08/19/2026
These members of R.E.M., Hootie & the Blowfish, and the Black Crowes weren't thinking about becoming a supergroup. But maybe they have.
Every year, ex-Black Crowes drummer and current syndicated radio host Steve Gorman would put on a fundraiser show for his kid’s high school performing arts department. In 2019, one of the performers cancelled, and Steve was scrambling to find a replacement. It turns out that ex-Hootie & the Blowfish frontman and country superstar Darius Rucker texted him out of the blue, and Gorman asked Darius if he would do the show.
“I saw his name pop up and I immediately wrote, ‘Hey man, do you want to come up to Nashville next month and sing at my kid’s school?’” says Gorman. ‘I’ll put a band together, we’ll just do covers. And he said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it. Sounds fun.’”
Rucker said he’d been thinking of giving Steve a call about putting a new band together. “Musicians always say, ‘Oh, we should do something together’. But I could tell he was serious,” says Gorman. Darius called ex-R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills, and within a month, the three were texting about getting together. Then COVID happened.
They finally got together in 2022. Over the next two years the group wrote and recorded songs. By fall 2024, they had enough for an album.
“We had to have that conversation, do we all actually think this stuff is good?” says Gorman. “Is it cool because it’s us and we like hanging out? Or do we think this is objectively a record? It was like no one wanted to be the first guy to say that.”
They agreed the songs were solid and started booking some shows.
But they needed a name. Mike Mills was in Spain, sitting with friends, when he heard a bird he’d never heard before, a Eurasian scops owl. “So, my friends and I started riffing, and somebody said—it might’ve been me, it could’ve been somebody else—howl owl howl.”
Howl Owl Howl released its first single, “My Cologne,”—about Ariana Grande’s line of perfume called R.E.M.—on Halloween 2025, followed by a nine-city U.S. tour in November.
The band plans to release more this year, and go back on tour.
