Editor’s Note: On July 3rd, Under the Poplar, the rock project of Silver Spring, MD-based guitarist Heath Witzen, released a great new EP entitled No Heaven.
“My music is typically a mix of alternative/indie rock and pop with some elements of jazz and blues, depending on the track,” Witzen tells SWT by email. “This EP, in particular, features a heavy dose of blues inspired guitar, especially on tracks like ‘No Heaven’ and ‘Run Run.’ Additionally, ‘Outside’ has some disco-inspired elements thrown in while ‘Distraction’ has a progressive rock feel with some jazz composition.”
In an exclusive Artist Essay, Witzen explores the question “How does making music connect us to our humanity?”
No matter where you live, I can assure you that there is an amateur musician making music close by. You may be completely unaware or maybe the sound of an amplifier or drum kit has given you an inkling. A teenager is exploring new sounds while still learning their instrument, a thirty-something is finding some release from the pressures of adulthood, or a sixty-something is exemplifying how punk never dies.
They are firing up their Scarlett in their bedroom or their basement. They may be paying for studio time with money that they will never recoup from album sales. They are scratching their heads at what compressor and equalizer settings they need to make the noise in their heads manifest. They are doing so on the best guitar they could afford or the one they could not afford, but bought anyway. In my case, I am doing so on a guitar I painted and soldered together myself and is worth nothing to anyone but everything to me.
Every one of them harbors a little (maybe big) dream that one day, they will wake up to their phones blowing up from all of the attention that their third EP has received. They will open the mail to find the Grammy invitation with their names printed in gold. But most, at some level, know the remoteness of that possibility.
So why do they do it? Well, they’re human beings. Why wouldn’t they?
It is art. We have a need to express ourselves and the capability to create something from nothing.
“No Heaven” continues in this long human tradition. I have played guitar for a long time, but only within the last couple of years did I begin writing and recording music. I did so for the same reason many have: I wanted to compensate for a lack of fulfillment in my professional life and found an outlet for a bunch of emotions I could not express in any other way. I also had riffs, chord progressions, and fragments of lyrics bouncing around my head and recording felt like the best way to excise them and maintain some sanity.
This EP reflects that process. “Outside,” expresses longing, loneliness, and the natural paranoia from being human; that everyone else is having fun and you are being left outside. “No Heaven” is a jaunty and playful love song that I wrote for my wife. However, the lyrics “If there don’t exist a heaven, // Can I believe that angels do?” hit differently when I recalled them from a sterile hospital waiting room in May as surgeons were operating on her spine. “Distraction” is a desperate plea for us to wise up and stop being taken by the world’s most obvious scams and con artists. “Run Run,” is what happens when you take urban decay, my favorite metaphor for the feeling that adulthood is just grinding you into powder, and marinate it in news stories of men doing some of the worst behavior imaginable.
Musicians weave together emotions and vibrations with strands of what has come before and our own sense of what could be. The jarring discordance of a D minor to an out of key F minor on Distraction would never be produced by a machine if you asked it to write a rock song. But I did it, even if only me and a couple of jazz cats smile when they hear it. The starting and stopping of Run Run as it transitions from its blues rock verses to punk-inspired chorus is unusual and may annoy fans of either genre. Outside includes elements of disco, nearly fifty years after its supposed demolition. It is possible I am the only one who finds these interesting. I suspect not, but if so, then so be it. I did it anyway.
It is indicative of the human spirit that me and literally millions of other musicians will continue to plug away at our tunes in a world where you can create a full set of lyrics in one click and a fully professional-sounding production in a second. For sure, AI-created music will exist and will continue to make its way onto playlists, on album charts, and, to some extent, I am sure we will see it played “live.”
But I do not think you can replace the nexus between human emotions, human effort, and their creations. Empathy allows us to feel that in each other’s work. For heaven’s sake, we built race cars and airplanes and yet, every four years, the entire world stands still to watch human beings run one-hundred meters in a straight line because it is amazing and we enthusiastically celebrate human achievement. That is why I promise you that, in thirty years time, you will still find some nobody in a basement impatiently muttering, “shit,” as he messes up the twentieth take of his rhythm guitar track.
You can connect with Under The Poplar via the links in Heath’s author box below
Heath Witzen
Contributor
Heath Witzen is a Silver Spring, MD-based guitarist who makes music as Under the Poplar. His EP, “No Heaven” was released on July 3, 2026.
