“Time is weird,” Mitch Rowland says, speaking for a lot of dads. A few years ago, he was just a shy Midwest guitar dude working at an L.A. pizzeria, washing dishes. Then he met Harry Styles, and suddenly became the wingman to one of the world’s biggest pop stars. These days, he lives out in the English countryside, where he made his superb new indie-folk gem Whistling Pie. He even demoed the songs with his father-in-law at the family farm — in a chicken shed.
But Rowland is right at home moving between musical worlds. Whistling Pie is a homemade album of acoustic ballads, inspired by his hero, the late British folk guitarist Bert Jansch. As on his 2023 debut, Come June, you can hear traces of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith in Rowland’s gentle vocals and delicate guitar. The songs are meditations on time and memory. As he says, with his soft-spoken laugh, “The big difference between the two albums is having kids, and not having time.”
The album is a family affair: Rowland made Whistling Pie with his drummer and collaborator Sarah Jones, the rock goddess from Harry’s band. The couple met in rehearsals when they hooked up with Harry for his 2017 solo debut, after the end of One Direction. They fell in love, got married, and moved to the tiny English village where she grew up, with their two little sons.
The music is full of that rustic atmosphere. “It’s a luxury for me to be a songwriter out in that part of the green world, rather than kind of grinding away in L.A.,” Rowland says. “It’s a pure choice — this is where we’ve decided to parent, so it makes sense artistically.” As the old song goes, you know it’s not the same as it was.
They live out in the British countryside, in the West Midlands. “It’s way out in the Cotswolds region,” he says. “One of the greenest areas — it’s not cool, which to me is what makes it cool. There’s a lot of tradesmen, but songwriters… There’s not loads of them. Just woods. And pubs.”
Rowland wrote these tunes surrounded by that pastoral beauty. “I made these demos with Sarah’s dad, because we’re right down the lane from her parents,” he says. “He and I would go into the studio he built in the chicken shed — the same shed where Sarah learned to play drums when she was a little girl. He’s such a music lover. He’s 75, but he was like, ‘All right, a bottle of wine, let’s go.’” In fact, as he learned, the area has a proud music heritage. “Mott the Hoople is the most notable,” Rowland says. “I suppose I have to mention Ellie Goulding is from there. But let’s stick with Mott the Hoople.”
When he met Styles, Mitch was a small-town guy from Ohio, an indie rocker who knew nothing about the pop world. Harry was already a megastar, but with zero interest in following any kind of conventional career formula. In quintessential Midwest fashion, Mitch didn’t even quit his day job at the pizzeria until two weeks into the sessions. But they’ve been together ever since, collaborating on all Harry’s albums, including the blockbuster Harry’s House, which won a Grammy for Album of the Year at the 2023 awards. Fans delight in these two as an odd couple, yet they share a unique musical chemistry. “There’s a magic to Mitch, past him being so good,” Styles once told Rolling Stone. “I feel like he represents a kind of magic to me.”
As with Come June, he made Whistling Pie working closely with producer Rob Schnapf, who’s made classics in the Nineties with Beck and Elliott Smith. The band is an intimate collaboration: Schnapf on guitar, Jones on drums, and engineer Matt Schuessler on upright bass. They recorded at Rockfield Studios, on a Welsh farm. “I wanted to make the album in the countryside,” Rowland says. “I wanted to capture everything on the spot, instead of taking these songs to L.A. But with Rob and Matt, I was nervous to get these city guys out to Wales. At their studio, it’s like, ‘Where are we ordering from tonight? What’s the best pizza in L.A.?’ All that shit that you start caring about. And out here it was like, ‘Someone’s going to cook, and then we’re going back to work.’ We just kept working until we were saying ‘good morning’ to the horses at 7 a.m.”
Rowland and Styles onstage in Las Vegas in September 2021 during the Love On Tour.
Anthony Pham/Getty Images
One of the most powerful songs is “Be Your Man,” an intimately emotional tune with a long arc in his life. “I wrote it in a parking lot, when I was 20,” Rowland says. “I was going to this treatment facility for an eating disorder, so I’d stop in the lot and smoke as many cigarettes as possible before I’d go in. And one morning I wrote ‘Be Your Man’ behind the steering wheel.” The song came back to him years later, despite its traumatic origin. “No one asks for it — it just happens,” he adds. “But I guess it’s something do with that song. Certain moments make certain songs, and that was one of them. I was at this stop sign in life, and I can easily look back at that time and think, ‘Oh, well, I’m not that different from that person with all the stuff that was going on.’ It’s weird how songs can say more than I’m able to.”
