from “whiskey to broccoli,” the shop is as much a part of Rowland’s daily routine. “My eldest knows going to Carrot and Wine means chocolate.”
While Rowland’s family is the foundation of this album, they rarely appear as characters on Whistling Pie. One exception is the tender “You Could,” written under pressure of new parenthood. “Take a step from your mother’s handbook/ Under pressure/ You and me in the world/ You could be good,” Rowland sings to his wife, though he might as well be singing to himself. When he started working on Whistling Pie, Rowland worried about a sophomore slump and wondered if it was even possible to crank out an album while tending to a family both at home and on the road. But watching his kids grow had the opposite effect; their constant transformation forced him to transform his approach to music making. Procrastination wasn’t an option. Going slow, as he had on his first record, wasn’t either. “Being a dad makes me feel like the time is now.” Whistling Pie digs its heels into the present, capturing flickering moments before they fade.
Publicity Contacts
Website
Press Kit
Photos
