Then, just a few weeks before the big day, the whole world got sick and everything shut down.
“I kind of dropped out of the live music scene for quite a while after that,” Miller says. “It took a pretty long time before I got back on the stage.”
Like so many others, Miller was forced to find something he could do at home to make ends meet, so he focused on his freelance work as a video editor. Music became less of a priority, and although he still played and tossed around ideas, Miller didn’t come running back when venues finally reopened their doors. It was only in the last six months or so that he began to feel himself being drawn back to the lights to perform his latest EP, Before.
“I really slowly got back into considering even doing live performances, but I ended up doing open mics because I feel like that's one of the hardest things for me to go through,” Miller says. “It’s the most nerve-wracking, and if I'm going to do solo, I really need to break into doing that in front of people. Just that intimate guitar in front, all the pressure’s on you. No hype man on stage with me to help my introverted self.”
After finding out about a nearby open mic, Miller showed up to play and got more out of the experience than he’d expected.
“Someone told me about The Love Mic at Sundown at Granada,” Miller says. “I went and ended up meeting a bunch of musicians who performed and they're just gradually building up a musical community again. I think that was my goal as well — not just to play a bunch of gigs. I wanted to kind of immerse myself and meet musicians again. It was also a really good exercise for me to get back on stage and get to test out some of my songs and rearrange them for acoustic sets.”
It’s only natural that Miller places so much value on camaraderie and collaboration, because that’s what’s led him to where he is today. Miller was originally a fairly sheltered musician, but his whole world changed when he moved out and started performing with others.
“I picked up recording music at home and I never played with anybody,” he says. “I wasn’t exposed to other musicians, so I just kind of sat on music for many years, until I went to college [at the University of North Texas]. I didn’t go for music, but when I first moved out to Texas from Georgia after high school, I found a guy who played drums. I’d put up a flyer at a Guitar Center, and we both ended up at the same college, so we played for a while. We made a band called Off World.
“The band fizzled out, but we had a lot of fun and that led me to doing the solo project. I wrote all of the music for Off World and just let the musicians do whatever they wanted to fill in the gaps. They were all jazz musicians, so I didn’t want to tell them how to play.”
Cool Cat
Attending a school with such a lively music scene worked out wonderfully for Miller. His time spent surrounded by jazz cats taught him a great deal about working with other artists and exposed his ear to new sounds and ideas to channel into his music.“I really enjoyed playing with other musicians,” he says. “It does get hard with schedules and everybody growing apart and moving, and that's what pretty much ended up happening with the band. We played all over Dallas, Fort Worth and Denton, and we even played Austin a few times with that group, but eventually, people wanted to move on to better their careers. I worked as a freelancer, so I understood the reasons for them leaving. But, I was like, ‘Well, I want to still make music,’ and that's what I did.”
From there things didn’t work out at all like he’d planned, but Miller has been steadily honing his craft, and the fruits of his labor can be found on Before, the EP he released last January. The project’s five tracks boast an impressive range within its brief 16-minute runtime.
“My intention with this past EP was to kind of make something that was a bit more in line with the tastes and the music I was listening to over the past few years,” Miller says. “Early on, I wrote long songs that were like seven-minutes long, and they were always very prog, but I love pop music so much and I hadn't really tried to write pop songs, so that’s something I’ve been working on.”
The title track features Miller singing softly over an upbeat piano riff before a jumpy snare joins in to add some energy to the tune. “Behind Closed Doors” is much heavier, with an acoustic guitar foundation and bright strings that contrast with its weighty bass. Speaking of bass, the funk on “Within You” is undeniable — the song slaps and grooves like a Thundercat jam, and Miller understood the mission with the light, fluid vocals that he lets loose.
“I think probably four out of five of the songs are sort of reflective,” Miller says. “Other than just getting older in general, they’re about just discovering who you really are — who I am as a person and how I function in this world.”
Now that Before is behind him, Miller has set his sights on moving from open mics to billed performances. He’s released a few singles this year as well, so he’ll have plenty of material to work with once he starts to line up more gigs.
“I'm working on that very aggressively right now,” he says with a bit of fire. “I just opened recently for some looping artists at Three Links, and that was like the first time I'd actually been able to use my live show where I incorporate all those instruments and Ableton and piano and stuff like that.”
That his first show of the year went so smoothly bodes well for this chapter of Miller’s career. Now that he’s back in the saddle, he doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.
