Haw Creek runs through Colin Miller’s sophomore album, Losin’. Contemplative grief and the sense of place is the heartbeat of this record, finding Miller focusing less on production, and more on composition. There’s a calmness in the solemn and potent melodies on the record, which is filled with a sense of appreciating the moments with loved ones, especially when they’ve gone.
We chatted over Zoom about his creative process, some literature, Gary King, and what it’s like to be able to have close friends to support each other’s musical endeavors.
Colin Miller by Charlie Boss
Jonah Evans: First of all, congratulations on your latest album release. It's really amazing. I love it a lot. And I was just clicking on the songs. I was like, oh, every part of all the songs sound so awesome. And so just really congratulations on the record. It's really great.
Colin Miller: Thank you. I'm glad you like it.
JE: So you're in a hotel lobby. What are you getting up to today?
CM: I am playing my second of three shows at Brooklyn Steel, And the Wind, in Jake's band, in MJ Lenderman. I drum in his band and we're in the middle of album cycle, so I've been touring a lot. It's been my life for a bit.
JE: Lots of hotels.
CM: Lots of hotels. It's a lot of bus travel, so fewer hotels than when we were van touring. Whenever we get a hotel, it feels very lucky and it's nice.
JE: Well, congratulations on having the hotel this time around.
CM: Yes, definitely very nice to have a bed. Sleeping in a bunk is cushy compared to driving in a van. Being able to fall asleep and wake up in the next city. It's a positive thing, but there's drawbacks to both. The idea of a bus when you haven’t been on one feels so luxurious. Then you get on and you're like, “oh, this is a hallway that I'm living with 12 people in.”
JE: Oh, it's a little cramped actually.
CM: Yeah, this smells pretty wild in here. If someone smells weird, everyone smells it for sure. So it's kind of like Sailor life [laughs].
JE: [laughs] So you're ready to get on a boat and sail off for a few months then?
CM: Exactly. That's the next step.
JE: That's cool and stinky, but still sounds like you're having fun.
CM: Yeah I'm touring almost all my closest friends, so it’s just such a comfortable thing.
JE: What's it feel like being on the road and having your album come out?
CM: It's just a new challenge. Ultimately it's been good. So many more people listen to my music now than they did three months ago, so that's kind of surreal. I'm just glad people are listening to it. Nothing in my day-to-day has changed much besides people loving this thing I made. That's really nice to hear and it's very affirming. Kind of makes me want to write, just keep writing.
Tour is a nice distraction from the release, and the release is a nice distraction from tour. So in a way it's kind of been grounding to have my project have its own life. It's had its own life for a long time, but now there's exponential growth that's happened and it's fun to tend to that.
JE: What's your relationship to the nature of East Asheville and the surrounding areas? What is the nature in the area mean to you? And maybe not nature at all, but the objects or structures or material?
CM: I mean, being out in the country means the world to me. I'm more relaxed out there. Living in Haw Creek, we were right below the parkway, and so there was this local trail I would take up to the parkway. Hiking and walking around in the woods becomes a natural part of your day when you're around it.
The property I lived on—Gary and Margaret had lived there. Margaret lived there her whole life, Gary married into it. He was a mechanic and ran his own shop on the land. The woods behind my house was overgrown, but back there you could find all these old cars Gary had never gotten to or that he started working on, and then they kind of just became lemons, so they're almost like sculptures. In high school, I would listen to music in some of those trucks, just for fun. Just because they were unlocked and I was bored and 17 and wanted to go.
I feel like that sort of stuff happens in the country. It's this weird mixture of living and pretending like nature isn't growing all over everything, but also accepting it at the exact same time. It becomes this nuisance that the trucks are in the woods and then it's just like, “oh, well, yeah, they're just there now.” It's not very environmentally friendly, but it's interesting to have these trucks and vans just sitting in the woods when you're a kid. It's easy to create your own mythology around that sort of stuff.
JE: You relinquished control over engineering for this record. In an interview with The line of Best Fit you said, “It felt like I was able to think more about the small details the song could have on it.” What were some of those details? Were you directing others in certain sections of songs? Was it making decisions about chords, beats or lyrics?
CM: All of that really. It gave my brain the space to think about arrangement and chord progressions a little quicker. Having small dropouts for effect, that sort of thing. When I don't have to worry about saving the file and making sure the recordings are still there, my brain is able to troubleshoot. Is this structure the best it can be? Is this tone the best it can be? So that's what I mean by the little things.
