Tim spluttered. “You can’t—”
“They can,” Monique interrupted. “I triple-checked. The payment’s all there. My clients are free to sign with whomever they choose.” For legal reasons, the actual agreement wouldn’t be signed until tomorrow.
Cannon looked thunderous. “In all my years in the industry—”
Oh, fuck him. “What?” Jeff said. “No one’s ever stood up to your predatory business practices?” He paused. “First time for everything.”
Trix spread her hands in innocence. “We’ve always been trendsetters.”
They all looked at Joe. It was definitely his turn for a parting shot. “Fuck you guys,” he said with an eloquent shrug. “Dina, call me if you need a reference letter.”
For the first time, Jeff looked at her and noticed she was biting both lips, wide-eyed. “For the record,” he said, “we probably wouldn’t have quit if Dina had been in charge from the beginning.” She would’ve been, like, twelve when they started, but whatever. He didn’t want her to get fired.
“Actually,” she said, “you know what? I quit too.”
“Nice!” Trix high-fived her.
Monique tilted her head toward the door, and Jeff was happy enough to take his cue. “All right, nonlawyers to the back. Drinks on Joe?”
“It’s Trix’s turn to pick up the tab—”
“I’ll buy,” Max broke in, prompting cheers.
Ahead of them, Monique offered Dina her arm. “So listen,” she said, “I’m new to the music management business. I don’t suppose you signed a noncompete agreement…?”
FromGuitar Hero Magazine
September issue
Howling at the Blue Moon
IT’S BEENa whirlwind summer for multiple Grammy nominees Howl. Between public indecency charges, headlining a Canada Day celebration, wrapping a tour, and cutting ties with Big Moose, it’s been an eventful few months, to say the least.
And that’s not even mentioning frontman Jeff Pine’s fairytale romance with best friend Carter Rhodes, recently of @smokeybearlake fame, or the happy news of Joe Kinoshameg’s impending fatherhood (his partner, Sarah Monague, is expecting their first child in December).
Somehow, on top of all of this, rehab and treatment for Max Langdon, and a handful of real estate transactions, Howl found time to record a new album and sign a new record deal, this time with NYC’s Spin Cycle.
You might think that writing an album in the middle of such a tumultuous summer would result in a slipshod, unfocused effort, patched together through necessity. But you’d be wrong about this. I sure was.
While it’s obvious that each member of the band has gone through their own struggles in the past year—drummer Trix Neufeld recently went public as a survivor of childhood sexual assault—their voices work together beautifully on the album, tied together by a common thread: that feeling of hitting your thirties and wondering,What next? I’m not where I should be. I’ve fallen behind.
“Our tour schedule with Big Moose was a lot,” Pine, now thirty-one, tells me in the back booth of a family-owned restaurant in his hometown of Willow Sound, Ontario, a few hours out of Toronto. Far from the gaunt, hunted-looking man who graced covers of magazines internationally earlier this year at the end of the band’s February tour, this Pine is tanned, round-cheeked, and dimpled, completely at ease. As we chat, he sips on a milkshake; a song he wrote plays on the diner’s tinny overhead speakers. “I was exhausted, Max was spiraling, Joe just found out he was going to be a dad, Trix was working through her own shit. But none of us were talking to each other about it. I came out here convinced I was going to find the guts to go back to Toronto and quit for good, pay my way out of our contract and then, I don’t know, write songs in a cabin in the woods for the rest of my life.” He laughs. “Except there’s, like, way too many spiders in the woods. So that wasn’t going to work out.”
Instead he opted for a cottage on the lake with his high school best friend and now boyfriend Carter Rhodes, a man many now speculate was the inspiration for more than a handful of early Howl hits. And as for the decision to stay with Howl….
“When I first came out here,” he says, “I wanted a break, but what I got was some clarity, some perspective. I realized that I’d gotten so burned out I couldn’t see past my own problems and that the way we were going was unhealthy for other members of the group too. It took a little break for me to realize they weren’t the right target of my frustration. Once I figured that out, my whole plan changed.”
The plan, as I’ve come to understand it—neither Pine nor any other member of the band will confirm or deny—seems to have hinged on securing a different label before their next album, the final on their contract to Big Moose, was due.
“I’m not going to talk about that,” Pine tells me. He takes a break to sip his milkshake. “You know how it is.”
Whatever the motivation behind it, Howl’s latest album is far more than a cry for freedom. It alternates between emotional connection and catchy bangers and will resonate with any audience who’s wrestled with past demons, uncertainty, and the dreaded third-life crisis. In the two hours I was permitted to spend for a sneak preview at Pine’s cottage, tucked into a recording studio apparently put together for the specific purpose of making this record, I struggled not to see myself in every song. This is a collection of tracks that meets you where you are and tells you it’s okay not to have all the answers.
This is the album we’ve been waiting for—even if the tour dates are farther out and significantly more scattered than we’ve gotten used to over the past ten years.
Rhodes’s Garagecomes to digital and physical stores near you this November.
“THAT’S THElast of it.” Carter set the box on the tailgate and gave it a push. It just fit between the lawn mower and the Rubbermaid bin full of kitchen detritus.
