Interview with Landon Lloyd Miller: ‘I keep the wheel spinning, that matters to me’

Kerrville, Texas Hill Country-based singer-songwriter Landon Lloyd Miller has released his second single ‘Bluebonnet’ today (14 January), with another, ‘Feel It Again’, out in February before his debut album Light Shines Through comes out on 4 March. 

Light Shines Through comprises nine tracks and is inspired by folk songs, murder ballads, country classics and everything in between, glued together by a biographical songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose career path is every bit as diverse as his music. He got into music at a young age accompanying his mum on her duties as director of a travelling church choir in Louisiana. ‘Drums were my first instrument. My mom is a fantastic piano player and vocalist. I thought I couldn’t compete with her, she was so great and I wasn’t! I remember being in the choir rooms – where the books and breath mints are (laughs). I’d be there for hours at a time with her, in those little rooms behind the church. There was a little karaoke machine, the room was like an elaborate closet with the robes the choir wear.’

Light in all its forms is the theme weaving its way throughout the album, including his recent debut solo single, ‘Light Is Growing’, which is about hope, with the song’s funky undertones shining a light on his Louisiana roots: ‘So the song is playing with different types of light sources – headlights, firelight, lanterns etc.,’ he said. ‘They make different foils of each other, that duality of light. The chorus came a bit later. I wish I could show you the version I did before. I cut 30-40 percent of the words out, it had a faster cadence. I think it’s an improvement for sure, now it’s easy going and medium paced. I wanted to lead with it as the first single as the album title also mentions light. I keep the wheel spinning, that matters to me. I’m quite proud of the album and excited to crank out other mood groups.’

‘I wasn’t qualified to write songs but I wanted to try’

Interestingly, he didn’t pick up the guitar until he was 15: ‘It was with the purpose of writing songs,’ he said. ‘When I started writing songs, there was a lot of “You have a terrible voice, you should stick to drums”. I wasn’t qualified to write songs but I wanted to try, it’s this impulse to make something.’

Songs that he’ll release this year include confessional piano ballads, cinematic roots rockers, and plenty of troubadour twang. One upcoming track on his debut album is ‘Landslide’, a bare-boned folk song featuring just the harmonica, acoustic guitar, and his vibrato-laced voice. For me, it’s the most raw, intimate and vulnerable of the upcoming songs I’ve heard. The harmonica intro is evocative of the Deep South and makes me want to be sitting on a porch in an old house in New Orleans listening to it. ‘I love the harmonica,’ he enthused. ‘I learned with my kids that it can be played by anyone. They come in different keys – it’s E in this song – so if you play E on the guitar, they can just keep on playing the harmonica. They’re mainly used in the keys of C and E, though.’

‘Landslide’ was born out of a moment of exhaustion, according to Miller: ‘There’s the line “Tell me where to rest, I’ll put my head down”, it’s my favourite line,’ he said. ‘It’s about touring and crashing on people’s couches, where you don’t know where you’ll be sleeping before you put your head down. It’s sort of about climate change, the first verse. It starts “Nature and pain just breathed a dark cloud, is it ever going to rain?” It doesn’t rain much in Texas (laughs). It’s more of a “Hey, I hope you can see it’s all going downhill kind of song”.’ I say that despite the message, I find it more optimistic than hopeless, which is true of many of his upcoming songs, and he agrees.

‘I have a whole suite of darker things like murder ballads’

‘I have a whole suite of darker things like murder ballads,’ he said. ‘Murder ballads are a sub-genre of country, Johnny Cash does them. So do The Louvin Brothers in songs like ‘Knoxville Girl’, they’re stories that have to do with one cowboy killing another (laughs). My collection of songs is melancholy with an edge of hope. One thing I was looking for – they’re not all recorded at the same time – was to tie them together. I’ve probably recorded 30 songs this year. This week, I recorded five. I work on them, strip them away or add things back.’

Songs like ‘Bluebonnet’ on the album find some middle ground between those two poles, laced with light touches of piano, horns, organ, and percussion. ‘We didn’t throw the kitchen sink at every song,’ he said. ‘There was reserve. There was restraint. We asked ourselves what each song needed, and we didn’t add much beyond that.’

Close harmony gospel songs were the first songs he was exposed to and it’s a pattern that goes back to his mum’s childhood: ‘My mom has two brothers and a sister and she says one of her first memories was standing on a piano bench as kids and singing together, for family and at church.’ Miller learned to play dominoes and cards at church retreats but, interestingly, wasn’t exposed to secular music until he was 15. ‘I wasn’t allowed to hear it at home, I didn’t hear Bob Dylan until I was 18 and now I like ska and punk rock,’ he laughed. ‘As a kid, I was more interested in making music than listening to it. Now, my mom listens to James Taylor and a little Simon & Garfunkel. She was a gentle lady, she still is.’ I ask whether he would take her to a rock concert: ‘Oh, yeah, totally! I’m the edgy person (laughs), I’m like “Hey, check this out!” I wanted to play the drums as a kid so I could yell, I wanted to cut through the unknown wildness,’ he said.

