Carnegie Corridor continues its 2021 Mainstage Efficiency Sequence on Friday, Nov. 19, at 7:30 p.m. with John R. Miller and Drift Mouth.
John R Miller is a real hyphenate artist: singer-songwriter-picker. Each track on his upcoming debut solo album, “Depreciated,” is lush with intricate wordplay and haunting imagery.
One among Miller’s greatest long-time followers is roots music favourite Tyler Childers, who says he’s “a well-travelled wordsmith mapping out the world he’s seen, three chords at a time.”
Miller is someway capable of transport audiences to a shadowy honkytonk and get existential all in the identical line together with his tightly written compositions. Miller’s personal guitar-playing together with vocals evoke the white-waters of the Potomac River rumbling under the excessive ridges of his native Shenandoah Valley.
Rising up within the Jap Panhandle of West Virginia close to the Potomac River, Miller mentioned, “There are three or 4 little cities I do know effectively that make up the area,” name-checking locations like Martinsburg, Shepherdstown, Hedgesville and Keyes Hole.
“It’s a haunted place. In some methods it’s frozen in time. A lot outdated stuff has lingered there, and its historical past continues to be very current.”
As a lot as Miller loves the place he’s from, he’s at all times had an advanced relationship with house and by no means might determine what to do with himself there.
“I simply wished to make music, and there’s no actual infrastructure for that there. We needed to journey to play often and as youngsters, most of our gigs had been spent enjoying in outdated church halls or Ruritan Golf equipment.” He was raised “kinda sorta Catholic” and though he gave up on that as a teen, he says “it follows me in every single place, nonetheless.”
His household was not musical – his father labored odd jobs and was a paramedic earlier than Miller was born, whereas his mom was a nurse – however he was drawn to music at an early age, which was important to him since he says faculty was “an train in endurance” for him.
“Music was the very first thing to show my mind on. I’d sit by the stereo for hours with a clean audio cassette ready to report songs I appreciated,” he says. “I used to be into a whole lot of no matter was on the radio till I used to be in center faculty and began discovering out about punk music, which is what I gravitated towards and tried to play by highschool.”
Not lengthy after a brief and, for him, an aimless try at school, Miller says, “I used to be launched to outdated time and conventional fiddle music, significantly round West Virginia, and my entire musical world began to open up.”
Across the similar time he found John Prine and says the music of Steve Earle despatched him “down a rabbit gap.”
From there he discovered the Nineteen Seventies Texas gods like Man 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 might be his greatest affect.
As a lot because the music buoyed him, it additionally took its toll. “I at all times prioritized being a touring musician above all the things, and my makes an attempt at relationships suffered for it,” he says.
Miller was additionally usually combating melancholy and watching lots of his associates “go off the rails now and again.” He says that for an extended interval he did a whole lot of self-medicating. “I used to go about it by consuming vodka from morning to nighttime for months on finish,” he says. “I shouldn’t have made it this far. I’m fortunate, I believe.”
In the end, music gained out and “Depreciated” is the hard-won results of years of self-education offered by life experiences that included arrests, a drunken knife-throwing incident, relationships each misplaced and long-term, and studying from one of the best singer-songwriters by listening.
Opening the present will likely be Drift Mouth, a Columbus, Ohio, band that fashioned in 2014 and their sound might be described as a mixture of nation, bluegrass, punk and wild storage. This mixture of genres is often known as “Storage Americana.”
Tickets begin at $17 and reductions can be found for Carnegie Corridor members, college students, senior residents and army. To buy tickets name Carnegie Corridor Field Workplace at 304-645-7917, go to www.carnegiehallwv.org, or on the field workplace at 611 Church St., Lewisburg, Monday by Friday, 10 a.m. till 4 p.m.
