Mitch Rowland Is Harry Styles’ Favorite Guitarist — and He Might Become Yours

Mitch Rowland could have been designed in a mad scientist’s laboratory as the prototypical soft-spoken guitar dude. He’s a shy rock geek from small-town Ohio who just won a Grammy for Album of the Year, for his work on Harry Styles’ global blockbuster Harry’s House. When he met Styles, he was washing dishes at an L.A. pizzeria, a complete unknown with zero professional experience. All he had was his guitar and his ideas. He didn’t even quit his pizza job until two weeks after he joined Harry, and he still ducks the spotlight in live shows. As Harry has playfully introduced him onstage, he’s “Mr. Mysterious!”

But Rowland might have to finally get used to people noticing him. On his gorgeous solo debut, Come June, released through Styles’ Erskine Records, he ignores pop trends and finds his own voice. It’s all introspective acoustic beauty, a deeply personal song cycle inspired by his hero, the British folk legend Bert Jansch. Rowland is still adjusting to the idea of stepping out on his own. As he admits, “I still feel like I’m walking off a building going onstage to play.”

Come June is full of hushed, gentle ballads, in the mode of Nick Drake or Elliott Smith. Songs like “When It All Falls Down” show off his trademark delicate melodies and breathy vocals. But it’s a real guitar album. “Bert [Jansch] was the dartboard,” he says. “I hit the paint on the wall, but that’s what I was aiming for.” The music has a homemade feel. “I wanted it to sound as wood-y as possible,” he says. “I hope we achieved even a quarter of the way [Neil Young’s] Harvest sounds when you put it on.”

If this talk sounds strange coming from the guy who co-wrote hits like “Watermelon Sugar” and “Golden,” that’s just a sign of the times. Rowland has a unique feel for walking the line between different music worlds, gliding back and forth between mega-pop flash and meditative folk. He and Harry have always made a funny duo — the most flamboyantly charismatic starman in the glam galaxy, next to the shy Midwest boy who’d rather let his guitar do the talking. Onstage, Rowland plays the Mick Ronson/Wendy Melvoin strong-and-silent sidekick to Harry’s Bowie/Prince. But he has his own mystique and his own following. When Styles played London in the summer of 2022, there was fan graffiti on the wall outside Abbey Road, with a drawing that depicted Rowland as George Harrison. It’s the highest compliment any guitar-weeper could ask.

As Harries already know, Rowland has always been brilliant at saying a lot with a quiet sound, as in ballads like “Matilda” or “From the Dining Table.” He co-wrote gems like “Sign of the Times,” “Canyon Moon,” and “Keep Driving,” and his psychedelic guitar freakout steals the show on “She.” He plucks the guitarlele on the fan favorite “To Be So Lonely,” a song that Harry called “the articulation of Mitch’s brain.” Styles sings back-up vocals on Come June, in “Here Comes the Comeback.” But he’s always been Rowland’s most shameless fan. “Super inspiring,” Harry once described him to Rolling Stone. “There’s a magic to Mitch, past him being so good. I feel like he represents a kind of magic to me.”

Come June is the album everyone hoped Rowland would make, except even better. He takes inspiration from contemporary indie-rock guitarists like José González and Jonathan Wilson — not to mention Ben Harper, who contributes lap steel and vocals to “All the Way Back.” Some people might think it’s a pop guy trying to cross over to an indie-rock folk sound, but it’s the other way around: These are his roots. He took an old-school approach to the album, thinking of touchstones like Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. “I wanted it to be under 30 minutes,” Rowland says. “I wanted a quick album, where it doesn’t take long to get into it. It ended up being 37.”

He cut Come June with producer Rob Schnapf, who made classics in the Nineties with Beck and Elliott Smith. The band is minimal — Schnapf, engineer Matt Schuessler on upright bass, drummer Sarah Jones. Rowland and Jones are both in Styles’ band, which is how they met, fell in love, and got married. They now have a toddler son. “If I couldn’t figure out a drum part, Sarah would come down,” Rowland says. “Our son came over one day. It was very cozy. We were always in a groove.”

Jones got to know Schnapf when she drummed on Kurt Vile’s latest album, (watch my moves). When she introduced her husband to the producer, it was a full-circle moment, since Vile was a pivotal influence on Rowland. “When I first played with Harry, I had this voice note on my phone, this slowish riff,” he says. “We sped it up in the end, but it sounded pretty Stones-y slowed down. I was trying to squeeze an idea out of Kurt Vile’s Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze.” The result was the Styles banger “Only Angel.”

Rowland and Jones’ toddler has grown up around Harry Styles shows, so he’s already witnessed plenty of fan hysteria. “We took him to the Green Man Festival in Wales, with all these folk acts, really chilled out, and he’s the only one screaming,” he says with a laugh. “He thinks that’s what you do. So he’ll probably be the only one screaming at my show.”

