No Depression Magazine, July-August 2003

WHEN YOU WRITE A GOOD SONG AND YOU KNOW IT
A Conversation with Scott Miller

By Barry Mazor

In the wake of his mid-late ‘90s tenure with the tuneful, playful roots-pop band the V-Roys, Scott Miller has been writing narrative ballads and hook-based roots-rock songs, pleasing audiences across the country with well-paced shows and clever banter -- whether he’s performing solo acoustic or with his loose backing crew, the Commonwealth.

Upside Downside, Miller’s second album for Sugar Hill Records since the demise of the V-Roys, employs the trope of being a two-sided LP (the back to the CD separates the songs into six songs each on an "upside" and a "downside"). The ploy may not be novel, but it’s never been more "right" than for the work of this rather complicated guy who can seem a pile of double sides himself.

Raised in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in some isolation, Miller is also a scholar of Russian language and literature, attracted to the same passion in Dostoevsky that he found in Civil War histories. Though much of his music could be a soundtrack for partying, he’s spent a good chunk of his life in quiet solitude. Associate with regional music and the south, he’s the son of a southern mother but a Pennsylvania father, and he doesn’t mind touring far and wide from his present hometown of Knoxville. And verbal as he is, he wasn’t necessarily wildly comfortable being asked a lot of questions in an interview.

Miller brings all these dichotomies to the stage, and the friction adds up to a consistent good time from quality material. You also notice, at these shows, a higher preponderance of female audience members than a lot of performers in the roots/Americana vein seem to pull. He’s aware of it.

"I do like to see a parade of healthy hair on women out there, " he told me. "I’m proud that I still get some of them -- even though I’m married! And the men follow the women, so they’ll be there too."

I. IT BREAKS THE RULES TO ASK THE AUDIENCE A QUESTION

NO DEPRESSION: You’ve clearly been able, uncommonly, to hold audiences both as leader of a rock band and alone and acoustic as a singer-songwriter. What are the performance differences between those for you?

SCOTT MILLER: Solo, there are tricks of the trade; John Prine can have a room full of biker summabitches raising hell, but he does "Souvenirs" and they’re crying. I like to make a lot of noise, but I like to play by myself too. I was only playing solo before the V-Roys; the V-Roys was the first band I was ever in, really. There were lessons that I learned there -- but a lot of them got thrown out the window when all of a sudden I was the guy in charge, with even the logistics different, just to get a band where it needs to be so they all play your songs with a smile.

ND: With or without the band you seem to be a practiced showman.

SM: That may have started in Boy Scout camp. There was one three miles down from the house -- as far as my parents would let me go in the summer -- and I worked there, making campfires for 11-year-olds. That’s a tough audience!

ND: Anyone who’s seen you perform knows the Scott Miller mantra -- "Are you with me?" -- that goes out to the audience now and then. What’s the worst response to that question you’ve ever heard?

SM: Silence. I was playing a country fair in Green Bay and I asked it -- once. And that was enough. It breaks the rules to ask the audience a question anyway -- because they might answer.

ND: How did the years you spent after college working in folk and even bluegrass clubs affect how you interact with an audience now?

SM: In two different ways. At first I was working at a place called " The Prison Coffeehouse" or something, very folk-based -- and those audiences were there to hear your songs, kind of quiet. Then I moved to Knoxville and started a gig that I did for four years -- at a big old bar called Hawkeye’s -- every Wednesday it started out, and then, as the poster said, "every damned Friday." They had a thing called "Animal Hour" between 9 and 10, where you got three shots for one.

ND: A solo acoustic performer’s dream! This may explain a lot.

SM: Yeah; I could get pretty fuckin’ loud! My songs were really obnoxious and timely and I guess had some shock value to them. They weren’t exactly the kind of songs that a man could play for the rest of his life! I’d do these for four hours straight with no breaks -- from 1990 to 1994.

ND: There’s still a change-up "picking" side to what you do, even b ehind a sometimes raucous band like the Commonwealth.

SM: That’s probably just my limitation as a musician. Where I grew up, there was bluegrass, but there were no rock ‘n’ roll bands, and nobody around to play. We were so isolated in the valley that the band I saw more than any other was Hot Rize -- and I was such a stick-in-the-mud traditionalist about a lot of things that I like that.

ND: You’ve been known to praise someone like Pete Seeger for his live shows, which will seem " of another time and folkie" to some.