Tonality and those things can be easy to look over, but if you’re able to dial it in, they end up having some of the biggest impacts and are foundational to the whole record. I felt like I could really zone in on that, which felt good.
JE: That's so interesting that taking out some logistical things can open up space for your brain and allow you to flow a little bit more.
CM: Yeah, for sure.
JE: What is the importance of having your song fleshed out before sharing them with your peers?
CM: I think there’s something to be said for not sharing something too quickly. I think it's important to have a clear direction when you bring other people in. Regardless if the song is half baked or less, if you have a great direction on it, that will help speed everything along. It was important to have the songs fleshed out structurally and have the chords. I wanted to sweeten 'em up and just add a little bit more interesting. Season it differently, I guess.
I think in a band dynamic, it's definitely different. I know that Karly and Wednesday will write the lyrics and have chords then bring it to the band. At this point, the band has a routine of how they're going to piece together the song. So I think it's just inherently different when you're bringing stuff to a band versus a solo artist like myself trying to communicate this to others. So having a pretty clear concept was important for me.
In terms of just when it's the right time to show people, it was just a gut thing. I think it was when I was able to listen to the songs in full and be like, “okay, this is pretty good. This is pretty close. I think bringing in Ethan and Xandy and Jake and redoing this with Alex will make it a little bit better.”
I think I had a sense of reassurance in the demo process. I sent it to a couple friends and they were like, “these are awesome.” Then I got a little feedback where some people were like, “you could speed some of these up.” Little things like that were helpful, but for the most part it was just a gut thing of being like, okay, I've got the songs in listenable form, I can now move to the next step.
JE: Even though you've played with your friends Jake, Xandy, and Ethan before, do you feel you understand each other a little bit more, or has there been a little bit of an evolution through creating this record?
CM: The most growth is feeling that sense of gratitude I know Jake has felt, and that Xandy—when he was writing songs and I was playing in his band—felt of appreciating your friends. Taking the time and bringing their skills and their energy into a project. That's the biggest thing I've felt grow is my own sense of gratitude. It makes you want to make your time more focused. Or if you're exploring, you're exploring together.
It felt really reassuring for me, and I felt very loved that my buddies would be down to play on my songs and that they liked them. I think taking the turn as the band leader felt like a moment of growth. For all of us to have taken that moment to be the band leader and have gotten support from each other. It's a collective growth thing that we've all experienced.
JE: How would you describe the process or relationship or evolution of the creation of this album with Alex Farrar as the producer? How did you attempt to communicate and understand your relationship with him and yeah, is it similar to the band, you guys are already in the same community, kind of just shifting the project to your project?
CM: It felt very similar to what I was experiencing with my friends being my musicians and being my band. Everybody was focused on the project and the vision was clear on each song, so it felt like everybody—Alex included—was able to focus on their zone and to make their part the best it could be.
Alex was able to provide input into structural stuff of like, “what if we did a dropout here? What if we maybe did a different chord here?” I feel like that's a big thing producers can do is make you rethink a song sometimes. Alex is really good at that. I was able to learn a lot from him working on this record and then also working with him on the Merce Lemon record. I did that right after recording this one. I just felt like it was a seamless thing to give him that control. I’ve worked with him before, but I also just love his records. So I felt like that made the project evolve in a healthy way.
JE: Awesome. Are there things you've learned in the process of making this record that you want to intentionally carry into the next one?
CM: Yeah, I think this record I read a lot going into this one.
JE: Fiction or nonfiction or both?
CM: I think it was all fiction for this one. I was reading Breece D’J Pancake. He's a West Virginia writer, and he only put out one collection of short stories and died young. [He was] this tragic figure who has this one kind of brilliant collection. I love the way his perspectives shifted within one character's narration in that book.
That was a really helpful thing to have as a guide in a way. When I was writing the lyrics, having a couple books that had such clear narrative voices and that were sad and funny—as you read it, it's like you feel like these people. That was really inspirational and helpful in writing this album. I'm definitely going to carry incorporating aspects of what I'm reading and what I like of those books into the lyrics or into just the project in general. I felt like I was able to distill influences in a way that made sense for me. I feel like that’s making this record communicate more clearly to an audience.
