E.W. Harris Unveils New Single 'The Nail Beside The Door'

With the release of the new single, “The Nail Beside The Door,” alt-folk singer/songwriter E.W. Harris has announced the forthcoming EP, Machine Living in Relief, due out in 2025. An ambitious collection of songs born out of a last call challenge to make a completely acoustic record about robots and AIs, Machine Living in Relief is the latest in a five-album series set inside Harris's self-styled “romantic dystopia” Rocket City. 

If one weren't already familiar with Harris's more traditionalist background, the chummy strum of his guitalele reaches out and shakes your hand by way of friendly introduction. He also incorporates a number of unusual instruments (cedar flute, a broken autoharp), outside-the-box toys (Speak-n-Spell, Mr. Robot, Magic Wand Reader), and MacGyvered percussion hacks (can full of rice, “suitcase that I hit with a roll of duct tape”) throughout these folkways-meets-the-spaceways tracks. Call it asteroid field recording.

In a strange bit of real-time lore that feels like it could only happen to Harris, one of his cousins walked up to him mid-set a few years back and handed him a banjo, offering only the briefest explanation – "Here man, I'm not gonna learn this and I thought you might use it" – before promptly leaving the gig. The result, some months later as Harris tinkered with the unfamiliar instrument under lockdown, was this album's lead single, “The Nail Beside the Door.” “Written from the perspective of a prisoner who becomes emotionally dependent on an AI companion,” it effectively sets out to explore the ideas behind the album opener from the other side, with all the profound, maddening aloneness of COVID isolation bleeding through the character loud and clear. 

Though perhaps best known for his event horizon synths, spaghettified guitar effects, and above all, his overwhelming, spacetime singularity of a voice, Harris's career began, some 25 years ago, in a much more earthbound vein, with the train trestle roots-rock of Luminous and the cable knit jazz-folk of The Eric Harris Group.

A Southern transplant originally from Akron, Ohio, Harris was always something of an outsider to the “cool town” music scene of Athens, Georgia, often preferring to hone his craft through neighboring hamlets and intimate house shows.  In this way, he slowly but surely began drawing likemindedly wayward musicians into his sphere, like curious fireflies from the gloaming – an undeniable bonfire in the outer dark – such that by the time he decided to start experimenting with pedals and loops and tales of space pirates on the run, he already had the makings of a whole different band at his disposal, ready and willing to follow him into the stratosphere. The bottled heat lightning of Ghost Dad the Robot and its next-gen replicant Resident Patient were factory floor playgrounds of electronic excess, as likely to make you quietly rue lost love as to grab a beautiful stranger and work those feelings out on the dancefloor. Climbing fast through his personal sound barriers toward a new echelon of creative fertility, it was with his parting gift to smalltown country life – the exceptional A Waste of Water and Time – that Harris finally adopted the E.W. moniker he uses to this day, packed up his gear, and set coordinates for NYC. 

Relocation quickly gave rise to the more ambitious, cloudbursting inventions of The Sky Captains of Industry, the project that first ushered Harris's growing fanbase into the world of Rocket City. “It's New York City, 250 years in the post-apocalyptic future,” he explains, with the eager enthusiasm of a kid just home from Space Camp. “But all the buildings have been replaced by rocket ships that never took off. It's my Neverland, Star Wars expanded universe, or Narnia, I guess you could say. I wanted a place to tell exciting and compelling stories that didn't have to be burdened with my own everyday existence.”

Through subsequent releases and relentless touring Harris steadily populated his teeming retropolis with comet-hopping hobos and android vagabonds of every stripe, worldbuilding his future from the ground up until it finally skyscraped against the present, with Machine Living in Relief, and the fateful fortune of that half-remembered night at the bar.

If Machine Living in Relief is truly the result of some apocryphal gauntlet throw issued at last call, Harris has met it in spades. Both a natural outgrowth of what came before, and a tantalizing peek at what might be soon to come, it pushes all the right buttons – even when those buttons are connected to the characters themselves – and leaves you contemplating your place within our brave new world of hyperconnected loneliness and transhuman striving. “If the heart pumps a turbine that generates power to the computer half of the cyborg brain, what is the value of the parts? Is addiction just a modality of being a divided whole? If time is not linear, in remembering our past mistakes do we actually return to those moments?” Harris wonders, waxing eloquent about his curious, acoustic robot friends, before adding, with that storyteller's twinkle in his eye, “It's a damn good thing songs don't need to answer questions.”

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