40’z On The Front Porch: A Conversation with Hemlock Ernst & Height Keech About The Fall Collection (The Witzard Interview)
Sam Herring AKA Hemlock Ernst & Height Keech (CREDITS: Hemlock - Daniel Cavazos and Height - Bob Sweeney)
Not too many musical artists can say that they’ve worked with both Debbie Harry (Blondie) and Madlib (Jaylib, Quasimoto.) Samuel “Sam” T. Herring, however, is indeed one of those people. Herring has spent the bulk of his career writing, recording, and releasing music with his groups Future Islands, Art Lord & The Self-Portraits, and The Snails, although, moonlights as ferocious emcee Hemlock Ernst. We were once messaging back-and-forth with Herring on SoundCloud Messenger wherein he said something to the effect of “Hemlock is not the alter-ego. It’s me. It has been me. If anything, “Samuel T. Herring” is the alter-ego…” Herring recently told Stereogum within a career-spanning interview that he started battle rapping at 14 and freestyling at 15 around 1998-99 while still in high school. Herring told us, via SoundCloud Messenger, that by the time Future Islands initially formed in 2006, he had already been writing rhymes in his room and performing on stage for seven years prior.
Herring has actively been doing features for his fellow Hip-Hop artists since at least 2016. He’s been showcased on tracks alongside the likes of milo/Scallops Hotel/R.A.P. Ferreira, BUSDRIVER, Drew Scott, Open Mike Eagle, Blockhead, Controller 7, Fatlip (The Pharcyde,) Beans, A.J. Suede, and more. To date, Sam Herring has issued a self-titled EP with Madlib as Trouble Knows Me, Back At The House with producer/beatsmith Kenny Segal, and most recently, The Fall Collection with emcee/producer Height Keech. The latter is, actually, what brings us here today, as a matter of fact: Herring’s latest collaborative as Ernst with The Height Man himself, Height Keech.
Keech & Herring have been friends and strong supporters of each others’ creative outputs for about 20 years. They both came up within the Baltimore Hip-Hop/Indie Rock scenes and previously appeared together on PASSAGE’s “Krang” (Total Reduction Remix) from Worked On/Re-Worked On (2017) and Height’s own “Gang Way” from Raw Routes (2019.) In addition to these aforementioned two full-lengths and an EP, Herring self-released what we’ll just call a fun collection of six rough drafts on his Hemlock Ernst SoundCloud page with production work from SPECSWIZARD, Captain Murphy (AKA Flying Lotus,) Butch Dawson, (‘i’s’), and all these fingers (now known as Gould ’72.)
Long story short, we’ve always been very intrigued by the collective and storied works of Sam Herring and/or Hemlock Ernst. So, we reached out directly to Height Keech, who we’ve known for a number of years and have worked on countless features together for this very site, to see if he and Herring would wanna do an interview. And to our surprise and utter bemusement, they both agreed! Anyways, for some additional context: this interview was originally conducted with Sam Herring & Height Keech a few months ago—November of 2023, to be exact—and now, may be a tad bit dated, but still reads incredibly well! It has been lightly edited for general clarity. Hemlock Ernst & Height Keech’s The Fall Collection is out now on ALPHA PUP. While we didn’t talk about it at length here, Future Islands are dropping their seventh studio album, People Who Aren’t There Anymore, is available today on 4AD.
I. How long have you two known each other?
Sam Herring: I've known Height [Keech] for coming up on 20 years. He toured through Greenville, NC with Dan Deacon back in 2004 and they opened for my first band, [Art Lord & The Self-Portraits]. After that, Greenville became a regular tour stop for Height.
II. How long have you been creating, listening to, and personally enjoying Hip-Hop/Rap music?
Herring: Hip-Hop kind of grabbed me around 1997-98; I was 13 years old. It was all so new and fresh to me and different to what my friends were into. My older brother started bringing home records and sharing them with me because he could see I was really interested. It made me feel like I had a secret, but, also, that I had access to a whole other world than I could be a part of, being from rural [North Carolina]. I started studying and practicing graffiti, learning to pop lock and [a] failed attempt at breaking, and began to write poetry and Rap verse, as well as my brother teaching me to freestyle. I was heavily immersed in Hip-Hop as a culture, the four elements—as [KRS-One] taught—all throughout high school. The emceeing and writing is what carried through all the way, [though].
III. What made you decide to finally get together and hammer out a long-awaited collaborative full-length project?
Height Keech: I did my first two projects in a producer role in 2017: Shark Tank’s Dan House and ialive’s Timewave Zero. I loved doing it and I’ve been actively seeking out more full projects like that since then. Sam & I had worked on a few one-off [collaborations] over the years. I always thought he killed it with these short and sweet guest spots and I was super-curious what it would be like to have him doing full songs on these Height beats. I’m a huge fan of those Trouble Knows Me tracks he did with Madlib. I remember telling Sam that I thought those were the most 3-D rhymes and beats I had heard in a long time… I was hoping to hear more rhymes like that and it turned out he had a whole arsenal of rhymes ready to go.
