Listen: Hollis Howard’s New EP, ‘Good Morning, We Love You’
Portrait by Cole Silberman, studio photography by Chloe Flaherty.
An independent musician who has a bunch of Youtube hits and then deletes it all to start over is exactly the kind of person we would want to feature.
That kind of punk attitude is what we are all about, and that’s why we’ve featured Hollis Howard here a couple of times, most notably as a part of Bright Young Things 2024. The LA-based writer/producer/musician/self-promoter/do-all-er has released an EP, Good Morning, We Love You, dedicated to the human experience by way of love, mutual insanity, absurd understanding, and the sort of things that make a person give themselves over to pure sentiment. Hollis Howard is an artist who will not be denied, and whose work ethic is to say the least, intimidating. Give the EP a listen. Give the interview a read. Give the music video for ‘I Love My Friends’, by Tom Dull a watch. You won’t regret it.
Who are you?
Hello Nazareth, my dear friend. This is your friend Hollis Howard.
Why are you?
I am me because my mom named me that and my dad named me that and they had me that's why I am that.
Tell me about this EP and the processes of recording.
This EP is like my first child - I feel like I've just given birth. Energy-wise and in the process recording, it was very different for each song. I made them all in different ways and with different people, who were all my friends. I wanted to tell stories about my life and how I feel; I guess this was my first approach at telling people who I am as an artist and sharing kind of the pallet I want to expand upon in the future.
Tell me about the singles, each seems to have their own identity. How did you develop that and how do those identities tie into the contents of the song?
I think being a person, that experience can express itself in very different ways; songs like, ‘I Love My Friends,’ and ‘Game’, where I'm all all happy, and then there's moments in the EP where it's talking about my relationship with my mom and how that affects me. You know an ex of mine happened to be the same person I wrote about, and then there's ‘Worst Person,’ where it's like, oh, I actually am a shitty person sometimes too.
The EP is kind of a reflection of how I see myself day-to-day and how much that can change. I feel like I finally have come upon a word that feels like a good expression of my music which I think is ‘catharsis’. Cathartic - I wanna make cathartic music, and I have a bad vocabulary and didn't go to college, so I'm probably not making much sense right now, but I want to make a genre of cathartic music basically I feel like all these were an expression of that.
How do you feel as an independent artist in Los Angeles?
I feel happy, I feel sad. I feel crazy, I feel insane, I feel lucky - I feel like I've made all my friends for that reason and I'm extremely grateful for the time I get to spend with other independent artists, learning from them and just being around them, playing together. It's fucking hard but I have no regrets tied to the decisions I've made. I maybe will have some when I'm forty but I'm twenty two and right now, it's okay to not be able to afford dinner for a little bit. Maybe it's not okay, but it feels less damaging than I maybe would feel when I'm forty, so yeah, I don't mind.
From music to production, it comes from you and is driven by you, can you talk a bit about the logistics of that and self financing, etc.
Well, I'd say it comes from everyone in the room I really like. I like to go into sessions a lot, which is maybe a bad thing, but I like to go into sessions with nothing prepared - just my mindset and playing around, and we kind of just find a sound and roll off of that. I don't really come in with a preconceived idea of what I'm supposed to do because I think the jungle gym of making music is way more fun. You create crazier things that are just very in the moment that are harder to make when you really sit down and focus on something.
I respect the other side a lot more because it takes a lot more and maybe there will be a point in my life where I have that bandwidth, but I find I write just as intentionally in spur of the moment situations as I would taking a year to write a song. I don't want to take credit for everything; the environment I'm in informs me.
Financing fucking sucks, I kind of just will do any hustle that anyone will let me do. I started selling peoples furniture for them on Facebook marketplace. I just like take their stuff and sell it for them so that they don't have to meet anyone and whatever. I always have random business ideas to try and make money. I'm trying to figure that out. I have no money and that fucking sucks because I wanna pay the people that make any of this possible and I want to have a thriving environment that I contribute to financially, and I want my friends to be taken care of as well as myself. The thing that sucks the most is just feeling bad about people helping this and me not being able to afford as much as I'd like to to pay them back. I've even thought about selling feed pics. I haven't gotten there yet though.
Your ep released today, how would you like it to be received/felt/experienced?
I would love for it to be experienced however people want to experience it. These songs mean a lot to me and I just would love to hear what people have to say, or that people like them or make them happier, they make them sad, or they make them feel literally anything at all. I want to do this for my whole fucking life and there's nothing I care about more, so yeah, I would like for it to be received in a way that gains me some trust to keep on making good music. I hope people know that I love them and care about them a lot. I'm just really grateful; I could not have done this even slightly by myself, my contributions were a drop in the fucking ocean. I'm extremely lucky to have what I have so I hope you like to EP. I hope my parents are proud of me. I love my parents. I love my sister and yeah. That’s all.
