John R. Miller
As John R. Miller started making plans to record his fourth album, his thoughts turned to challenging himself not just musically, but geographically. “I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, go somewhere less familiar to me and try a new approach,” he says.
Born in the Washington, DC area and raised in West Virginia, Miller is a studious and acclaimed representative of the sound usually categorized as alt-country or Americana, but his work is rooted in sources from the punk he grew up around to more unconventional paths in rock history. So when the idea of heading to Tulsa and working at Leon Russell’s legendary, recently reopened Church Studio came up, Miller took notice.
“Immediately the gears started turning,” he says. “Tulsa is one of the great legacy-bearing cities of American music—J.J. Cale is one of my all-time favorites, and Shelter Records was based there. So much of what I love in music history happened right around that block.” The result is The Great Unknowing—an ambitious, sprawling project that extends the sound and scope of Miller’s previous releases, 2021’s Depreciated and the 2023 follow-up Heat Comes Down. Those albums earned him praise from outlets including Spin and American Songwriter; Tyler Childers called him “a well-traveled wordsmith mapping out the world he’s seen, three chords at a time.”
But the singer-songwriter wasn’t content to just keep his direction and his momentum, chugging along in the same lane. In addition to changing location, he wanted his new music to explore new sounds and approaches, even if that meant rolling the dice on different players and processes. “My goal was to get into a room with a bunch of people that I didn’t already have a rapport with and track the record live,” he says. “I wanted to go into a new situation and hopefully strike up some new creative ideas as we were doing it.”
The album was engineered by both Gary Laney (Don Williams, Merle Haggard, The Marshall Tucker Band) and Mike Prado (Ziggy Marley, Sara Bareilles, Matt Kearney). A longtime Nashville engineer, Laney brought decades of experience into the room along with a deep and varied resume that quietly underscored the caliber of the team Miller had assembled.
Miller notes that his history in West Virginia—where he grew up in the Shenandoah Valley playing in high school garage bands before discovering traditional fiddle music and touring as a member of an old-time string band, working his way up to performing alongside some of Americana music’s heavy hitters—remains present. “Those songs are about folks who really taught me a lot about how to live well,” he says. “Not being in West Virginia as much these days, I feel kind of wistful about it, but sometimes I like to hold on to that instead of seeing things change. After the pandemic, we got back on the road and started doing more touring than I’d ever done before, but since then it’s had a strange, chaotic feel to it, something that’s more hostile to people who do the kind of stuff that we do. It’s taken on an air of menace in some places, and I think the traveling songs carry a little bit of that weight with them.”
