Buddy &Julie Miller
Sharing Spirit and Song
by Kerry Dexter

When Buddy Miller is producing and engineering projects for himself, like his latest album, Cruel Moon, or his wife Julie's Broken Things, he doesn't want things to be too polished. "I like to put things down before everybody's really learned them," he said. "That way I think you get more of the energy that's going on, and people don't have the chance to get into cruise control." Miller, whose other producing credits include Jimmie Dale Gilmore's One Endless Night, Bob Delavante's Porchlight, and Emmylou Harris's live album, Spyboy, records in a home studio in Nashville. "It's an old house, really; it used to be a duplex. So we took part of it and made it a studio. Four rooms are sort of dedicated to the recording process. The living room still looks like a living room, even though it's not used as one. There are glass doors between the rooms so that you can see each other. I think it's just a little bit cozier than working in a big commercial studio. It makes a lot of sense these days — and I think that you play differently when you're in that kind of environment. You're more relaxed and less worried that you have to get the exact right thing the first time through."

The Millers, who met in Austin, Texas, and have lived, as Julie put it, "east, west, north, and so now we had to come to the middle," never really thought they'd end up in Music City. "We used to kind of laugh about Nashville," Julie said. "It just didn't seem our kind of town. But then we got to know Emmylou Harris and she'd tell us about Nashville, and we discovered that we could buy a house here for less than we were paying in rent in California. And we sort of figured, if Emmylou lived here and liked it, how bad could it be?" Julie said, laughing.

"Our motivation was economic," Buddy added, "but really it's turned out to be a wonderful town. There's a creative community here for almost anything you want to get into. There's just so much going on."

The Millers have spent time in enough other creative communities to have a good basis for comparison. Buddy, who's originally from Ohio, lived in Massachusetts before moving to Texas. "Growing up in the 60s," he said, "there was just so much great music. I was kind of torn between the psychedelic, Grateful Dead sort of stuff, and Ralph Stanley and Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton's real early stuff, and Haggard — they were all making just great records." He'd go to bluegrass festivals at that time, "where there'd be these long-haired hippies with their campers blasting out the Rolling Stones. Even though I was a long-haired hippie then, too, that kinda bugged me, and at that point I just stuck to the country side of things." He moved to Austin in the mid-70s "just for the music scene...It was a great time in Austin. It was when rednecks and hippies met — I don't want to say that exactly but you know what I mean, that was one of the first places where that kind of thing happened, where on Tuesday nights at the Split Rail or wherever it might be, people were putting aside their differences and the music was bringing them together."

This is an excerpt. Read the full article in Dirty Linen #89 (Aug/Sept '00).