John R. Miller: Humanity is a messy fucking thing
Photo by: Mike Vanata | Western AF
Written by: Meredith Lawrence
Singer/songwriter John R. Miller’s just returned home with some 30 used CDs. Over the phone, from the thick of the tedium of ripping the disks to his computer for his personal music collection, he’s reveling in the haul: The Jesus and Mary Chain, Tom Waits, Sparklehorse, The Outfield’s Playing the Field, Sunny Day Real Estate, Iron Maiden, Levon Helm, and a couple of sealed Replacements CDs. Like his listening tastes, Miller’s artistry resists any neat descriptor, and he chafes at the country label he’s sometimes stuck with, preferring folk, if necessary; Miller is wary of simplistic assumptions.
“But it’s the same old shit, same old tactics. As long as we’re looking at each other and saying, ‘well, that person’s different from me, so they must be the problem,’ then the people who are actually causing the problem are getting away scot-fucking-free.”
“Nothing is binary; like, nothing. Humanity is a messy fucking thing, and the more that you try to box it in and tell people how they're supposed to act or dress or identify themselves, the more it goes against our inherent nature, which is wiggly,” Miller says. “It's not static. There's vested interest, mostly these days I suspect because it's easier to sell stuff to people when you can put them in a box. But it's the same old shit, same old tactics. As long as we're looking at each other and saying, ‘well, that person's different from me, so they must be the problem,’ then the people who are actually causing the problem are getting away scot-fucking-free.”
Made restless by, and frustrated with, society’s dysfunction and greed, Miller tackles human existence from within the liminal unease inherent to disappointment in the status quo. “Some people never try to dance / Some romanticize their ignorance / But you can't hide behind a paper fence / Nobody goes out innocent,” Miller sings on “Dollar Store Tents,” which appears on his 2023 album, Heat Comes Down. He wrote the track after reading Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptic novel, Parable of the Sower, during the summer of 2020. The book struck him so deeply that he dreamed about it and it lingered with him in waking hours and into the present.
Indeed, Miller composed most of Heat Comes Down during COVID-19’s early days, rising at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, and compelling himself to write before doing anything else. Behind much of the album simmers the slow-rolling ennui coupled with terror that defined those early pandemic months.
Photo by: Mike Vanata | Western AF
In his lyrics, Miller distills stories into succinct observations whose emotions and characters — people who might otherwise elide a sense of importance — reveal with their troubles Miller’s innate compassion and curiosity. “Good intent corrupted by the best-laid plans /Can't find the footing on shiftin' sands,” he sings on Heat Comes Down’s plangent midpoint, a chorus-less soliloquy on the state of the world. “Beneath the magnolia and wonderin' why / Everybody wants a piece of the crumbling pie / If he can get some, why can't I?”
Miller wrote “Crumbling Pie” hovering on the edge of the astral plane, in a dream, or was it a mushroom trip? Maybe it was both. It sounds like the spiritual cousin to “Shenandoah Shakedown,” one of Miller’s best-known songs off his 2021 album, Depreciated. (The album, his Rounder Records debut, introduced broader audiences to Miller’s wry, craggy delivery.) Still, a great storyteller knows when to bounce up from rock-bottom. Miller follows the angst in “Crumbling Pie” with the whimsical succor of “Smokestacks on the Skyline,” a spritely-plucked satire of tour life (“There’s a couple of hotdog hills that I would die on / The secret’s in how you roll your eyes”).
Miller found solace from the weird buffeting of life in music at an early age. He grew up first in Maryland, outside of Washington D.C., and then in Martinsburg, West Virginia. There, as a pre-teen suffering from the epic schism of such a move, Miller burrowed into books and music in his new basement room. When an older cousin gifted him Green Day’s seminal 1994 album Dookie, he devoured it, then taught himself to play punk power chords on his dad’s old nylon string classical guitar (not recommended) — Blink 182’s “Damnit,” followed by songs by Green Day and Weezer.
“Music is what moved me the most,” Miller says. At 16, he joined his first band, and in school he found community in theater classes. “That was my first experience with any sort of a scene, where it was a refuge from being a perennial misfit.”
Through connections from his early music endeavors, Miller eventually wound up touring extensively with an old-time string band. When that band flamed out, he formed Prison Book Club, a rock band. Iteratively, the bands Miller joined fell apart seemingly just as they gained traction. In 2014, in need of a way to get solo gigs and supplement his restaurant job income, Miller cut an album of demos (now available on streaming services as Service Engine). But as his 30th birthday approached, Miller became sure he’d drink himself to death if he stayed in West Virginia. He cut one more album with a band of friends — The Trouble You Follow (2018) — and moved to Nashville, where he lives.
“It feels like it’s been too easy — and maybe it’s been on purpose — for us to lose touch with our local communities in a way that gives a lot more power to the greater economic industries and globalization and shit.”
Miller’s lyrical vignettes reward multiple listens. He also has a knack for couplets that land immediately: “Maybe hate's just been lookin' for love / But I don't know if it's gonna be enough” Miller wonders mid-way through “Crumbling Pie.” It’s a hopeless thought, begging to be proven wrong, but without much luck: “Every peaceful valley’s been found / and the promised land is mineral-rich,” he muses later in Heat Comes Down, on the chorus of “Dollar Store Tents.”
“It feels like it's been too easy — and maybe it's been on purpose — for us to lose touch with our local communities in a way that gives a lot more power to the greater economic industries and globalization and shit. I don't really know what the hell I'm talking about with all that stuff, but I do know how those things have affected the work and the communities that I've been around. And maybe not everybody in those communities knows who to point the finger at, but I got two fingers for ‘em,” he says.
As part of this ongoing reflection, Miller writes songs mostly to figure out how to contextualize his existence. “I try to write about how I feel about the things that I see, which sounds really banal, and I guess that’s what we’re all trying to do. But I don’t think there’s anything really intended to be profound or anything about it,” he says. “It’s just, I want to be in conversation with my fellow humans.”
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