What do you consider to be the darkest piece of music you’ve ever heard?
Go-Kart Mozart “Summer is Here”.
How would you characterize your own music?
Heart Music.
What are your musical aspirations?
To live an art life. To create music that speaks to me, and speaks to my community, and in moments transcend beyond those borders.
What are your main musical inspirations?
Anything really, life. I have always been drawn to music that to me feels like it has to be made, otherwise the artist is going to explode, so it’s not necessarily genre specific. That to me is Heart Music. It’s a difficult quality to explain in words but I know it right away when I hear it. It’s like when I listen to some of The Cure’s early albums, I can tell there was just no choice for Robert Smith at that time in his life other than to create that music. It is an urgency, a heaviness. It is an energy that draws me in. And it’s a bit of an addiction, I am always hunting for more of it because I know it’s floating around out there in some album from 50 years ago or on some teenager’s bandcamp page today. One day if I’m lucky, I’ll track them down.
What are your main goals in life?
To help allow people permission to be themselves. To understand what love really is. I think I am getting closer. To accept everyone as they are, and where they are, not who I think they should be.
What motivates you to create?
Oftentimes I am chasing a memory of a moment or a feeling from my childhood. It is very abstract, it is kind of like the feeling I had when I first saw The Monkees TV show when Nickelodeon aired reruns of it in the 80’s or when I first saw Def Leppard on MTV. It’s world of curiosity and possibility that feels magical.
Are you more of an early bird or a night owl?
I have mostly been a night owl my entire life. I used to go to sleep at six in the morning and wake up around noon or one in the afternoon. When I was a teenager I would stay up very late even if I had to wake up early for school. I live in the woods on a mountain most of the time now so I’ve slowly acclimated to an early bird lifestyle because that is the schedule of many of the creatures around me, my new neighbors.
Besides music, what other art forms would you like to explore?
Music, life, visual art, breathing, walking, it is all the same to me. I just try to follow where whatever speaks to me the most in the moment leads, because that is where the most honest of work mine arises from, in those moments. Many times I’ll just be walking in the woods and a melody will pop into my head. A lot of ideas that came to me for Chromatics that ended up speaking to a much larger audience than myself usually came very quickly like that, just appeared and then disappeared, I can’t really explain and I struggle with even taking ownership of it, maybe it is because I was relaxed or I was in pain and I wasn’t really creating for any purpose other than my own amusement or relief? But the music had to happen so I just tried to create the space for it to emerge out of wherever it came from, help it feel welcome and hopefully stick around for a bit. Same for my new album “Gateway,” the music was born out of a lot of exploring and improvisation where luckily I happened to have the recorder running. I feel more like I’m just the conduit, because I am so reverent of music. The hardest part of creating for me is trying to refine and figure out how I want to present those ideas to an audience larger than myself.
Which is the very first record that had a big impact on you?
Music has always been a huge part of my life, my parents had a record collection and diverse tastes in music so it’s difficult for me to be specific about the very first record that had a big impact on me because a lot of those memories blend into a vague collection. I remember after my brother was born, I was probably between three and a half or four, my mom playing her Beatles 45’s for me. I think my brother was taking a nap. I watched her drop the needle on to the vinyl and the music started, I was transfixed. I asked her if I could try it, and she may have helped me to do it. I remember it was winter, and the sunlight was reflecting off the snow, peaking through the glass, refracting on the dark wood moldings in my parents’ dining room. It’s a strong memory I’ve had for most of my life. I guess you could say it’s a feeling like this that I’m chasing after when I am creating.
What is the best decade for music?
All of them.
What do your future plans include?
I’ve been writing and recording songs with a bunch of different people, some lifelong collaborators, and some newer ones that I’ve been fortunate to work with, all artists that have the same shared love of music that I do. I’ve also been practicing with a couple friends who are both fantastic musicians, we’re working on presenting some of the songs off Gateway and some newer songs in a live setting. That project will be called Adam Miller & Inner Magic. We have our first concerts booked for the spring, pending whatever happens next with Covid. Practicing and improvising with them has been very exciting and fulfilling. If all goes to plan we will be giving more concerts throughout the year. Other than that I am going to just keep working and keep creating. I’m excited to see where it leads next!
Gateway releases February 11, 2022 via Inner Magic
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Adam Miller
Artist photo by Alexandra Cabral
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