New Song from an Old Soul: On E.W. Harris’s “Hammerhands”
As I’ve noted before in this space, E.W. Harris has been at this music thing a long time, but even in early days, it was always clear he was an old soul. While the rest of eagerly plunked our paychecks to sample the latest artisanal lambics and infused IPA’s from the burgeoning craft brew industry, Eric happily sipped Old Crow and kept his fridge stocked with Miller High Life. While we were gathering round flat screens of increasingly unwieldy size and pixel quantity to ooh and ah at the so-called “Golden Age of Television,” Eric seemed content with his boxy console and beloved VHS’s of Cane Toads and Uncle Buck. While we were transitioning from CD’s to MP3’s, Eric’s house was full of warm, dusty, thriftstore vinyl (this well before its present-day gentrification into yupster fetish object) — everything from Antonio Carlos Jobim to Cat Stevens to Kraftwerk — though I’d wager nothing after the turn of the millennium. For so many young people, this would rightly qualify as affectation, but there was never any doubt with E.W. It was simply who he was.
The first time I saw him play, it was at the head of his folk-rock band Luminous — a reeling, ramshackle outfit that, more than anything, invoked the sound of hopping a moving train. With chugging kickdrum, wanderlust violin, and Harris’s windswept howl guiding his hobo compatriots on like the North Star, they were my first glimpse of what it looked like not just to love music, but to live it; to follow wherever it might lead.
Already splitting at its patched and quilted seams by the time I came around, I only saw Luminous a few more times before they disbanded, and Harris transitioned into his long-running folk-jazz combo, The Eric Harris Group. For all the freewheeling fun of the old act, it was only once he’d gathered this new quartet round his hearth in the quiet contemplation of standards and fingerpicked reimaginings of his best originals, that he truly began to find his voice, and his old soul came home to roost.
As it turns out, wouldn’t you know it, a man picks up a lot of admirers when he sews his heart as firmly to his sleeve as Harris did with that plucky little foursome (not to mention leveling up his chops a fair piece as well), and as the looming technocracy of the aughts grew larger, some of the young white dwarfs he’d pulled into his red giant orbit (they will all love this metaphor btw) convinced him to take a hard pivot into a post-ironic electro side project called Ghost Dad the Robot (currently enjoying something of a mini-revival). Somehow both lauded and savaged in the local alt-weekly (in the same review!), Ghost Dad was a beautiful flash in the brainpan; a solar flare peeped through knockoff Oakleys; a twinkle in the North Star’s eye. It seemed after all his time laying low with his acoustic den of tramps and thieves, Harris was ready to follow the music again, up through the ozone, past the Oort Cloud, and beyond the event horizon.
Ghost Dad begat Resident Patient which begat The Sky Captains of Industry — a resolute refinery process that ultimately gifted us E.W. Harris, the modest moniker he goes by today. And in his latest single, “Hammerhands,” I can hear it all — every step of the zero gravity tumbleweed journey that’s taken him from then to now. The hushed, powerful control Harris has always exercised over his voice has never felt stronger, as he laments his titular nickname whilst facing down a murderer’s row of mistakes and misunderstandings — bad memories of a world that still doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with him. But then, against a crystalline hail of slide guitar that trails off into the dark like a meteor shower, he slips into just the slightest of twangs (indeed, despite his Southern roots, this is the closest I’ve ever heard Harris get to a true country song), before a Brian Wilsony cowpoke chorus rises up from the mist to accompany him home, lullabying the possibility of a brighter tomorrow — one less beholden to messy reality, and more aligned with his beautiful dreams.
https://ewharris.bandcamp.com/track/hammerhands-4
As with last year’s triumphant “Bad Ghost,” the studio wizardry provided by Harris’s benefactors at Hanging Moon Records brings his music to a stirring new level, and it seems fair to suggest that this old soul has more than caught up to the shimmering trappings of our obsessively ever-new world. Drifting along betwixt the terrestrial and interstellar plains, slinging his lush, opalescent brand of spaceway folk with that transfixing ease that only arises out of a lifetime spent working your shit out on the road — communing with crickets, watching bonfires fade into sunrises, always running on empty, but always with a heart that’s full — Old Hammerhands remains one of a kind. I continue to hope that he’ll land in the right place, at the right time, and catch the right break — the one that teaches the world to pronounce his name at last, and leads them back through all these names that came before. But until then, I have no doubt he’ll keep following his own North Star — to the next song, the next gig, the next town — on through the night, and into some fine, green-skied day.
-Dave Fitzgerald
