Howlin Rain will release a new album, The Dharma Wheel, on October 8 via singer-songwriter and guitarist Ethan Miller’s own Silver Current Records. Miller and company also shared the title track as the lead single.
Miller teamed back up with Tim Green to co-produce The Dharma Wheel. Green resumed his co-producing role after working on Howlin Rain’s previous albums Magnificent Fiend and The Russian Wilds. Miller tapped his Howlin Rain bandmates, bassist Jeff McElroy, drummer Justin Smith and guitarist Dan Cervantes, to distill the energy of the album’s six road-tested tracks into studio magic. The Dharma Wheel also features contributions from violinist Scarlet Rivera (Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue) and keyboardist Adam MacDougall (Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Circles Around the Sun).
Miller shared his thoughts on The Dharma Wheel in a statement. Read his words below:
I wanted The Dharma Wheel to be a portal from our everyday world, the one from which you stand on hard ground and hold the album in your hands and peer into the artwork, and into another universe. You enter into that universe with your eyes and ears and mind and take a ride through free-form meditation on these ideas—from big, fundamental concepts about our existence right down to the grease that rolls down the arm of a pulp novel killer as he eats a gas station hot dog in an old Dodge in an alleyway.
We were trying to build a world big enough that the imagination won’t go soft on you after just a few listens and where our love for this music, and music in general—along with a good dose of audacity—creates a magic carpet ride through the world of The Dharma Wheel. In pursuing that I think we also managed to make a record that has a lot of joy in it: the joy of playing music, the joy of experiencing music, the joy of storytelling and poetry, the kind of singular joy and extended ecstatic moment that only a real ‘band’ can express in just that way. And it’s this joy, this exuberance and dedication to the lines of cosmic expression — all centered in the exalted art of the everyday — that constructs the heart of the record. At its core, The Dharma Wheel is the triumph of a working band, a transmission from a never-paused before arriving for our strange, bruised, spectacular now.
Howlin Rain shared the multi-movement 16-minute suite “The Dharma Wheel,” premiered by MOJO, to preview the album. Stream the song below:
The Dharma Wheel Tracklist:
- Prelude
- Don’t Let The Tears
- Under The Wheels
- Rotoscope
- Annabelle
- Dharma Wheel
