{"id":595,"date":"2026-07-07T22:10:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T22:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=595"},"modified":"2026-07-07T22:10:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T22:10:09","slug":"miles-hewitt-makes-songs-for-the-end-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=595","title":{"rendered":"Miles Hewitt Makes Songs For The End Of The World"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Miles<\/div>

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An interesting factoid about Miles Hewitt is that he studied poetry at Harvard. It was interesting to me, anyway. I assumed that the talented 31-year-old singer-songwriter would volunteer this in conversation, especially since his background suggests far greater knowledge of what good constitutes \u201cgood lyrics\u201d than the music critic interviewing him. But \u201cHarvard\u201d did not come up in our 32-minute conversation until just over 21 minutes in, and only because I was the one who brought it up. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou learn to pay attention to stuff,\u201d he said during a Zoom call last month, after sounding slightly embarrassed by my Ivy League name-dropping. \u201cEven just small technical things like, what if this period is a comma<\/em>? That can change everything in a line of poetry. You don\u2019t have periods and commas in songwriting, but the principles apply. Like, what if you change the word? What if this song that I thought was about \u201cI\u201d is actually happening to \u201cyou\u201d instead? It\u2019s like the feeling of pushing on something and feeling how it will push back on you, finding worlds and worlds and worlds within a single image or a single word. Even the idea that the world is really that alive, and that full of meaning, if you are willing to go looking for it and to find what\u2019s there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Based on talking to him for a half-hour, I would say the title of Hewitt\u2019s stunning new album out July 24 does not<\/em> apply to him. Instead, Vainglory<\/em> refers to some greater sense of mankind\u2019s misplaced confidence in his own ability to control technology \u2014 or to prevent it from stripping humanity from the very things that once defined it. \u201cIt\u2019s so Western colonial, so Enlightenment. It\u2019s like Ecclesiastes \u2014 it\u2019s vanity of vanities to believe that people have some kind of rare perspective, or rarefied power over the universe. That\u2019s part of what the album title means to me,\u201d he explained. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt also has a second meaning underneath, which has to do with my own struggle in making it, and the desire to make something that is really glorious, and to feel the torturous artistic process that can get you there.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you can\u2019t already tell, Hewitt is an artist interested in applying grand themes to grandly realized music. And on Vainglory<\/em>, his first album in four years \u2014 his 2022 debut Heartfall<\/em> was a critical hit \u2014 he achieves peak grandiosity, singing foreboding and apocalyptic songs about the dehumanization of modern life (by A.I., in particular) over spectral folk-rock that evokes the desolate, haunted landscapes depicted on the album\u2019s cover. A fan of prime-era English folk (Nick Drake is among his inspirations), Hewitt\u2019s music achieves a similar sort of slow-building, fully immersive despair, with his sensitive, reedy voice \u2014\u00a0a strange but alluring synthesis of Dan Bejar and Marianne Faithfull \u2014\u00a0softly intoning over music that glides from one mood piece to the next. <\/p>\n

The attention to detail Hewitt pays to his words also applies to the music, which came together over the course of several years after the tour cycle for Heartfall<\/em> ended. His support musicians come from a who\u2019s-who of well-regarded indie-rock acts, from Destroyer to Cass McCombs to Andy Schauf. In some cases, he worked with different combinations of players to produce different versions of songs as Hewitt searched for what he wanted, a process that mirrored the spiritually questing of his lyrics. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, what makes an album really special isn\u2019t just that it\u2019s good or that it sounds good, but it has that feeling to it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt feels like something emotional that you can tell is coming from a particular place. And it just took a while to find that. It took going through a lot of iterations. I think by the end of the process, some of the musicians were just like, \u2018Man, why are we doing version six when version three was just as strong?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that the album is a search. It\u2019s both a search on the level of the sort of sociopolitical things, technological things we\u2019re talking about, but it\u2019s also about searching for the truth on a purely aesthetic level as well.\u201d<\/p>\n