The Guest List | Colin Miller
The Guest List is a regular book column that surveys the reading habits of our favorite musicians. In this edition, Jimmy Cajoleas talks with Colin Miller, the multi-instrumentalist and songwriter from Asheville, North Carolina. Miller’s latest album, Losin’, is out now on Mtn Laurel.
Jimmy Cajoleas: What are you reading right now?
Colin Miller: Right now I’m in the middle of Bruce Springsteen’s memoir Born to Run. I’m actually listening to it. I’d been off my audiobook grind because I enjoy reading physical books so much, but I couldn’t give up the chance to hear Bruce read it in his own voice. He talks about his Italian grandpa, how Bruce would pronounce his name growing up. Getting those little things is unlike any other audiobook I’ve ever listened to. If I wasn’t hearing Bruce’s voice, I don’t know if I would have gotten so much color to the story and to his memories. I love listening to Bruce read his book.
Whenever I read an autobiography, I try to read another one along with it, so I’m making my way through Levon Helm’s autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of The Band as well. There’s nothing like Levon’s drumming. He’s such an important figure, and he was such a big personality. It’s so exciting that there’s so much material in this book about his journey as a drummer, with all the details about why he drums the way he does. A few years ago, I read Levon: From Down in the Delta to the Birth of The Band and Beyond, the biography about Levon that Sandra B. Tooze wrote, and I loved it so much. I heard that Levon’s autobiography was very much written in his own voice and dialect, so I didn’t mind reading about the same events all over again, if only to get it from his perspective. I’m about halfway through, and it really is so special.
JC: Levon has always been so mysterious to me, but it never feels like he’s being deliberately mysterious, do you know what I mean?
CM: He’s such a rare musical icon—not just in his time of music, but in general. He’s so honest and open, and he has a disdain for the industry that is really specific, because of how everything went down with Robbie Robertson. The Band and their dynamic musically was so distinct, and the fallout was so specific to those people. As soon as you read more about it, you realize it’s not the classic story of “Oh, the manager got all the rights and screwed over the musicians.” It’s so much more complicated than that. I’ve heard a little bit about Robbie Roberston’s memoir Testimony, and I’m probably going to read that because I’m such a Band nerd. Robbie’s take on everything is so different, just a whole other narrative. I find Levon’s place in that story really interesting. In a way, it was never about money for him—he just wanted to be not on a tractor in a cotton field. Levon’s favorite thing in the world was to play music. So when you watch him play in The Last Waltz or when you listen to the records, it’s so interesting to hear that there’s so much shit going on behind the scenes, that The Last Waltz was so emotionally tumultuous, because all that got left off the stage and they all played together so beautifully. It wasn’t a problem. I watched The Last Waltz twenty times before I ever read about the innerworkings of The Band’s social dynamics and business stuff, and I never would have guessed that they weren’t all having an incredible time. That’s the special thing. When they played, they were still able to be there in the moment, even if they did have all their issues with each other behind the scenes.
JC: Are there any books that inspired the writing on your new record?
CM: Oh, definitely! The biggest one was a book that the writer Ashleigh Bryant Phillips recommended, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. I was reading several different things around the time I was writing the album, but that book changed my way of thinking about writing in general. I didn’t know you could write stories like that. The first short story in that book, “Trilobites,” moves like no other short story I’ve ever read, almost like a song. It was so inspiring to me the way the story jumps perspective and time and emotions so seamlessly and so organically. I felt like Breece D’J Pancake captured the way memory works. The story felt very true to an actual human being. I loved that, and I tried to emulate the shifting narratives into my songs, making the plotlines specific to the characters’ emotions. The way the story flows, it’s not random, it’s jagged. All the stories in that collection are so good, but “Trilobites” in particular was a huge inspiration.
Another inspiration was Joe by Larry Brown. I’d read it a long time ago, but it’s always pretty present for me, implicitly informing the writing of this record. The way I was writing about different characters and settings in the songs. It helped me to say things plainly. I love Larry Brown’s writing, the way he lets stark images hang in the air, giving you the space to think about them as you’re reading. No one describes a man driving his truck the way Larry Brown describes a man driving his truck.
JC: What are some of your all-time favorite books?
CM: The Rabbit Factory by Larry Brown. That’s at the top of my list of books to reread. It’s one of his funniest books. I love that book so much.