His original guitar inspiration back then was Ben Harper, who’s now one of his friends and collaborators. “The first time I saw Ben, I didn’t know who he was, but I went because my friend had an extra ticket. Then I went out and bought every CD of his. That only happens a few times in life. And that song was me emulating him. I can’t remember finger-picking before I started listening to Ben Harper.”
“Really Ready” sums up the album’s domestic spirit. Its origin story is a classic parable of modern parenthood: Mitch found an old demo on his phone, while frantically trying to free up space for photos. “I’m trying to take a picture of my kids,” he recalls. “So I gotta get rid of a hundred things first, so my camera will turn on.” He came across a riff he’d captured on video years earlier. “I wrote it when I was new in London, at Harry’s flat — Harry didn’t live there, but I just kept the water running. This song was one of hundreds of unfinished ideas, but for some reason I always remembered it. Every time I’d go to delete and make more room, I’d come across it and think, ‘That’s kinda cool.’”
That thought also evokes the way technology interferes with our emotional lives. “Oh, man — I hate my new phone,” he says. “Why do I need a new phone that does the same shit as the old phone? What’s the next app I need to delete so I can take pictures of my kids? This summer I went to see Neil Young at Hyde Park, but I had to delete pictures to download an app. I’m on the guest list — I need an app? How many songs am I gonna lose having to get this app?”
They’re a modern rock & roll family on the road. For Rowland’s great 2024 solo tour, their toddler son came along, as he’d done on the Harry’s House tour, watching his folks onstage. (Their younger son was still a few months away from being born.)
“Harry made it possible for us to tour as a family,” he says. “We had all those moments like, ‘What the fuck are we doing taking a five-month-old on a bus? Are we stupid?’ But for so many people, it’s a way of life. I take advice from Ben Harper, who’s raised his kids on the road. Our son is so socialized — always jumping into the mix, immediately talking to other kids — and I think that has to be down to taking him on the road, or else he’d be a bit more on the shy side. Right? I was so shy when I was his age. Thank goodness for Modelo.”
This is the family that plays together — the little boys have one-string toy guitars shaped like tigers, so they can join in. A few years ago, Rowland and Jones took their then-toddler to the Green Man festival, the famous folk gathering in the Welsh countryside. But having grown up at Harry shows, their child kept screaming. “He thought that’s just what you do at a concert,” Mitch says. “We had to say, ‘This is folk music, son. This is not Wembley.’”
As you might expect, both kids are pop fans. “He’s really into Chappell Roan at the moment, which made me as a parent realize, ‘Shit, am I more of a Chappell Roan fan than a Sabrina Carpenter fan?’ I think I’m leaning more to Chappell. I texted Harry, ‘They’re great.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, yeah — I think you’re right there.’”
It’s been three and a half years since Harry’s House — enough time for Mitch and Sarah to come up with two albums and two kids — and Rowland praises Chappell for not banging out a quickie follow-up to her big album. “People don’t know how to go away, do they?” he asks. “Do people just live in a panic state of, like, ‘I need to do more’? Not even in terms of popular, but just in general — ‘I need to do more.’ People romanticize being over-prolific. Why can’t they just savor it? It can really work for people not doing anything.”
He pauses. “All this just to say, ‘Take your time, Chappell Roan. Do it for my kids. Stretch it out.’”
But that’s part of the mystique of his organic collaboration with Styles. Musical inspiration has its own natural timing. “When we were finishing Fine Line, we were working in the same studio as Liam Gallagher,” Rowland recalls. “He was like, ‘I gotta fucking hand it to Harry. He’s not fucking about. He made one record, now he’s getting right back in making another.’ And then after that he made another straightaway.”
Fine Line was a massive success, yet Harry’s House was a phenomenon even by previous standards, while “As It Was” spent 15 weeks sat Number One in the U.S. But there was no rush to jump right back in to bang out another. “No, it was kind of the opposite,” Rowland says, citing Styles’ famously obsessive full-immersion studio process. “Making those albums, it felt like he was going inward — or maybe we were all going inward, and we couldn’t imagine doing anything else. With him, it’s not like a flash in the pan, ‘let’s book two weeks and bang it out.’ It’s like, ‘Let’s live in it. We’re a stew.’”
That’s the same process that Rowland brings to his own music, whether he’s playing in a chicken shed or Wembley. “The thing that makes me want to make music is Bert Jansch,” Rowland says. “The first time I saw him, it was just him sitting in a chair, with his acoustic guitar. And to me, that’s still the ideal. That’s the mountain for me to climb. I want to be good enough to need a chair onstage one day.”