Losing someone close and meaningful to you is a difficult and heartbreaking thing to go through. It is quite hard to really put into words the emotions and feelings you go through when you lose someone super important to you. Just before writing his second album, Losin’, multi-instrumentalist Colin Miller’s good friend and landlord Gary King passed away. Miller turned his grief into something incredibly beautiful as Losin’ is a phenomenal album full of raw and powerful emotion and vulnerable lyrics.
‘I was putting feelings I was processing down into a project, and as I was making it, it helped me process these emotions in real-time, and I’ve never had that happen before,’ Miller says about his new album Losin.’ ‘When you’re writing something very personal, I think it’s a natural thing to be like, “Do I wanna give this to other people? What am I doing this for?” It was something that I felt that is something that other people are going through or have gone through and so I thought I might as well put it out in case people connect with it. That was a scary idea so I felt like it was a sign I should do it.’
Miller’s debut album, Haw Creek, was made over several years. ‘A lot of those lyrical ideas I had just had for so long and in the process of making it because I engineered and produced it myself, it just took longer,’ he comments. ‘It was also my first album, so I felt like I had a lot to figure out.’ He loved doing that process for Haw Creek. However, with Losin,’ he wanted it to be a bit quicker. ‘I wanted this next project before I knew what it would be to make something a little bit quicker. I started writing soon after my friend and landlord Gary died because that was such a big thing in my life and on my mind because it was a personal loss and it was also a symbol that my life was about to change, and my sense of home was about to change in a big way. I started writing just as I was feeling something, just as a way to process this thing, and I didn’t really know what would come out of that. I just knew I wanted to push it along faster than I had with older songs.’
Writing Losin’ helped Miller with his grief of losing such a close friend. ‘Grief is always gonna be there so time passes, but that’s about the only distance really I think you get from grief, and so I think the worst thing that could happen with that grief being constant throughout life is that you forget,’ he reflects. ‘I think it was a really helpful thing for me to put down a lot of my thoughts, feelings and memories in this thing, and I have something to reference. I have a place to put those feelings, so that feels good and it feels like a nice tribute to my friend who is not around anymore.’
Through Miller’s beautifully vivid and honest storytelling, listeners can get a sense of who Gary King was. When writing and recording many of the songs, Miller recalled the fond memories he shared with King. ‘A lot of them are things that reference his life or reference my life with him as a character in it,’ comments Miller. ‘My memories with Gary are intertwined with the lyrics of the album, sometimes just straight up one on one.’ Miller tells me that the lyrics “NASCAR crash on the big screen/Shirtless in the July heat” is one such example. ‘That is just kind of like exactly how that shit went down. More than once. He was shirtless most of the time that I would hang out with him. I mean, you get a guy whose wife has passed away, he’s got his house paid for, he doesn’t have to work, he’s on oxygen, and all he wants to do really is sit and watch TV. In a way, he’s a lot like a teenager.’
Some of Miller’s best and closest friends appear on the record, too. Jake Lenderman (MJ Lenderman and Wednesday) is on drums and does some lead lines, Xandy Chelmis (MJ Lenderman and Wednesday) provides the pedal steel, and Ethan Baechtold (MJ Lenderman and Wednesday) plays bass and keys. ‘They’re like my closest friends, so it felt natural to have them on it,’ smiles Miller. ‘At that time, we were all living in the same town, so it’s just like, “Hey, can you play on this? Are you free? That’s kind of like exactly how we all joined those bands in the first place.’ Collaborating with such close friends on musical projects is something that he always enjoys. ‘It’s all been this natural process of including each other on each other’s projects and that feels so good.’
Most of the demos for Losin’ ended up being quite similar to their recorded versions. ‘If I felt I was dwelling on it too much, I would immediately move on,’ comments Miller. ‘There were certain kinds of fragmented ideas that ended up being in other songs in the final versions and the demos. There’s only one song that basically wasn’t demoed out. All the other ones have pretty solid demos where they resemble their ultimate form.’
One of the standout tracks is ‘Birdhouse.’ Miller’s voice is exceptional, and he gives one of his best vocal performances from the record. It perfectly blends indie rock, Americana, western rock, and folk. The guitar, in particular, on this track is electrifying and is very fascinating to listen to. ‘The chords have some shapes that I got from a Songs: Ohio song called Love Leaves Its Abusers,’ comments Miller. ‘There’s this shape, like a barre chord, but it’s open in a way that includes other notes and has this quality that I hadn’t ever heard before. It’s also very cowboy-chordy. It’s lower on the neck. I just thought one of those shapes was cool and thought it’d be cool to write a song around it.’
‘4 Wheeler’ has a hauntingly ambient atmosphere, and gorgeous soundscape and is a change of pace compared to the other tracks. ‘I think I wanted to capture a certain stillness, and I feel like the others I had written songs at that point had a bit more of a driving tempo, and there were more changes in the arrangement,’ exclaims Miller. ‘I wanted to try and slow it down and let the lyrics take a bit more of the spotlight. That was kind of the thinking behind it having a more serene production and overall arrangement.’
‘Hasbeen’ has a much shorter runtime than the rest of the songs from the record, clocking in at under two minutes. ‘Each song is its own entity, and sometimes as you try to write more to a song after the initial idea, it can kind of react poorly to that,’ comments Miller. ‘The initial idea for what it is was perfect. It didn’t need anything else. The demo I did for that was essentially what it ended up being. We re-recorded it, but essentially, it ended up being the same arrangement and the same lyric. It was tight. It didn’t need anything else. I didn’t feel like pushing it.’ In a way, ‘Hasbeen’ acts as a little breather or break. ‘The other songs are between two and a half minutes and four and a half minutes, so I was like, “Why don’t I have a song that feels different and is just in a different zone or chapter of its own.’”
As Miller mentioned each song from the record is its own entity. This requires him to tackle each song differently. ‘Each song is different and kind of requires different attention and upkeep,’ he comments. ‘Lost Again’ and ‘Porchlight’ are excellent examples of this. He continues, ‘Lost Again was really difficult to write. I just had so many different drafts of it, and then Porchlight took five minutes to write.’ What exactly made ‘Lost Again’ so difficult to finish? ‘It was so hard to write like it came out of that perfect mixture of like, “These lyrics mean so much to me why can’t I find the right melody, chords, and order for these ideas to go in?” It was the hardest puzzle, so I was really proud of that when I figured it out.’
Losin’ closes with ‘Thunder Road,’ a reference to the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name. In the opening line, Miller sings “Singing Thunder Road karaoke.” When writing the album, Miller listened to a lot of Springsteen and is a huge fan of him but the song itself is not necessarily about Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road.’ ‘I feel like people do karaoke songs for a myriad of different reasons, but it was an interesting idea to explore the reason someone might choose a karaoke song, like something that comes from the heart,’ says Miller. ‘I feel like everyone has witnessed or heard that story of being at karaoke, and most people are having a good time and choosing things they think will be fun songs to sing, but then one person brings the house down ‘cause they give it everything. That was kind of the thinking that went into that. Just thinking about that person’s perspective on something mundane.’
Losin’ dropped on April 25th. ‘I wanted the songs to feel very cathartic but also really interesting to play,’ reflects Miller. ‘I wanted them to be meaningful but not one-dimensional sad bastard music. Another nice challenge was to try and make the lyrics allow for different experiences to be included or projected on it so that kind of informed the way I wrote in some way. A lot of it was just what I thought was interesting, but I wanted people to enjoy listening to it rather than it just being kind of gutting.’
Photo Credit: Charlie Boss
