Rick Rubin Digs Howlin Rain's Distorted View of the '70s

On Magnificent Fiend, "Lord Have Mercy" is the literal gospel according to Miller. It references classic gospel choir scales and chords, slides in slow-burning organ melodies, and offers warnings of plagues like man-eating insects. Like the rest of the album, the song sheds skins with each new passage. A reflective piano bit backs Miller's hushed sinner's confessional; a triumphant Allman Brothers lick aids his plea for mercy; and then the heavens give way to a loud instrumental celebration of this finale — Miller giving himself over to a god who "has my number under the thunder in his hand." The song ends in a tailspin of ecstatic vocal harmonies, sprawling to the outer edges of what he calls "faith and doom."

Miller's lyrics are dosed with references to God and Jesus. That may seem odd since he is agnostic, but he points out that his "personal faith in this world and the faith of my narrative voice are two separate things." He says he calls on biblical allusions as a lyrical device. "I'm using it as metaphor for different kinds of things that I'm trying to say very quickly in short stanzas," he adds. "You bring religious elements in, and you have a couple thousand years' worth of resonance just in one phrase."

Other songs tone down the biblical lightning, but are just as jubilant about man struggling with his beliefs. "Goodbye Ruby" is a fun boogie-rock tune with a blue lining of homesickness turning the narrator's "heart a beggar." Miller's velvet croon tears open the more he remembers what's been left behind, turning his delivery into a passionate, horns-backed wail by the end. But that sentiment gets flipped in "El Rey," when Miller tells a friend to untangle himself from the past, offering assurances that "You don't have to change/You don't have to hold onto your past/You don't have to carry it down this path."

Magnificent Fiend's songs hang on you, as the native of the misty North Coast would say, "heavy as three days of rain." That's due in large part to the musicians Miller handpicked for the band, a crew with the skills to let loose with his vision. Drummer Garett Goddard is a fixture on the East Bay punk and garage scene; bassist Ian Gradek has been a buddy since high school; and regular guitarist Mike Jackson occasionally trades off duties with Drunk Horse's Eli Eckert. But it's guitarist, keyboardist, and horn player Joel Robinow (also from Drunk Horse) who really sparks with Miller musically.

Sitting in producer Tim Green's Louder Studios on a rainy January night, Robinow and Miller lay down radio edits of "Calling Lightning Pt. 2" and "Nomads." Isolating the pair pinpoints a chemistry that can go unnoticed in Howlin Rain's mellow maelstroms. Their voices were made to harmonize together, dancing all over the melody lines and sounding at turns woeful, weary, and old-soul wise, with Miller the more weathered of the two. Robinow also breezes through myriad styles on a piano. Listening to the playbacks, Green jokes that one of Robinow's ivory interludes sounds very "Welcome to the Hyatt Hotel," while Miller asks his friend to aim for more of a "hot-tub jam" vibe on another. Just before midnight, Robinow achieves the highest compliments from Miller, who tags his sorta-jazzy, sorta-Latin style for a song "very Romancing the Stone."

Movie references are all over Magnificent Fiend. In another contrast to the musicians who can discuss the minutiae of fusion guitar gods with the best of the jam-band geeks, Miller looked to blockbusters from Armageddon ("That part when Bruce Willis knows he's never coming back") to Ghostbusters to summon the right emotional resonance. Those clues point to the populist nature of Howlin Rain's music, even if you can't hear them outright. Where Comets on Fire's appeal was in confronting fans with a shit-ton of distortion, Howlin Rain offers a more melodic — and accessible — alternative. "Howlin Rain music is music for emotions like joy and sorrow, not necessarily testing the limits of musical artistry," he says.

And yet Howlin Rain still contains an essential edge, a core of conflictions where more mainstream acts compress down the contrasts. These aren't simple Black Crowes ballads. And the songs are still a bit long for KFOG's Acoustic Sunrise and a tad crunchy for Live 105's spit-shined aesthetic. Magnificent Fiend condenses the struggle among good, evil, and otherwise — one that's been repeated from the Bible down on through Michael Douglas movies — into one of 2008's most essential records. And if Rick Rubin has anything to do with it, rock 'n' roll will only get more complicated from here. Or so we can hope.