As you might expect, both kids are pop fans. “He’s really into Chappell Roan at the moment, which made me as a parent realize, ‘Shit, am I more of a Chappell Roan fan than a Sabrina Carpenter fan?’ I think I’m leaning more to Chappell. I texted Harry, ‘They’re great.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, yeah — I think you’re right there.’”
It’s been three and a half years since Harry’s House — enough time for Mitch and Sarah to come up with two albums and two kids — and Rowland praises Chappell for not banging out a quickie follow-up to her big album. “People don’t know how to go away, do they?” he asks. “Do people just live in a panic state of, like, ‘I need to do more’? Not even in terms of popular, but just in general — ‘I need to do more.’ People romanticize being over-prolific. Why can’t they just savor it? It can really work for people not doing anything.”
He pauses. “All this just to say, ‘Take your time, Chappell Roan. Do it for my kids. Stretch it out.’”
But that’s part of the mystique of his organic collaboration with Styles. Musical inspiration has its own natural timing. “When we were finishing Fine Line, we were working in the same studio as Liam Gallagher,” Rowland recalls. “He was like, ‘I gotta fucking hand it to Harry. He’s not fucking about. He made one record, now he’s getting right back in making another.’ And then after that he made another straightaway.”
Fine Line was a massive success, yet Harry’s House was a phenomenon even by previous standards, while “As It Was” spent 15 weeks sat Number One in the U.S. But there was no rush to jump right back in to bang out another. “No, it was kind of the opposite,” Rowland says, citing Styles’ famously obsessive full-immersion studio process. “Making those albums, it felt like he was going inward — or maybe we were all going inward, and we couldn’t imagine doing anything else. With him, it’s not like a flash in the pan, ‘let’s book two weeks and bang it out.’ It’s like, ‘Let’s live in it. We’re a stew.’”
How Harry Styles’ Guitarist, Mitch Rowland, Moved to the Countryside and Made a Folk-Rock Gem, Rolling Stone, 12September2025
