FEATURE ARTICLE
Julie Miller follows in Emmylou's footsteps
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., May 3, 1997) -- When Julie Miller was a high school student in Austin, Tex., in the early-'70s, before radio playlists were strictly formatted, she had one ear glued to a local station that played artists as varied as Muddy Waters and Gram Parsons.
As Miller tells the story, one day she heard Parsons' "Grievous Angel," and she was instantly struck by a female voice duetting with Parsons.
"I called up the radio station and asked, `Who was that girl?' and the person said, `Someone named Emmylou Harris,'" said Miller in a phone interview last week from her home in Nashville. "So I was totally flipped out over Emmylou Harris from the very first note I ever heard her sing, before she even did her own records."
Some 25 years later, Miller now counts Harris as a friend and musical colleague. Harris recorded Miller's "All My Tears" on her ground- breaking "Wrecking Ball" album of 1995, and on Miller's brand-new solo debut, "Blue Pony" (Hightone), Harris lends her distinctive vocal style to one of the tracks.
And before Harris takes the stage tonight at the Berkshire Performing Arts Theatre in Lenox, as part of the National Music Foundation's Berkshire Music Festival, Miller and her husband, Buddy Miller -- who is also in Harris's band and who also has a solo album on Hightone Records -- will warm up the crowd with a set of songs drawn from their respective solo albums.
Listening to Miller's fine new CD, a rootsy, eclectic blend of songs drawing on country, bluegrass, blues, Celtic, rock and other influences, one can see why the native Texan would have been drawn to Harris. Like her more famous colleague and role model, Miller boasts an almost shockingly distinctive voice, alternately evocative of youthful innocence and aching maturity.
While her album's influences are eclectic, the overall sound is tied together by her classic voice that reeks of Americana and by her poignant songs that figuratively and literally portray emotional scars.
"I guess I've just had so many influences of different stuff I like," said Miller. "I'm just a humongous fan of different people from Ralph Stanley to Etta James to the Pogues to Elvis Costello, and I just kind of don't want to leave anything out. So it sounds like, `This is Julie's radio show, here's all the kinds of music I've ever liked, one after the other.'"
As to the dark quality of much her material that belies her outwardly cheerful if not downright giddy aspect in conversation, Miller acknowledges an internal contradiction others have remarked upon.
"I've been down my own road of course, and I just really spend a lot of my conscious thinking on people and people's woundedness," she said. "And I meet a lot of people who really get to my heart a lot. There's just so much woundedness in the world it's really overwhelming. Everybody thinks I laugh so easily, and I very much do, but somehow the sorrow part seems to come out in the music. I don't know why that it is. It's probably hard to write a happy song anyway."
As for getting to know and work with Harris, Miller admits that at first, "It was one of those pinch- yourself things. I wasn't miserably scared or anything, but I was very overwhelmed, pretty speechless, when Emmylou first came to sing on a song of mine.
"That was a few years ago and it still blows my mind. She's just the most incredible person. You see somebody who's so talented and so beautiful and you think, `Well, they can't be really nice too, can they?' And she's like so incredibly beautiful and her voice is so cool, but she's even NICER than she is beautiful, which is pretty incredible. When I see how nice and considerate and thoughtful and sweet she is to everybody, I get really tired thinking about how much energy that must require. It's really incredible."
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on May 3, 1997. copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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