Ethan Miller
ETHAN Miller has come full circle. After 20 years living in Oakland, he and his wife recently bought a farmhouse in Humboldt County in the far north of California, close to where he grew up alongside some of his future Comets On Fire bandmates. “There’s a saying about this place,” he confides. “They say it’s ‘behind the redwood curtain’. It means that you can get lost up here.”
Miller laughs heartily when reminded that he’s about to enter his third decade as a recording artist. “Making it that long in indie music is like 10 lifetimes!” he reckons – and in his case, that’s not such an exaggeration. A member of at least five different outfits down the years, even his ongoing journey at the helm of Howlin Rain has been a particularly bumpy ride, with Miller regularly forced to recruit an entire new band. However, you sense that he relishes the turbulence, which feeds back into his music – always motoring, often at full tilt, navigating vibrant American backwaters with an infectious lust for life. “There’s a regeneration every couple of albums and hence a new aesthetic, a new flesh and blood,” he explains. “I try to carry the bones on from body to body to keep that original flame alive.” SAM RICHARDS
COMETS ON FIRE COMETS ON FIRE
SELF-RELEASED, 2001
Spontaneous space-rock tear-up thrusts the fledgling band into the vanguard of New Weird America
Ben Flashman [] and I were playing in another group and it was getting a little wibbly-wobbly. I wanted to make a radical reaction to that particular musical predicament, so I said to Ben, “Let’s do a little project where we just blast this thing out –] and went into this garage we were renting as a practice space in Santa Cruz. We basically put the four-track up and blasted through those songs pretty much first or second take, it just magically came together.