JE: There was a moment of humor [on Losin’] that you were talking about helping Gary smoke cigarettes in the song “Cadillac,” but then maybe the tank would explode. Would it be my fault? It's slightly humorous, but a little bit scary and sad kind of combination.
CM: [Laughs] Well, yeah. The background behind that is cause that happened. I got a call from this couple Clint and Tammy that were best friends with him. They brought him groceries and helped him out with going to the doctor and general day-to-day stuff, kind of like what I was doing too. I got a call from them where they were like, “man, he's all right, but Gary exploded last night.” He fell asleep at three in the morning with a lit cigarette and basically tipped the ember side of the cigarette into his oxygen and it lit his upper lip up.
JE: Oh, no.
CM: And, [laughing] yeah. And it scared the shit out of him. He had this awful mustache shaped scab for probably about two months. And my mom was like, you know, she lived at Haw Creek while I was in high school, and so she knew Gary really well, and she was like, now you don't let him do that again. If you start smoking again, you don't let him do it. Because she was like, she was like, if he blows up again, then it's your fault.
JE: Oh noo.
CM: So, this line really comes from just this long stretch where he was like, I'm quitting. And then he was like, well, maybe I'll just go to one cigarette a day. Then of course, he just eventually went back to what he was doing after the scabs healed [laughs].
JE: [Laughing]
CM: Awww, and then every time I hung out with him, I was like, you know shouldn't be doing that. And he's like, if it happens once, it's never going to happen again. And I'm like, that's not exactly how that works.
So it's like little things like that. I feel like throughout that album I was pulling from these really ridiculous moments and isolating how I felt and leaving it open ended. I know the history behind those lines, but I’m leaving it. So writing it in a way that’s more open-ended and people can interpret it however they want. That was important too, being able to put my life into the lyrics and not feel like my music and my life are things I have to keep separate.
JE: I like that. Last question, and it's going to be about Gary. Losin’ is a follow-up to Haw Creek, and it talks about you renting Gary's house for 13 years and you looked after the property mowing the tobacco fields and making music while Gary grew old next door and the abandoned cars he collected years sunk into the woods. I know you performed some caretaker roles before he passed in 2022 at the age of 77. My question is, can you tell us a funny or endearing story that you've etched in your memory about Gary King, maybe something that captures his essence?
CM: At Margaret's funeral, in 2018. It was a somber event. It was a funeral. It was sad. She had an open casket. They both had open caskets, I just think it’s so weird and creepy and awful. You see your loved one, just in a weird fake version of themselves on display. It feels so ancient. So, I was distraught that Margaret just died, but Gary was sitting next to her body, shaking everybody that was coming by to pay their respects. And he was honestly having the time of his life. He was just seeing everybody that he's ever met. He was just slapping people on the back. Time and days before when Margaret died, it was probably one of the few times I ever saw him cry. I knew he was distraught that Margaret was gone, but he also just loved people so much and he loved shooting the shit. He was such a classic country old man.
Everyone pays their respects and the eulogy part starts. Clinton Gorman spoke at Margaret's funeral and he was in the middle of telling a story about how Gary and Margaret met. They met when Margaret worked at a GMC car office. Gary worked at a mechanic shop next door. As he was telling the story, Clint got the car wrong. And I don't know how Gary got a microphone, but he had a microphone in the crowd. And he started heckling. He started heckling Clint during the eulogy, and he was like, that was a Ford Mustang.
JE: [Laughs]
CM: Then Clint starts yelling back at Gary, and he's like, “I think this is the first time in history that anyone has been heckled during a eulogy. This is one of those times in your life, Gary, where you need to sit down and shut up.” And then Gary was like, “well, I'll sit down and shut up the minute you start getting your details right.” And then he's like, “but in all seriousness, Margaret was the love of my life, and he choked up and gave the microphone away. Just unbelievable. Yeah. That's just one of the best Gary stories, but there's so many good ones of him being like, I don't know. When he died we all felt like they broke the mold when they made him, and maybe we're all better for it [laughing].
JE: [Laughing]
CM: Just this mixture of he knew, he loved people so much, but he also razzed them in such a unique way and that was just a unique like, he just, he loved people and he was also such a cut up.
JE: A little bit of a non-conformist.
CM: Oh, big time. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, he's just kind of a larger than life character and that's the reason he made such a huge impact in my life and why I wanted to write about just losing a person like that in my life.