Brooklyn-based Miles Hewitt has released an excellent new single, Fortune and Her Orchestra. Directed by Wes Ellis and Hewitt himself, the cinematic video takes us through vast, unpopulated landscapes, the bright lights of the city at night and the intimacy of a motel room; it’s as adventurous and expansive as the song itself, which extends beyond seven minutes of immersive music. The desolate wreckage of America is reflected in the intensity of Sean Mullins’s drums and Brian Betancourt’s bass guitar. Meanwhile, Jack McLoughlin delivers absorbing pedal steel and electric guitar alongside flourishes of piano from Michael Coleman.
The layers of instrumentation steadily grow throughout the song, a beautifully-arranged backing for Hewitt’s distinctive vocal and thoughtful words: “I was born a hitchhiker // Created for to roam // Made to love with a broken heart // Divided as the moon // And there seek a completion // We may never find // Completion, it’s the last thing on my mind.”
Fortune and Her Orchestra addresses the impact of algorithms and AI on artists and, by extension, our very humanity. Hewitt took the title from the poetic gibberish and rambling response of a spam-bot beneath a news article. He explains: “It struck me as an eerily beautiful turn of phrase, like a cut-up, and seemed perfect on multiple levels for a song about the crises of meaning and artistry in our time.”
Fortune and Her Orchestra is taken from Hewitt’s sophomore solo album, Vainglory, which is due for release on 26th July 2026. The writing was instinctive, but the recording process was long and meticulous, with multiple versions of songs recorded over the months. Sometimes with the original musicians returning to hone the sound, sometimes with new ensembles creating something new from the original recordings. Hewitt notes: “There was just a lot of, No; it can be bleaker than this, it can be more lonesome than this. But I wanted the music to be as true to itself as it could possibly be. It was one of those man-loses-mind, man-versus-self-in-the-studio albums, for sure.” Indeed, the extent and intensity of the work involved reflected the album’s themes: “It became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s one thing to make an album about wandering, seeking, searching for the transcendent. But eventually I really was wandering a desert of my own design.” The result displays Hewitt’s song craft and generates a powerful atmosphere. Check it out.
