Miles Hewitt Releases New Single 'Heartfall'

Miles Hewitt is sharing "Heartfall," the final single & title track from his forthcoming debut LP.

Miles' ambitious debut LP, Heartfall, is out on August 26th and features contributions from members of Devendra Banhart, Kevin Morby, and Aldous Harding's bands. Click here to pre-order the record. In case you've missed them, check out the previous singles "The Ark" & "Moongreening"

"The song embodies a gentle pastoral mood, taking on a pensive and reflective air that dives from the burdens of duress and distress for a landing of solace and comfort." - Week In Pop

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 2017 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 ambitious and wide-ranging 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.

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.

Listen to the new single here:

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