Kris Howland

If you have seen HWF on a t-shirt at a bluegrass show, you have met Kris Howland's work.

A group with one rule

Kris came out of the pandemic looking for company. He rejoined Facebook, joined a music group, and watched it fall apart. So he started his own, built around his own way of listening.

The name began as a joke. Kris borrowed it from "Blood Sucking F(r)iends," a Greensky Bluegrass song by Dave Bruzza, where the "r" in parentheses lets you read it either way. Trevor admits he was in the group for a year before he noticed it was Fiends, not Friends.

The founding rule is simple: no dunking on anyone's taste. Members post a record, name the artist and title, and talk about why they love it. Kris hits the love button even on records he would never play himself.

"Nobody likes everything. Everybody loves someone. One of my buddies said that to me a few years back, and it sticks with me to this day."

He hoped for 150 people to talk records with. It grew far past that. It mostly runs itself now, he says, and he still finds music there almost every day that he never knew existed.

"If you can love something as much as I love my favorite things, we're solid. It doesn't matter about my feelings on it."

"Send me money every month and I'll mail you a record"

A member asked the group which record club he should join. Kris joked that he could send him money every month and get a record in the mail. About five weeks later, the club shipped 225 records to its first subscribers.

Subscribers get one pressing a month. At first, Kris bought into runs that were already happening and added a signed card or an obi, the Japanese-style paper band that wraps the jacket. From the fourth release on, every record had to be exclusive to the club, either a color variant nobody else could sell or a pressing that existed only because the club made it. The club's catalog has since passed 50 releases. Fulfillment runs through Ridge Runner Records in Parkersburg, West Virginia, home of Kris's partner Erik Myers.

Pressing records for the people who made them

About half of the club's releases now are what Kris calls self-presses. He finds an artist who should be on vinyl but has no backing to get there. From mastering for vinyl to shipping, the club handles it.

The first one Kris pressed himself was Kyle Tuttle's Labor of Lust, a record that was headed for CD and streaming only. The club got it mastered for vinyl, helped rework the artwork for the bigger format, and pressed it at Gotta Groove Records in Cleveland. Kyle got a stack of records for his merch table. Kris calls Kyle the mayor of progressive bluegrass in Nashville, and says doing right by him changed everything. Opportunities started coming to him through Kyle's friends.

"We wanna be known as the most artist-focused label, record club, in the scene that we're all in together."

How a sellout led to Rounder

The bluegrass reissues started with a crash. Real Gone Music reissued John Hartford's Aereo-Plain, and a link to it landed in the group. It sold out in about half an hour. The label went looking for the source of the traffic and found a Facebook post by Kris.

Gordon Anderson of Real Gone reached out. Kris, still new at this and plenty intimidated, pitched him the club. A few weeks later, Anderson came back with catalogs Kris could draw from, including Rounder, Vanguard and Flying Fish.

Kris made a list on the spot. He picked records that shaped the bands he loves, and records that had become too rare and too expensive to find. Béla Fleck's Drive came first, in October 2023, its first vinyl pressing since the late 1980s. Next came J.D. Crowe & The New South, the record everyone knows as Rounder 0044, then Manzanita by the Tony Rice Unit and Doc Watson's self-titled 1964 debut on Vanguard.

Rounder 0044 is personal. At Bender Jamboree in 2019, Jarrod Walker of Billy Strings's band told Kris he had to hear it before they could keep talking bluegrass. Walker wrote the set list and a note that night. It hangs in a shadow box at Kris's house. When the reissue came, Walker wrote new liner notes for it.

Manzanita, pressed only once when it came out in 1979, became the club's most popular release. The goal, Kris says, is a clean, sealed copy of an essential record at a fair price, not $100 on the used market.

Working backward to John Hartford

Bluegrass was not something Kris heard growing up. He came to it through jam bands, Yonder Mountain String Band first, and then worked backward. He thought plenty of Hartford songs were Yonder originals before he knew better. Hartford, he says, is the trunk of his family tree on that side of his music.

"A good band makes you listen to everything they've ever done. But a great band will make you listen to everything they've ever done and why they did everything that they did, all their influences."

On the show, Kris broke the news of a club variant of Aereo-Plain in Cubs blue. He calls it a bit of an ego project, and a rite of passage.

Early on the Billy train

Kris and Trevor both caught Billy Strings early, back when you could buy a ticket at the door. The two still argue, mostly on Facebook, over whether the first pressing of Turmoil & Tinfoil came in anything other than pink. Kris stood on the arena floor in Denver not long before this conversation, watching a crowd bigger than all his early Billy venues put together.

"The passion hasn't changed. The appreciation hasn't changed. It's just grown to more people."