SM: Yeah -- and others like him. What struck me was the songs. People can laugh about some of them, but there was that "Point a to Point B" thing in them that would move me; For me, it’s all about the song; I try to keep it about that.

ND: There’s a different sort of "roots" thought your music, of course, which is clearly broad rock ‘n’ roll background. It’s possible, in you music, to find references to everything from ‘50s doo-wop to Buck Owens to indie rock. Somewhere, rock sounds came into your life. What did Scott Miller’s high school record collection look like?

SM: Like the twelve albums for a penny that you got from Columbia. At my 10th birthday, Kiss was in their heyday; I was Kiss Army fodder. But my older sister gave me Abbey Road. Like every other singer-songwriter, I started with Dylan, in moving from the folk stuff. When I went to college I’d still not even heard of the Violent Femmes or R.E.M.; but when I heard them it wa like "well, that’s OK then."

ND: College was William & Mar. Was southern pop of the, say, Big Star or beach music varieties impacting you then?

SM: Are you kiddin’? I didn’t even drink; I spent those four years studying and sitting in my room playing the guitar. I loved Neil Young -- who is somebody who can do solo and band -- but, this in not feigned ignorance. The first rock I played was with the V-Roys. Well, I played with Greg Smalley in Atlanta some, in the band the Diggers.

II. YOU USE THE ERASER A LOT MORE THAN YOU USE THE OTHER END OF YOUR PENCIL

ND: Has the Commonwealth evolved from a loose conglomeration to a set working band?

SM: I’m a working songwriter guy; that’s what I do. To go out and do these shows, I’ve got to be able to keep a band. At least I had enough foresight to call it the Commonwealth! It’s not a band the way the V-Roys were; you didn’t have to tell anybody what to do there. Everybody did their job and we traveled together well.

ND: There’s a set bunch of guys on the new Upside Downside CD, and contributions like Eric Fritsch’s organ and accordion work are marked, for instance.

SM: Well yeah. He and I co-produced it, and I’ve played with him for the last nine months or a year. But there’s still no set Commonwealth.

ND: With the V-Roys, you were co-leader of a band pretty widely heralded even outside of the root-rock arena. Some good music got made. What happened?

SM: The same story as a million others. We were a band; I know we were. E-Squared and Warner Bros. Fell out, and there was no way to go farther up or out. And I think Jeff Bills and Paxton Sellers didn’t enjoy the road as much as Mic Harrison and I did -- and that’s not a happy van. Mic and I played a few V-Roys songs on the radio here in town, live at a club, just this week; I was amazed how many people there hadn’t heard of them by this point! Time’s gone by.

ND: What did you take from those years, as writer and performer?

SM: Writing for the band was new. And traveling -- shit, man, I hadn’t been anywhere. I couldn’t wait to see the Midwest for the first time. And I learned how to read in the car without getting sick!

ND: Did the V-Roys work with Steve Earle and Ray Kennedy impact how you see the making of songs and records?

SM: those were the first real records I ever made. It was, "What the hell is a compressor? MIDI, meet troglodyte, troglodyte meet MIDI." Steve has always been real encouraging on the songwriting. He’s the one who taught me about editing. You use the eraser a lot more than you use the other end of your pencil, till it’s right, and it flows and you don’t have a line you put there just to get to the next verse. That you need to rewrite that verse, and you can’t be afraid. Oh, and that you can only really do that in the morning -- sober!

ND: Did any of that make you more interested in collaborating as a songwriter?

SM: I definitely love to write, alone, probably because I’m a selfish bastard. You try to find something in your song that you can connect with, so when you play it or record it or people listen to it, you’re in there.

ND: How do you go about it? Are you prolific?

SM: This new album is the first album that I had to write for without songs piled up -- where I took off from the road last summer to fix up this little hut behind my house and then sat down. It was, "Well, what are you gonna do now?"

III. THE WHOLE COUNTRY IS BECOMING LESS DISTINGUISHABLE

ND: There are a lot of southern themes in your songs. How much did where you come from really affect the sounds you make?

SM: It affects everything about you. That’s the point I was trying to make with the Thus Always To Tyrants CD (2001) -- how geography effects your thought. I grew up in a big beautiful valley with mountains on either side. In some ways, it was a neat box. The people in that valley, including my family, are all of Scotch-Irish and German descent, Presbyterian and Methodist, and they look at their watches at 12 o’clock when church is supposed to be over. It’d better be over. Where I see that work ethic in myself is where I put my head down and work twice as hard as a smarter person who might stop. I don’t say no to gigs too fast.

