Tim Lopez Mutates Into Timothy Howls

Tim Lopez is not a werewolf─at least not in the literal sense. Itching to reinvent himself, personally and creatively, the Plain White T’s guitarist began to consider a new stage name to coincide with a new-found musical awakening. He turned to his last name, derived from the Latin term “lupus,” meaning wolf, and initially pitched around several ideas like “Timothy Wolf” to capture the transformation.

“When Googling my name, I wanted the first thing people found to be the music on this project and not be distracted or have any preconceived notions about what it should sound like,” Lopez tells American Songwriter over a phone call. “This batch of music had a darkness to it, and I just didn’t want to confuse the two projects.”

He eventually settled on Timothy Howls, a double entendre blending werewolf imagery with an “aggressive singer ring,” and it unexpectedly gave him a jolt of confidence. “It’s never come super easy to me─to get up in front of a ton of people. Since I was a kid, I always hated that part of school. It’s weird to be someone who gets up on stage for a living and writes their most vulnerable feelings into song and has stage fright,” he says. “Almost every time I’ve gotten onstage, I have to talk myself into it. This year, I’ve been feeling confident about the songwriting and the more I put myself out there, the more doors that are opening. It seems like things are unfolding. In a way, I’m doing the whole manifestation thing where I keep on the gas pedal and keep the positive mindset.”

With the name change, Timothy Howls unleashes a brand new song today (April 22) called “Lightning from the Blue Sky,” a song title based around the old idiom “bolt from the blue.” “As a songwriter, you’re often listening to everyday conversations for a phrase that sounds cool,” he offers. Lopez had been flipping through a book of idioms when he stumbled across the phrase and “instantly felt like it was a cool description of what it was like to meet my wife Jenna. I’d spent a lot of time single in Austin and had gone through all the usual ways of trying to meet people, like hitting the bars with friends and being the wallflower.

“When I met her, it was the easiest thing. I felt instant electricity between us, and I was telling her I loved her super quick─like embarrassingly quick,” he adds with a laugh.

And then she hit me on the blindside, electrified / Cuts right through like lightning from the blue sky, he sings over sharp waves of static guitar and piano.

“It’s always the absolute best feeling when you write. Sometimes, I toil over a single line for a couple days and tweak lyrics here and there and feel unsatisfied,” he says. “I went for a walk and basically could hear the song in my head even down to the guitar parts. I was singing the guitar parts into my phone. I had the whole song written in a day. My brain was already putting the musical elements together, too. I couldn’t even keep up with my mind. I was trying to track it as a fast as possible so I didn’t lose any ideas.”

The accompanying music video, self-produced and directed outside his home in Austin, borrows horror film elements (think The Creature from the Black Lagoon)─even if Lopez himself doesn’t quite know where it came from─to tell his love story. “I don’t really understand why Fish Man popped into my head and why that concept seems to line up with a song that’s super positive and good,” he reflects. He’d been racking his brain for video treatments, “especially for ones that felt like I could pull off here and film myself with some friends” when “this visual of me in a large body of water, fully soaked in my clothes, swimming away from something” came to him. “The subconscious is weird sometimes.”

The video, filmed over two days with no budget, finds Lopez and his family sitting down for a mid-afternoon lunch of fish sticks. Fish Man peers through the window and soon reels in revulsion. “He’s so disgusted because it feels like we’re eating his brother or his kind. Then, it haunts him. When he sees us, everything gets dark and twisted and looks really evil. In our minds, it’s just everyday life. At some point, he has to end up getting his revenge.”

“Lightning from the Blue Sky” anchors Lopez’s forthcoming The Rubble EP, out everywhere May 21. As many artists have done, the singer-songwriter had to adapt to a new normal, so he took to GarageBand to demo a collection of new songs, largely centered around his “brooding love for heavy singer-songwriter material. As much as I enjoy a song that makes me feel incredible positive emotions, I almost think I prefer to be dragged down by a song. Maybe at certain times in my life, I’ve been low and really leaned on songs like that to carry me through.” 

He hauls universal feelings of pain, sorrow, and loneliness throughout the six-song project. During quarantine, he “tried to listen to any weird, subconscious moments I was having. I’m the type of person who if I have an idea right before I fall asleep I have to get up and leave the room and go sing into my phone. GarageBand is not the best platform for getting your ideas across, but if you really work at it, you can get some solid-sounding ideas. I used those demos to send around to producers here in town.”

Lopez eventually teamed up with Adrian Quesada (of Black Pumas) and Spoon’s Jim Eno on the first single. Producer Sam Kearney came into the picture much later to finish up the entire project. A song like the brittle “The Current,” closing out the project, finds Lopez pulling in the reins to discuss depression, as he takes cues from someone very dear in his life for inspiration. “They lean on me, and we’re always battling through those tough times together,” he says. “The message is hidden in the lyrics, but I think anybody who might be struggling can probably pick it out. I’ve been low at points in my life and needed this kind of song.”

Elsewhere, he honors his neighbors Joe and Lily and their enduring love with “Fire,” an affecting ballad written after Joe’s death in 2020. The sands of time slip away / And the hours fly / Now, I’m learning how to live without you / But I can barely breathe without you near me, he sings with what might be his best vocal performance.

“That was a tough loss. I definitely leaned on those folks. My grandparents had lived in California and have all passed on now. Joe and Lily filled that role. Joe was kind of a partier. He’d have a big glass of whiskey and ask me to come over and have a drink. I played golf with him sometimes. You could go over to their house and they’d hand over whatever you needed.” 

Lopez remembers Joe’s last night quite vividly, like a tattoo on the brain. “I saw him the night before he died. We were standing in his living room, and he was in home hospice care. It was heavy. You don’t witness people that close to death. Knowing he died that night… I was one of the last people he saw. I prayed over him and felt like it was such a strange thing. Afterward, I would see his wife walking up and down the street. She would put her arms around you and sob. Nothing could be more heavy.

“I tried to think about what it might be like to love someone your whole life and then all of a sudden be absent of their presence,” he adds. “There’s definitely a therapeutic element to writing. Regardless whether anyone else gets that emotion from it, I still do. It might end up meaning more to me than anybody else and that’s OK. Sometimes, that’s what it is all about.”

Married six years ago, Lopez and his wife Jenna certainly looked to Joe and Lily as a testament to what it means to love and commit for life. “There were times you’d see them ribbing each other. It’s a lifetime of loving somebody and being annoyed by somebody. There’s all those things in a long-lasting marriage I would think. I don’t know who’d go through life with a flawless relationship,” he says. “They would walk together every single morning. If you’re going to make a relationship like that work over a lifetime, then you know there’s really solid commitment to one another. That’s tough to come by. They were such a unit.

“It was nice to have somebody modeling a successful relationship. You always want to surround yourself with people who are better at things or more successful at things so it drives you to pursue something better. Why do the opposite and have people terrible at things around you?”

When The Rubble took hold, Lopez knew it was time. It was time to step centerstage. It was time he commanded the spotlight. It was time to see his own vision through. “It’s just time. I’ve been doing music for half my life. In both bands I’ve been in, I’ve always had somebody else who’s the more prolific writer and in more creative control of the project. This is the first time where it felt like my project, music, and vision. It’s time to get over any insecurities. Become what you want to become. It’s been there the whole time.”

Photo by Garrett Porter