IV. Would you mind briefly explaining the intended meaning or significance behind the album title, The Fall Collection?
Herring: Early on in the demo process, I wanted to name this record The Fall Collection because the album consists mainly of songs that were never going to be released. On the Rap side, a bulk of this record was written between 2014-16. There were full songs, like “Oregon Shore,” “Hard Truth,” and “40z On The Front Porch,” to name a few, that were fully fleshed out lyrically, but had been demoed two, three, and four times over different beats. The process of some of those songs was so long and drawn out, it caused me a lot of angst and frustration. Even going between the quick demo process of taking Height’s beat packs and trying out already written songs over his instrumentals until doing the final vocal takes, took a long time because I was so tired of demo’ing these tracks. I had a mental block. Before Height came along with all these amazing beats, I was already resigned that these songs would never see the light of day. So, getting to the finish line, though, I was really excited, was, also, me having to break down a wall that I had already put up within myself. I had had to accept that these songs were lost without an outlet, to cut off that nagging anxiety and the frustration of failure. To make the record, I had to re-open the wounds all over again and change the truth that I had accepted. The Fall Collection spoke to this idea of the things that had fallen to the wayside, the orphaned songs and verses all collected and finally getting the chance to be heard. To be fair, it speaks more to the words. Height's beats are all fresh as Hell, but for me, the stories in this album are collecting nearly 10 years of my life and more so a view of my life 10 years ago. It's all old wounds, cuts, and scrapes.
V. What did the typical writing, recording, production, mixing, mastering, etc. creation processes behind The Fall Collection generally entail?
Keech: Sam came to the table with tons of ready-made sets of lyrics… (as in enough for multiple albums!) This was a totally new thing to me. I had a lot of fun with the trial and error of it. I let the stories and scenes from the lyrics guide me and kept trying different things under his rhymes until something clicked. There are some songs where we tried the same words over five or six beats… on the song “Murder Money,” I tried three or four different beats, all of which I thought were awesome, but Sam kept asking for something different. Once I found the right sample to loop, he kept pushing me more, like “it should have more to it... more bass, more depth” and each time I tried, I felt like I found another way to make it more of what it was supposed to be. I would do it like that every time, if I could.
VI. Who or what would you readily cite as some of your greatest sources of personal inspiration and influence while making The Fall Collection?
Keech: My Pandemic era soundtrack was Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Toots & The Maytals, Slapp Happy, Dead Moon, and La Dusseldorf. That’s what I was blasting everyday before getting to work on these Hemlock [Ernst] tunes.
VII. How long did it take you both to collectively create what we now know as The Fall Collection? About how old are some of the beats and or rhymes included within?
Herring: The first two songs we wrote came about in December of 2020. Funnily, those are the only two complete originals on the record. Height reached out to me with some beats and was curious if I was interested in working on some tracks. This was the first time he had approached me as a producer exclusively. I knocked out “With The Devil” and “Tic Tac Toe” within a couple weeks and, then, we felt we had some momentum, but I was, also, feeling a block because I was still sitting on a whole album and a half of finished songs. I told him about these unreleased tracks and he asked if he could hear them. I shared and he checked it out and was interested in flipping them. I was more than happy to share a capellas and, then, we just went to work puzzle-piecing beats and rhymes together. By the end of 2021, we had the demos for what would become the album, but by that time, I was back on the road with Future Islands and couldn't commit the time and energy or brain space to finalizing the vocals. I was, also, going through a life-upending break-up from the end of '21 and, then, was on my first acting gig [The Changeling] for six months through '22, so all manner of things were allowing me to put off recording the vocals.
I also like to record myself because I have a strange pocket and like to do multiple takes. The combination of feeling like I HAD to do it myself mixed with the fact that I had recorded these songs three to five times already through multiple demo processes made me very anxious and shut down whenever I felt I was ready to record. It wasn't until January of '23 when I finally got it done. I rented a house in New Orleans and fashioned a sound booth in a utility closet with all the extra pillows and blankets in the house. I made myself to 10-15 takes every morning of a song and would chop up the comps at night. It took me about three and a half weeks to get it to where I got it. I learned a lot through the process and it did feel like a weight lifted with every song I committed to tape.
VIII. Would you mind telling us how The Fall Collection's lone feature of billy woods on "Inherit My Speech" initially came to be? Why was it the only guest spot you decided to include and incorporate onto the album?