Growing up in Ohio, Rowland’s first musical love as a kid was his older brother’s drum kit. (He later played drums on “As It Was,” which spent 15 weeks at Number One.) He taught himself guitar, and moved to L.A. in 2013, where he had enough trouble just finding a pizzeria dish-washing gig. He and Harry were from very different worlds — Styles was a global superstar making his solo debut, looking to find his voice after breaking free from One Direction. Rowland had never even heard a One Direction song. But they had an instant chemistry, sharing a fresh, eccentric sensibility.

Their collaboration didn’t make any commercial sense, and people weren’t always shy about letting them know. Rowland grins as he recalls Swedish superproducer Max Martin coming into the studio to hear one of the tracks from 2019’s Fine Line tracks early on: “He gave a list of all the things that were wrong and needed to be changed.” They didn’t take his advice. The song was “Watermelon Sugar,” which became Styles’ first Number One hit as a solo act.

Rowland and Jones were indie rockers, blissfully ignorant about the pop scene. (They’re both obsessed with Guided By Voices.) Then they each met Harry — and suddenly found themselves playing arenas. It was a baptism of fire for both of them. But Jones was a road-seasoned veteran of U.K. bands like Hot Chip and New Young Pony Club, while Rowland had never toured at all. So he experienced some serious culture shock. The first time he ever played New York, it was the legendary Radio City Music Hall. “I went missing,” he admits. “I think I was feeling squirrelly, and I must’ve found an open bar on a different level of the venue, but I was late to getting dressed.” Five or 10 minutes before showtime, manager Jeffrey Azoff pulled him aside. “He said, ‘Do you want to meet Donald Fagen?’ I was like, ‘Fuck you, telling me that Donald Fagen is here! The marquee was scary enough.’”

Rowland calls his pop career “a nice accident,” but he’s authentically fluent in both these worlds by now. “I never wanted to win a Grammy,” he says. “I just never thought about that. How could that even possibly enter my brain?” When he gets star-struck, it’s usually meeting indie-rock heroes like Jonathan Wilson. “Going back to 2012,  when I heard Jonathan Wilson’s Gentle Spirit, I thought, wow, this is something else, and it’s happening now. That was my musical lifeline.” He notes that he met the great indie singer-songwriter Kevin Morby back at the pizza shop, when serving him a birthday pie. “I arranged the pepperoni,” he says proudly.

His first gig at a solo artist was opening for Harry at Dublin’s Slayne Castle — in front of 80,000 people. No pressure. “We were the first one on the bill,” he recalls. “It was us, Annie Mac, Inhaler, and Wet Leg. Like a festival day. So we went on first thinking, ‘They’ll be trickling in,’ but it was already full. That was freaky.” How did the gig feel to him? “I don’t know. I couldn’t look at anybody onstage or out there. I looked at the white dots on the side of the guitar neck until it was over.”

It’s a great rock & roll story — from slanging slices to conquering castles. But in typical understated style, he refuses to take any credit. “I’m only prepared to play a place like Slayne because of all the places Harry’s taken me, and then I’m only playing my music to anyone because of him,” he says. He also won’t accept credit for the meteoric Styles phenomenon, despite co-writing and playing on so many hits. He’s still the same dude who didn’t want to quit the pizzeria. (“I needed the check for the rent,” he says.)

“Harry could have picked any group of people when he decided he was going to go solo,” Rowland continues. “He was massive — he was larger than life. I still can’t believe he wanted to make music with someone who had zero credit to their name, when he could have done the opposite so easily, and everyone would’ve said yes. I’ll never quite get over that.”

But Harry’s gut instincts about Mitch turned out to be justified, to say the least. “He just had a feeling, which says a lot,” Rowland says. “I’ve learned a lot from Harry, but a lot of the most important stuff is to just trust the people around you, and let something be whatever it’s going to be.”

A few years ago, it might have seemed weird to cross over between pop and folk, as Rowland does on Come June. But it’s a sign that pop audiences have gotten more broad-minded. Whenever Styles sings the intensely emotional ballad “Matilda,” with Rowland on acoustic guitar, you can hear a pin drop in the room, even in a stadium. The hush is poignant — nobody even sings along. “Well, everybody’s crying,” Rowland says. “I never play that song facing the crowd. One night I thought, ‘Why don’t I just try it one time facing the crowd?’ But it was too much. It was deep into the tour, and all of a sudden, I’m paying attention, and I almost stopped playing. I thought, ‘God, this is what we’ve been playing every night?’”

He’s hitting the road next spring with the same tight-knit group that made the album. “Sarah’s on drums, Matt’s on bass, and Rob on guitar,” he says. “Everyone who did their bit on the record has said yes to playing live, which is ideal for me. It makes it feel more like a band. When we played Slayne Castle, Rob told me, ‘The last show I played was in ’98 with Elliot Smith.’ So I thought, ‘That’s a nice trajectory.’”

But the toughest audience to impress? His young son. As Rowland says with a smile, “His new thing is putting his hand over the guitar neck when I’m trying to play. He says, ‘No, daddy. No ’tar. Play cars. Come.’ I’ll be in the middle of playing something, but it’s hard to argue with that.”

From Rolling Stone US.