Colin Miller makes the kind of music you already know the words to on a first listen. At least that’s how I felt when the weeping guitars went subterranean during “Birdhouse” and I suddenly began singing “If I stay here, I will die in silence here” along with him. The multi-instrumentalist’s new LP, Losin’, is yet another example of a Tar Heel entering Drop of Sun Studios and exiting with the best album of their career. There’s something in the water in the Carolinas; recent recordings like Fust’s Big Ugly, Merce Lemon’s Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks, and Wild Pink’s Dulling the Horns make for a good sampler of producer/engineer/mixer Alex Farrar’s potent, near-bulletproof curriculum vitae, all of which either came to life or crossed the finish line at the Asheville studio in the last year.
Miller has been noodling around in that community for a minute now. He’s famously the drummer in Lenderman’s live band the Wind, and his debut record, 2023’s Haw Creek—named after an east-side neighborhood in Asheville—was a remarkably empathetic portrait of his hometown. “Just to Be Around You” was colloquially minimal yet immediately familiar. “I did donuts outside of your work at the Dollar Tree. I know you saw me, and the morning light kissed my dirt bike” landed like a weekend still-happening anywhere but nowhere in particular. Haw Creek was scrappy and stripped back, featuring breakbeat samples more in-line with Hovvdy’s lo-fi era than, say, the country rock spilling out of Drop of Sun nowadays. It was singer-songwriter music heavy on the songwriter half—tracks like “Sweetheartmetalbaby” and “Never Wanna” worked because their connections were too tender, too soulful to ignore. You could sing into the mouth of a holler and the sounds of Haw Creek would echo back.
The contemporary Appalachian Songbook is in good hands, thanks to songwriters like Miller. Losin’ is a tremendous motif of grief, place, and lives remembered like road signs. Miller recorded the album in service to his late landlord-turned-father-figure Gary King, who passed away in July 2022. He’d rented King’s house for 13 years and became the property’s (and King’s) caretaker, mowing tobacco fields and watching rusted automobiles fall into the earth. You can feel King, once a truck driver, auto-shop owner, and car club regular in Asheville, in these nine songs. King’s family and friends sold off his possessions piece by piece for two years while Miller hung around on the property, writing the music that would become Losin’.
Losin’ is a filled-out upgrade from the Haw Creek material, and Miller has bettered himself in all pertinent areas—singing, writing, playing, the whole enchilada. “Porchlight,” which swerves and aches from Xandy Chelmis’ pedal steel, is a lost-in-translation, ships-in-the-night tale of heartache. But our narrator isn’t some hangdog sap. He might be waiting up for an old flame back home, but someone in Beaumont, Texas is just as sweet on him. Lenderman swaps roles with Miller and steps behind the drum kit, cutting loose on a snare rattling like a box of bang snaps. “Porchlight” is a track with harmonies that could roar in 105.5: The Outlaw’s daily rotation, and “Darlin’, you know you’re still my #1 tube-top angel” may very well go down as the lyric of the year.
In vignettes of colorful and country-fried bedroom-folk, Miller tames his small-life suffering with a rural language spoken in the pitch-black of maudlin adulthood (“It’s a good day at the wreckyard, it’s a bad day for my heart”). A track like “Cadillac” sounds effortlessly timeless, arranged with renders of NASCAR crashes, tinted windows, toothy laughs, and routines of “suckin’ down coffee, Pall Malls, and oxygen.” Micro and macro blame encroaches like a summer hot spell, but you can find sketches of King’s beloved image in the foibles, as Miller sings “there goes all my hope for you” and his vocals stack in twos, maybe threes before locking into Lenderman’s guitar leads—lines blackened with the right amount of sludge.
The background of “4 Wheeler” is draped in ambient decorations, and the guitar plucks twang over bleached synth glitches. Miller shoestrings loss into passerbys, singing, “Saw you lose cryin’ at the charity game, saw you lose your breath in the beer cave. So shotgun a beer to prove to me that you can drive faster in the rain.” The 2-minute “Hasbeen” is a gauzy, submerged snapshot of everyday hurt tempered with chugging rock and roll guitars. “I was an engine rusting in the woods in the back” makes the song profound until it turns suddenly ordinary, as Miller settles into himself and gets overwhelmed in a Wendy’s drive-thru lane. He returns there in the stubborn, threadbare “Little Devil,” getting his clock cleaned in the parking lot before returning home, wrapping himself in a landline cord, and playing cute with a leaving lover: “You’re my little country angel, you’re my darlin’ little devil.”
That goofy lovesickness wanes in “I Need a Friend,” a soft-spoken, brightened plea for grace. Chelmis’ pedal steel asks the questions Miller answers, and the song ends with a gloves-off acknowledgement: “Maybe I just needed to be the one who leaves first.” On “Lost Again,” Miller worries about wedding dances while spinning out in front lawns. The structure is porous enough to total up the vacancy, and his vulnerability is paramount. “No Ford Mustang will drag you back to me,” Miller declares, turning “Lost Again” into hillbilly heaven’s “Wild Horses.” It’s his greatest tribute to King, whose absence warms in the missable details: “I don’t need another Christmas morning, I don’t need another birthday picture cake. I just need you here for a second.”
“Losin’” isn’t just a nominal truth, but an encapsulation of all that Miller’s second record aims for. His songs arrive in-flux, lurching between failed relationships and failed living, and his lyrics are scribbled like smudged poetry on in-transit postcards. Everything sentimental is misplaced, even the snow angels and the dormant disco balls, but everything gently returns to center—because the truth about grief is that it’s as sore as a common cold. It touches everything and everybody, yet it does fade, which ought to be celebrated, too. That cup King drank out of, Miller argues, will fill up again. There’s something in a memory keeping the light on. When the guitars heal and return, so too the parts of you that once vanished.
On “Thunder Road,” a sing-along tribute to Springsteen and King (both of whom, I’d reckon, are beloved troubadours with legacies on equal-footing), a wide-eyed Miller twinkles at-peace, and deservedly so: “I got you on my mind, and you can put your shoes under my bed anytime.” It seems he’s found his voice after losing the one that lovingly guided him for so long, as a well-tended friendship surrenders to the inevitable—but not without earned gestures of well-worn gratitude. Losin’ plunges into what’s unfair and unfortunate, and the worst part about death’s punchline is being too in on the joke. But, if you’re lucky, your laughs’ll run the red light and take you someplace sweeter than the heaven waiting down on the tracks. Put me down for five on the odds. I’m going belly-up in the July sun.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