Herring: This was just a fortuitous thing. I'm not a guy who likes to ask for help, which is why my first album, Back At The House [B.A.T.H.], doesn't have any features. That being said, I do tons of feature work for friends and people I look up to. woods has been my favorite writer for about a decade now and, of course, Kenny Segal (B.A.T.H. producer) is a very tight friend and collaborator. Kenny and woods hit me up about singing the hook on “Facetime” for their album, Maps, [in the] summer of '22. At the time, we didn't work out the deal, I just said I wanted a publishing cut and we'd figure out the fee later. I was angling for a song trade instead of a fee, so when woods hit me about what I needed to get song clearance for “Facetime,” I mentioned a song trade and he was immediately down. I sent him through a few tracks, between two projects, including ”Murder Money” and “Inherit My Speech.” Initially, Height & I had talked about leaving that beat flip on “Inherit [My Speech”] open as an instrumental, but it just felt like a perfect space for woods once we knew he was down to do something. This all came about in the final hours of the record, so once we got woods’ finalized files from Willie Green, I think the record was turned into mastering just a day or two later.
IX. If you could have stepped into your rapper-producer chair and spit some slick rhymes across any track(s) included within The Fall Collection, which track(s) would you have selected and why, Height?
Keech: I, actually, wrote a bunch of verses to try and fit on this project, but it was early in the process before I understood what the tone of the album was going to be. Most of those bars ended up on ialive [and I’s] Necessary People project, [These Are The Necessary People,] or on Darko The Super [and I’s] album, [You Gotta Have Friends]. I hope to do more albums where I produce the whole project, but don’t rhyme at all. It becomes a challenge of getting people to recognize your presence from the sound without hearing you tell them you’re there.
X. In addition to or aside from yourselves, who else contributed to The Fall Collection and helped make it the robust 14-track collection we have today?
Keech: Daddy Kev hooked up the ultra-pro mastering treatment. We had talked about getting him behind the boards before we knew he was taking this Alpha Pup label to the next level or that he wanted to get our album involved, so it was awesome how this all came together. billy woods knocked out the show-stopping lone guest spot with an engineering assist by Willie Green.
XI. How would you say your overall musical approach(es), style(s), and sound has/have changed and evolved since your first officially released collaboration together? (NOT PART OF THE QUESTION: and what exactly would that have been... "Krang" ('Total Reduction' Remix featuring Eze Jackson, Height Keech & Hemlock Ernst) from PASSAGE's Worked On in 2017?)
Herring: I mean, Hell, Height [and I probably] made music together for the first time freestyling at a house party in Greenville, NC 20 years ago. That's long before Future Islands, which taught me how to write a song, so everything has changed, really. If you go back to 2017, my acceptance of my voice and style and ways of approaching Rap has grown a lot, as well. I was dormant as an emcee from 2008-13 because I was on the road with the band for those years, trying my [damnedest] to make something click. When I came back to my pen, I had grown a lot, I had learned to write songs, and I learned the importance of saying something, speaking truth, as opposed to just tongue-twisting. The weird thing with [The Fall Collection] (T.F.C.) is that some of these songs date back to that time. The first verse of “Young Gods” was penned in late 2013 over my own production, the second verse, late 2015, so it speaks to before and after.
XII. What can you tell us about the front and back album over imagery and its relationship to the content heard across The Fall Collection? Who did the photography and did the album layout?
Keech: Alan Resnick took the photos. To me, everything he does is funny and mysterious in the greatest way. When I look at the back cover, I’m like, “where is this room? How did Alan get there?” When I first heard the name, The Fall Collection, I imagined us on a fashion runway, but once I saw that pic, I liked the idea of The Fall Collection being a collection of old tires at the dump. Sam said the picture felt like he “was looking at the weight of discarded things.” Our good pal, MISTER, put together the album layout during a crash-course with Sam, right before a Detroit Future Islands set.
XIII. What's planned next for each of you together and/or separately?
Herring: Future Islands [is] dropping our seventh LP, People Who Aren't There Anymore, [in] late January next year. Got another Hemlock record coming [out the] middle of next year with the producer Icky Reels; that one is a lot different in style and approach than anything I've ever done before. Definitely speaks more to my Avant side, all about style-flipping, beats more Industrial and acidic. Excited for people to hear it.
Keech: I’ve got new projects I've produced for Heir Max and andrew. on the way and I’m, also, part of a top-secret new band dropping our debut album in 2024… it’s too soon to announce, but as a sneak peek, I’ll say that the original The Witzard blog played a role in it all coming together.
Hemlock Ernst & Height Keech’s The Fall Collection front and back covers (CREDIT: Alan Resnick / LAYOUT: Bryan Lackner)
