Country Artist John R. Miller Makes His Own Meaning Out of Anti- Authoritarianism

Singer-songwriter John R. Miller says his anti-authoritarian streak began around third grade. He was in Catholic school in his native West Virginia, and he got into a habit of “questioning everything.”

“There wasn’t really a world where I could see myself wilfully submitting to a system I found to be extremely imprisoning and inequitable,” he says ahead of a tour stop that brings him to Dallas' House of Blues on Dec. 15, when he'll open for country icon Robert Earl Keen.

Those are heady thoughts for a third-grader, but Miller has always been introspective. That’s a big reason the country musician, now 38, has built an impressive career as a songwriter, band member and, most recently, as frontman of his own band.

The tour's Dallas performance will include plenty of songs from Miller’s 2023 album Heat Comes Down, a largely melancholy record that ruminates on the troubled past, the anxiety-inducing future and the uncertain moment Miller — and all of us — are living right now.

In other words, the record is a reflection of the man who wrote it: a man who, even as a third-grader, started realizing that things like capitalism weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

“When I learned you could do this,” he says, referring to a music career, “it looked like freedom.”

Before he performed under his own name, Miller made a living playing in other folks’ bands. He worked odd jobs — catering, contracting and a lot of restaurant work. Then, when he got the call he was waiting for, he’d hit the road with a group.

One of those groups included fiddler Chloe Edmonstone, who is now Miller’s partner and bandmate. She and her bandmates needed a bass player for a cross-country tour in the summer of 2014, and Miller was looking for “any opportunity to hop in a van.” He ended up playing with the group, Locust Honey, for multiple years, and he and Edmonstone now live together in Madison, Tennessee, along with a host of other musicians who have been priced out of Nashville.

“Nashville has two very stark sides to it,” he says. “There’s a sort of independent, weirdo, underground side to it, then there’s everything else you see on TV.” (Miller, who calls himself an “anarcho-pinko person,” has more in common with the first side.)

Despite settling down in a community full of “DIY creative people” he adores, a lot of his life is lived on the road.

“I hate touring when I’m home, and then I hate being home when I’m touring,” he says.

He’s restless, itching for the next show, but when he’s on his way, he worries about his and his band’s safety. After all, they’re a bunch of people in a relatively small van, as he points out. It’s not the safest or healthiest way to live.

But it’s his way.

Much of Miller’s music carries a feeling of nostalgia, both because of his sonorous voice — which sounds like vintage country music — and because his lyrics touch on a country that’s changing and a home life that, while sweet, will always be out of reach. To him, one of the few certainties in life is that those without power will always be exploited.

“Nostalgia is a super real and positive thing, but as we’ve seen, it can be used for some pretty dark stuff,” he says. “One person’s nostalgia is another person’s trauma.”

His songs — even peppy tracks such as “Conspiracies, Cults & UFOs” — are full of grim, foreboding imagery. For instance, on “Harpers Ferry Moon,” he laments, “There was blood before our time / and there'll be blood to come.”

Then, on “Crumbling Pie,” he reminds listeners, “The ground takes back everything that it gives / But you can't rob a man of what was never his.”
The somber lyrics call to mind some of the work of Tyler Childers (a friend of Miller and a collaborator), but each song is a wholly original peek inside Miller’s busy mind. He’s constantly thinking about complex, maddening topics like late-stage capitalism and disinformation and its impact on people who have, as he says, “A lot more in common than not.”

He doesn’t want to be preachy, he says, but by writing these songs, he hopes to convey what’s jangling around inside his head and, maybe, connect with someone else who feels similarly troubled.

Many of the songs on Heat Comes Down were written early in the morning (specifically around 5 a.m.) during “one of the winters in lockdown.” It’s a road record; it sounds like a man trying to make sense of the places, people and things he saw in a pandemic-addled America.

As he was writing, Miller wrestled with whether he should approach things from an allegorical angle or attack them head on. In the end, it seems like he did a bit of both: Songs such as “Nobody Has To Know Your Mind” appear to be direct commentaries on the constant hustling people must do to earn a living, as well as that timeless American urge to ditch it all — your job, your social media, your life — and disappear into the country.

Yet that’s just one interpretation.

“All of the songs that I write are always me trying to work through something in my head or remember something properly or find something to say about it,” he says.

Because memory, he cautions, “is sometimes inherently wrong.”

Of course, not everything Miller thinks about is intricate or anxiety-inducing. For example, he’s excited to come to Dallas — a place where he hasn’t spent as much time as he’d like — and he’s excited to be “in a state like Texas, which has such an amazing history of songwriters.”

And even though his mood, his memories and his music can dip deeply into melancholia, he is ultimately hopeful about the role music can play in the grand scheme of things.

“Sometimes a song can take on a life of its own and become bigger than three or four chords,” he says. “I think that’s part of the magic of songwriting that I really love. In our more profound cultural moments of the last 100 years, recording music has played a pretty big role. If nothing else, it’s a powerful backdrop.”

Maybe one day one of his songs will become “bigger” in that regard. Maybe one of them already has, at least for some people.

What’s certain, at least in this moment, is that he has to keep trying. He knows this in his bones — maybe he knew it all the way back in third grade.

“If you want life to have any sort of meaning,” he says, “you have to make it for yourself.”

John R. Miller plays with Robert Earl Keen on Sunday, Dec. 15, at House of Blues, 220 N. Lamar St.