His parents divorced when he was 13 but his mum remains very involved with his music: ‘She’ll call me and say “I saw your post on Instagram, is that song about X?”, she wants to know what they’re about.’ He has made an unreleased album every year for around the last 10 years and given them to friends and family. ‘I’ve sent them to my dad but I found out recently that he keeps them wrapped like they’re collectibles and hasn’t opened them,’ he said, looking a bit dejected. ‘I’ve written a few songs about him, I’d hoped he’d heard them. My song ‘Bluebonnet’ is partly about him. The ‘bluebonnet’ is the state flower of Texas but I wrote the song in Louisiana, I’m not sure what that means (laughs). It came from a conversation I had about the struggles of being on the road, of being away from my family and kids. The first line is about the ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ song (by Harry Chapin) I sing “You were only lying when you said why you would never go”. I was listening to it with my dad, he tried to convince me that it wouldn’t be my story, that my parents wouldn’t get divorced but they did. For me, it’s a deeply personal, tough line. It’s a song about being absent from your life. I think it’s the best production on the album. I did it right before COVID.’

‘ I make music as an excuse to make music with people I love’

Songwriting for him is enormously cathartic: ‘I’ve written some to process stories, sometimes they’re explorative, not curative. I make music as an excuse to make music with people I love. I use it as a vent, sometimes it’s autobiographical, sometimes it’s more about the feeling than the words and sometimes it goes the other way.’

Miller grew up amidst the swamps and fishing villages of northern Louisiana where his father was a minister. Gospel music always filled the family’s home and by the age of 14, he was playing drums during local church services. He dove into the secular work of folk singers like Bob Dylan during his college years, and says that the impact was monumental. Before long, he had expanded his music collection to include Roger Miller, Conor Oberst, Roy Acuff, and The Louvin Brothers — artists who, he says, ‘were willing to talk about real life, personal troubles, and grey-area scenarios’.

He now works as a winemaker for Signor Vineyards in Fredericksburg, Texas, having spent a decade working as a coffee roaster, and I say that I see parallels between those two industries and the music sector and he agrees: ‘Definitely, I like to take raw things and turn them into something beautiful,’ he said. ‘Coffee roasting is alchemy. Now I’m a production manager and my job is to hunt down grapes. It allows me to finance my music, on my terms, which hasn’t always been the case.’

After travelling around in his early twenties, he returned to Shreveport, Louisiana, and put his creative abilities to use as the frontman of The Wall Chargers, who mashed up psych rock, shoegaze, folk, and soul. By the time he launched his solo career in 2020 — a year that also found him leaving Louisiana and resettling in Texas Hill Country – he’d also worked as a composer, documentarian and producer for a regional film company. Going solo last year has been a game changer for him: ‘I’ve always been nervous to say something was truly mine, in case someone doesn’t like it,’ he admitted. ‘But Light Shines Through isn’t the work of a person who’s hiding behind a band’s moniker. It isn’t fiction. It’s me.’

‘We look for weird stories that are unrepresented’

The storytelling inherent in documentary filmmaking is very appealing to him: ‘We’ve also done music videos. making documentaries is one of my big connectors and one of my ways to be an observer, not a voice. Actually, that’s how I got my job working at Signor Vineyards, they were a marketing client,’ he said. ‘We did one documentary about a guy who built a castle here, we look for weird stories that are unrepresented. Right now, I’m chasing a dude who does micro fishing for tiny fish, with tiny nets and hooks (laughs). It’s weird but kinda cool.’

‘Light Shines Through’ is the perfect closer for the album and allows it to come full-circle by coming back to the hope of the opening track, ‘Light Is Growing’, as Miller’s questioning vocals rise over the strings and piano: ‘It’s vulnerable but encouraging,’ he said. ‘The through line is that things suck but they’ll get better. There was a studio in my home town – Blade Studios –  that was amazing but too expensive for me to record in. They closed it in 2020 but a friend of mine had the keys to the place before they dissolved the equipment. I got to use it for a day but all I did was this song! I don’t play the piano a lot but I’m getting better on it. I thought, where better to record this song than on a grand piano with the best mikes on it? I sang the vocals the same day. I waited on that song for a year but it means a lot to me, where it was recorded. Now that building is a techie building,’ he said, sounding really disappointed.

Kerrville, where he currently lives, is around an hour and a half from Austin, which he describes as the music capital of Texas. ‘Kerrville is the crown of Texas Hill Country. Willie Nelson’s from here and Bob Wills and Guy Clark, who are legendary in Americana. I’m astounded at some of the people I get to play with. This week, Georgia Parker played bass with me. I used to admire her from a distance, she’s soooo good. My songwriting comes and goes but I think I’ve invigorated people around me to write songs again. I hope I have.’

‘Loretta Lynn is amazing, to sing with her would be wonderful’

If he could write a song with anyone, he picks Leonard Cohen: ‘I love his words, I’d love to discuss lyrics with him,’ he said. ‘He’d make space for me as an amateur. Or Roger Miller (best known for his novelty honky tonk songs), I love his humour.’

His dream line up would include American folk singer Conor Oberst: ‘I want him to play drums,’ he grinned. ‘And I do love Jack White. Sufjan Stevens – hey, they’re all living, that helps! To bring someone back, Don Helms, I love that old Nashville sound. (Helms was a steel guitarist best known as the steel guitar player in Hank Williams’s Drifting Cowboys group.) A favourite country voice for me is Sierra Ferrell (a young artist from West Virigina), she’s got something of the Loretta Lynn about her. I just saw Sierra in October. I saw her in Oregon, I was floored, brought to tears, nearly. Loretta Lynn is amazing, to sing with her would be wonderful. I would love for the universe to bring us together!’