Jarad Miles & the Ancient Waves

From his modest beginnings discovering his mom's old guitar collecting dust in their South Dakota farmhouse basement, Jarad Miles’s musical life has followed nary the predictable path.

Although his mom refused to teach him to play, she bought him a Telecaster look-alike guitar and amp kit from the nearby Walmart for his 16th birthday. Largely self-taught, Jarad first began learning songs he heard on the radio by Beck, Modest Mouse, Radiohead, Weezer, and Elliot Smith. Later, after seeing the 2005 Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home—he fell deeply into the songs of Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, and Nina Simone among others.

During his early 20s, Jarad would live for short stints in Granby, Colorado, the Twin Cities, and Hyderabad, India before landing in Portland, Oregon in 2008. While in Portland he would record One Million Years EP followed by his first full-length Rocketship with engineer Jake Kelly (Kimya Dawson, St. Even). Rocketship received favorable reviews from local blogs and newspapers including the Portland Mercury's music critic Ned Lannamann, who called Rocketship "A wonderful, weird record..." and described the track ‘He Once Was a Friend of Mine’ as “a gaspingly good funeral song”. Another song from the record, 'Lazy Old Sun', was featured on the PDX POP NOW! 2011 Compilation and mentioned in a shortlist of "names you might know soon" by OPB's (Oregon Public Broadcasting) Jeremy Petersen.

Jarad’s second full-length album, Ancient Wave, was recorded with producer Dave Jones and engineer Adam Selzer (The Decemberists, M. Ward) at Type Foundry Studios in Portland, OR. The album was released in 2013 alongside a short film about the album called ANCIENT WAVE - A Musical Portrait by Norwegian director Carsten Aniksdal.

After moving to the Twin Cities in 2017 to be nearer to family, he began writing new songs and looking to form a new band. In September of 2018, Jarad self-published a collection of poems, Carried Then This World: Selected Poems, 2005-2014.

In 2019 he formed the band Jarad Miles & the Ancient Waves (formerly Featherbed) with local bassist Andy Nail and drummer Ed Draper, and later joined by guitarist Andrew Berg. They began playing shows in early 2020; sharing bills with local bands Little Fevers, Pleasure Horse, and Battlerat. They had studio dates to begin recording a new full-length record on the weekend of March 14 just as the pandemic hit full force.

As the shutdown and quarantines prevented the band from working in-studio together, Jarad began working on a solo record. That album, Standing Upon This Array, would take shape starting in June of 2020 and reach completion near the end of 2021. It will be his first full-length album in nine years following the 2013 release of Ancient Wave. The new album is a collection of ten songs compiled and developed during the pandemic and reflects a panoramic view of a turbulent 12-year relationship. Through an inward-looking prism and lyrical perspective, Miles invites us on a kind of spiritual retreat — a sonic spa of love, loss, yearning, and inner peace.