The Great Unknowing John R. Miller

• 1 Don't Bet On Me 04:01
• 2 Far From The Station 04:36
• 3 Tollbooth 04:03
• 4 Think I'll Start Over 03:34
• 5 Looking For a Place to Die 04:05
• 6 Steering Wheel Drums 04:02
• 7 Daughter of Night 04:17
• 8 A World Away 05:21
• 9 Day Drinking 03:50
• 10 Golden Light 04:00
• 11 Two Days Clean 03:33
• 12 If You Could Only See Me Now 03:05
• 13 Double Lives 04:23
• 14 Static and White Noise 04:07
• 15 Cornbread and Pinto Beans 04:35
• 16 Walk of Life 04:07
• Total Runtime 01:05:39

Info for The Great Unknowing

Born in the Washington, DC area and raised in West Virginia, Miller is a studious and acclaimed representative of the sound usually categorized as alt-country or Americana, but his work is rooted in sources from the punk he grew up around to more unconventional paths in rock history. So when the idea of heading to Tulsa and working at Leon Russell’s legendary, recently reopened Church Studio came up, Miller took notice.

“Immediately the gears started turning,” he says. “Tulsa is one of the great legacy-bearing cities of American music—J.J. Cale is one of my all-time favorites, and Shelter Records was based there. So much of what I love in music history happened right around that block.”

The result is The Great Unknowing—an ambitious, sprawling project that extends the sound and scope of Miller’s previous releases, 2021’s Depreciated and the 2023 follow-up Heat Comes Down.

John R. Miller belongs to the rare breed of songwriters whose expansive introspection uncovers so many truths about the state of the human condition. On his new album Heat Comes Down, the West Virginia-raised, Nashville-based artist intimately narrates his sleepless nights and nostalgic daydreams, existential dread, and nuanced observations of the troubled world around him. But while a number of its songs convey a certain unease, Miller endlessly imparts the kind of lovely reassurance that can only come from shared catharsis. “Whenever I’ve got a lot of thoughts bouncing around my head, alchemizing that energy into something creative helps take the gravity out of them and quiets them down for a while,” says Miller. “For me this album is largely about anxiety in many forms: the things that cause it, what it causes in turn, and the moments of clarity in between. Listening back to it now, most of the songs seem like they’re trying to answer the questions I’ve been asking myself.”

John R. Miller

John R Miller
grew up in Hedgesville, a small town in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia where the mountains meet Interstate 81. A co-founding member of hard-traveling bands Prison Book Club and The Fox Hunt, and crafting a unique-and-familiar blend of country blues & folk, he has performed music in nearly all 50 states, Canada, Ireland, the UK, Japan, and much of Europe. He has twice appeared on NPR's Mountain Stage with The Fox Hunt. He has also been a featured songwriter and performer on the Travelin' Appalachians Revue. John can often be found performing solo, alongside fiddle player Chloe Edmonstone, or with his band The Engine Lights.

Miller grew up in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia near the Potomac River. “There are three or four little towns I know well that make up the region,” he says, name-checking places like Martinsburg, Shepherdstown, Hedgesville, and Keyes Gap. “It’s a haunted place. In some ways it’s frozen in time. So much old stuff has lingered there, and its history is still very present.” As much as Miller loves where he’s from, he’s always had a complicated relationship with home and never could figure out what to do with himself there. “I just wanted to make music, and there’s no real infrastructure for that there. We had to travel to play regularly and as teenagers, most of our gigs were spent playing in old church halls or Ruritan Clubs.” He was raised “kinda sorta Catholic” and although he gave up on that as a teenager, he says “it follows me everywhere, still.”

His family was not musical—his father worked odd jobs and was a paramedic before Miller was born, while his mother was a nurse—but he was drawn to music at an early age, which was essential to him since he says school was “an exercise in patience” for him. “Music was the first thing to turn my brain on. I'd sit by the stereo for hours with a blank audio cassette waiting to record songs I liked,” he says. “I was into a lot of whatever was on the radio until I was in middle school and started finding out about punk music, which is what I gravitated toward and tried to play through high school.” Not long after a short and aimless attempt at college, I was introduced to old time and traditional fiddle music, particularly around West Virginia, and my whole musical world started to open up.” Around the same time he discovered John Prine and says the music of Steve Earle sent him “down a rabbit hole”. From there he found the 1970s Texas gods like Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver, and Blaze Foley, the swamp pop of Bobby Charles, and the Tulsa Sound of J.J. Cale, who is probably his biggest influence.

As much as the music buoyed him, it also took its toll. “I always prioritized being a touring musician above everything, and my attempts at relationships suffered for it,” he says. Miller was also often fighting depression and watching many of his friends “go off the rails on occasion.” He says that for a long period he did a lot of self-medicating. “I used to go about it by drinking vodka from morning to night for months on end,” he says. “I shouldn't have made it this far. I'm lucky, I think.” Ultimately, the music won out and Depreciated is the hard-won result of years of self-education provided by life experiences that included arrests, a drunken knife-throwing incident, relationships both lost and long-term, and learning from the best of the singer-songwriters by listening.

This album contains no booklet.