Ty Segall Joins Howlin Rain on Scott Walker Cover
The garage rock artist delivers vocals and guitar on the track from Ethan Miller's deep-cut covers collection.
California rock collective Howlin Rain, led by Ethan Miller, is celebrating 20 years of freewheeling, vintage rock 'n' roll in 2026 with the deep-cut covers collection, Watermelon, due November 13 on Silver Current Records.
For the album's third and final single leading up to its release, Miller enlisted garage rock savant and longtime Howlin Rain fan Ty Segall on vocals and guitar for a rendition of the Scott Walker song '30 Century Man.' Segall's dead of night delivery is the perfect foil for Walker's velvet croon on what begins as a plaintive acoustic number before taking a left turn into exploding, fuzzed-out solos and glorious, psych-rock bombast.
'Scott Walker is a creative deity to all of us down here miring around in the swamp. We should all care so very much about the pursuit of art and give so little a f about how everyone else thinks it should be done. He reminded us that musical identity is a mystifying thing that you forever bend and experiment with,' says Miller. 'So when we recorded this arrangement and turned the acid rock elements up to eleven, I thought there was one perfect person out there to front this version, and that person is Ty Segall, an artist who's equally committed to risk and reinvention, cutting his own path radically off the interstate.'
Segall is one of three special guests on Watermelon, alongside Chris Robinson, who sings both Mountain's 'Silver Paper' and Todd Rundgren's 'Black Maria,' and David Nance, who delivers Fairport Convention's 'Possibly Parsons Green.' Other standouts on the nine-track collection of often forgotten, but ultimately essential material include Judee Sill's 'Jesus Was A Crossmaker,' Moby Grape's 'I Am Not Willing,' and Sugluk's 'Fall Away.'
'Rather than curate a record like this with universally loved hit songs, we wanted to draw on more esoteric songs and sometimes obscure artists that were meaningful to us, both of which would tempt further investigation into their strange stories and secret worlds,' continues Miller. 'In that way, the album is a bit of a historical and musical jigsaw puzzle. What ties it all together is our inspired interest in this material, that somehow, these underground rabbit holes all linked together for us and showed us a connected musical world unto themselves.'
Watermelon releases November 13, 2026 on Vinyl, CD and Digital formats via Silver Current Records. Pre-order available here.
Photo Credit: Denée Segall
Photo Credit: Denée Segall
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