ND: You have a Virginian mom and Pennsylvania Dutch dad -- and Mason-Dixon line song themes. There must be some relation!

SM: We’d all get together for meals, even third cousins. With one side, you’d be done with dinner in 15 minutes -- no talkin’, and one purpose, to nourish you body -- amen! But on my Mom’s side they wouldn’t clear the table for two hours; they’d just sit around and yak, argue about politics or anything.

ND: The song "Amtrak Crescent" on the new CD mentions how the region is getting less distinguishable. Can there continue to be any genuine sort of roots music that’s more than nostalgia if that’s the trend?

SM: The whole country is becoming less distinguishable. I can go home to our farm and see cow places springing up everywhere and farms going down -- more homogenization. The kids will grow up in the most fertile land in this nation -- and what are they going to know about it? They’ll be driving down to the Taco Bell and the duplex movie. But ether’s still lots of "We’re a stompin’ Southern band; we gew up in the suburbs of X, y’know!" out there. Maybe that’s interesting, or not, but either way it would be better if they had good songs!

ND: It sometimes seems, in your songs, that where you came from was a place to escape. You left the "simple holler" to go study Russian literature and language.

SM: It’s kind of why I started playing, too -- so I could sit up in my room and escape. I just turned energy inward in my early 20s -- and about exploded. My senior year in college, I went into the guidance counselor’s office and asked fi there were applications for the Post Office. I found out that getting into the postal system is probably harder than getting into Harvard. There are waiting lists! So I roofed and dug ditches -- anything to keep my mind on songs. My brain tends to turn at a millian miles an hour -- and usually gets me into trouble. The hardest part is to get yor brain to calm down enough to get in touch with the basic emotions in life, the basic things, and write from there.

ND: Somewhere between the rebellious young guy whose head was exploding and the one singing "I’ve got a plan to be the man she’d see was worth having" on the new CD, there was some change. Are you coming from a more settled place now?

SM: I’m going adult contemporary! Well, there’s a lot of difference between these songs and something like "Cry" from the V-Roys. In the bad years of my twenties, I wasn’t growing. What to do about that -- I’ve had no idea.

ND: Come on -- you’re a guy with a pretty good career, music that’s well-received, and you’re married with a lot of things going pretty well.

SM: Yeah. And it could all fall apart.

ND: The new record ends with the very hopeful, positive song, "For Jack Tymon". SM: He’s the son of my best buddy, Shane, a guy I listen to records with every Monday. I was like, "Goddammit! The world does not need more babies!" Shane was missing Monday nights! He’s a huge guy, and he said, "Miller, you have to get behind this baby thing -- right now!" So I went home and wrote that.

ND: Today, what’s the best part of writing and performing for you?

SM: When you’re not thinking. When that brain finally chills out and you’re just there, sitting at the beach and feeling the life force. Playing does that sometimes -- and when you write a good song and you know it. It’s better than any drug you could ever take. That "Jack Tymon" song came that quick. And with the V-Roys, the song "Goodnight Loser" came that way. I’d come home from hearing Pachebel’s Canon at somebody’s wedding and decided to write myself a lullaby -- with "Goodnight Mom and Daddy, you conquered the dreaded Nazis" or something, as the first words. The next day -- well, it only took one rewrite.

IV: EVEN IF THERE ARE ONLY THREE CHORDS

ND: is basic guitar-led rock ‘n’ roll, partytime, punk or otherwise, an ongoing thing with new places to go -- or has it become a very traditional music, locked in its ways?

SM: Oh, there’s still got to be another combination or permutation to put them together in, to make something different. I thing it’s always going to be around; whether it’s gonna be on the radio and have directions to go, I don’t know. But there are still songs to be written out there for it, even if there are only three chords! I wish people would concentrate more than that. What I try to do is write the song good enough so it can be played with a band or played solo.

ND: And for a guy who writes narratives, you come up with a lot of song hooks, while you’re at it.

SM: I swear this is more about my limitations. I’m no musician, and I’ve never pretended to be or tried to be. Maybe I have the hooks in songs because when I finally stumble on something on a guitar, I’ll use it many times like that just to get through the friggin’ song!

ND: I notice that whenever I point to one of your strengths, you describe it as a limitation. If that’s what they are, making the most of them is its own talent -- and a pretty useful one in roots music.

SM: When then -- God, I’m pretty lucky.