I just finished Werner Herzog’s book Every Man for Himself and God against All: A Memoir. It’s awesome. It was one of those books where I finished it and I wanted to watch all the movies he was talking about. I’d seen some of them, but I wanted to watch all the rest and then reread the book. Herzog gives so much incredible detail about his life while he was making those movies. He’s such an adventurer. I feel like he could have never made a movie and he still would have become famous for being, like, a mountaineer or a journalist or something. He has a knack for going to places just to see what’s happening, or doing something crazy just for himself. There’s part in the book where, maybe for his first marriage, Herzog made a pact with himself that if he was going to propose to his then-girlfriend, he would have to walk the ring to her on foot across a mountain range. And then he did it. Herzog intentionally seems to live life the hard way and the long way as a means of testing his limits, in a way that people don’t really do anymore. Or if they do, it’s to produce content, or to write a story about it. Herzog would do that too, but in his free time, he’d also just see how far he could go, because that’s who he is. He’s a fascinating person, and that naturally makes his autobiography gripping and interesting. It was one of those books where I got it, pored through it, and then had some friends who wanted to borrow it. I didn’t really want to lend it to them because I wanted to reread the book immediately.
I also spent last summer reading as much Harry Crews as possible. I was just tearing through his books. I think I read five in a month. I was hungry for them. I’d read Childhood: A Biography of a Place a few years before, but I’d never read his novels before. I read Feast of Snakes, Body, Car, The Gypsy’s Curse, and The Knockout Artist all right in a row. I couldn’t get enough Harry Crews. I think Feast of Snakes is the best book of his that I’ve read, and it’s easily one of my all-time favorites. It’s a book I would be so careful to recommend because it’s so intense. I’m definitely recommending it with some disclaimers. But I think that book is incredible. Oh and I also read The Gospel Singer at the same time. It reminded me of that HBO show Carnivale. I grew up watching that with my dad. He worked as a local videographer, working on commercials and stuff like that, and he was a big movie fan and showed me that at a young age. I loved the characters and the weird, pseudo-pagan take on Christianity, especially that era of tent revivals, the whole rural pre–televangelist Christian tradition. That stuff is so interesting to me. The fact that the main character of the novel is never called anything but “the Gospel Singer” and his closest confidante is an old man named Didymus. There’s something off about it, a kind of timelessness that feels more like a myth than like a story about a corrupt spiritual leader.
JC: Did you ever read Harry Crews’ sort-of-sequel to Feast of Snakes, the novel All We Need of Hell?
CM: The one from Duffy Deeter’s perspective? I started that. It’s actually the book that ended my five-book run! I think I had lived in Harry Crews’ world too long, and the way that book starts, and with Duffy Deeter in particular, I was like, “I need a break.”
JC: Do you have any other music books you’d like to recommend?
CM: Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H. Walsh. It’s about the making of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. It’s more of a story about where the album came from than how it got put together. Walsh describes Boston in 1965 to ’68, and is like, “This is the place Van Morrison was in when he wrote this album, these are the people he was hanging out with, and this is the vibe.” It’s really interesting. I’m a big Van Morrison fan, unfortunately [laughs]. It’s amazing to read how he felt about that album before it was out, especially considering where it all went after that.
JC: Any other books you want to mention before we go?
CM: I’m working through a few different poetry books. One is Frank Stanford’s What About This. It’s an anthology of his poems. I’ll read some, put it down, and pick it up again later. Frank Stanford is such a special writer to get to know. I also got into some Japanese poetry last year after I saw someone post one of Machi Tawara’s poems online. They’re very short—I think they’re called tankas. That’s a form with a very specific classical structure to it. Tawara’s whole thing is kind of modern takes on tankas. Some of them break the form. I have a translation of one of her books, called Salad Anniversary, and she just has some incredible poems in there. My favorite one is, “Like getting up to leave a hamburger place— / that’s how I’ll leave / that man.” I’ve read that book twice now. There’s kind of a narrative to the collection. She has chapters with a ton of different tankas in them, and they’re almost journalistic, with an overarching theme, but they can all stand alone as well.
I have collection of poems by Nakahara Chuuya that I’ve been going through called The Poems of Nakahara Chūya. He’s a poet from the around the ’20s. There are poems where he’ll describe a hangover or something, but it’s in such a different setting and time from me that I find it really interesting. He’s writing poems about where he is, very rooted in a place that is so different from where I am, that it becomes a mix of familiar and unfamiliar. I really like this book. You can relate to it and it also takes you somewhere new.
Jimmy Cajoleas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.
