Portrait of an Artist: The Solars’ Miles P. Hewitt

Although Miles P. Hewitt no longer lives in Pfoho, he still spends many hours in the house’s basement recording studio. After three years studying at Harvard, the English concentrator decided to take a year off to focus on his band, The Solars. Last month, the band toured from Montreal to New York City, and they’re performing in Boston and New York for the next several months, in anticipation of the release of their debut EP "Retitled Remastered." The Solars are performing at Cambridge Queen's Head on March 2.

The Harvard Crimson: Tell me about the history of the band.

Miles P. Hewitt: A long time ago, in Vancouver, Washington, two young dudes, Miles and Quetzel Herzig, became friends in fourth grade, kept in touch, and went to an arts high school together. They played in bands, really terrible high school bands, you know, the usual. And eventually, both ended up in college at Boston: me at Harvard and Quetzel at Berklee. He and I are the nucleus of the band; we do most of the recording together. Quetzel is the technical person, and he’s the percussion mastermind and keyboard. I play the rest of the instruments, bass and guitar and stuff. When we perform, it’s a five[-]piece, but in the studio, it’s mostly just Quetzel and I.

THC: Why did you decide to take a leave of absence this year?

MPH: What led to the gap year was this feeling of destiny. This feeling that this was what I was put on earth to do, to play popular music ... I had been an English concentrator, I studied with a professor whom I really admired, I read a lot. I could just feel … myself becoming a slightly different human being than I had been before, knowing that I could reach for cooler sounds. I knew that now was exactly the time to throw myself into that no mercy and no-looking-back situation. The recording was nine to five, three times a week.

THC: Did you ever want to go to music school?

MPH: I never wanted to make music the center of my academic life. The mysteries in it were worth studying, I felt, but the thought of going to school for music versus studying something like poetry, which was just studying life and thoughts and human soul—that felt a lot more relevant.

THC: But you went to an arts high school? What was that like?

MPH: In hindsight, it was honestly just such incredible bliss that I got to spend four years there [at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics]. I studied literary arts, which was just poetry, and I played piano in the jazz band. Everyone was playing bands, and there was an imported soda store down the street that we’d all go to after school and just listen to bands. In some ways, it was the most romantic music scene that I had ever been in, and I was only sixteen at the time. It was the coolest thing.

THC: What do you think the biggest difference is between writing your poetry and writing your songs?

MPH: A poem, to me, is a fundamental human art form that anybody can and probably does write. I’m really interested in all these old poems that have been translated. I was on a kick of reading all these ancient Chinese poems from twelve hundred years ago, all these four line poems that are mind-blowing. It seems like somebody yesterday wrote them, just walking down the street and saw a tree and wrote it, but it was actually twelve hundred years ago. Song is a more technical art form to me, though I know some people would disagree. A poem is just something that anybody will dig, if someone is willing to slow down and listen to it. A song, you spend a lot of time on it, it’s a much more technological kind of art form.

THC: Do your poems ever turn into songs?

MPH: Super rarely, but occasionally. In the past six months, it’s happened more, probably just with what I’ve been doing with my time off.

THC: Were you involved in the music scene while on campus?

MPH: I mean, yeah. I don’t mean this in a harsh way, but to the extent that there is a music community for what I’m interested in. Everybody’s just focused on other stuff here. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just the size of it here. I think people who want to be involved in music definitely make it a huge part of their lives, but there’s a reason that there’s not a large community of music.

THC: What’s one of your favorite songs?

MH: I really, really think that “Dance Yrself Clean” by LCD Soundsystem is one of the songs of our time, the last ten years. It’s so f**king great. Because it’s really just such a song about being in your late twenties, and all the deception and self-loathing that goes into the really pure [feeling], get-you-by-the-throat-hipster.

THC: Who else do you think is an artist of our time?

MPH: I think Kendrick Lamar is the artist of our time. He’s just so, so surefooted. He doesn’t even have a choice of what he says, it just comes. God or whatever is just whispering straight to his ear, it’s kind of chilling.

THC: Tell me about your EP.

MPH: There’s four tracks on the EP. There’s three that’ve already been released, but this is the real version now. And one of them is kind of new, it was actually one of the first songs that I wrote when I came to Harvard, freshman year. The album is called “Retitled Remastered,” which is kind of ironic because you know, it’s actually our first album, and we’re not really “remastering” it. And also with Kendrick Lamar’s “Untitled Unmastered.” We’re going to be playing at a release party in the Red Room on April 20, and the album comes out the next day.

Staff writer Lucy Wang can be reached at lucy.wang@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @lucyyloo22.