In December of 2022, Colin Miller mapped out demos for what would become the songs of his latest album, Losin’, out this week on Mtn Laurel Recording Co., in the middle of a Wyoming polar vortex. In weather reaching negative 50 degrees Fahrenheit, Miller succumbed to the cabin fever and its forceful, creative symptoms. 

“The world wouldn’t let me leave until I finished these songs. They came out of this physical space where there was so much cold around it,  but there was a small little bit of warmth where it was able to grow,” said Miller.  

The latest songs from the Asheville-based singer-songwriter and producer are warm, emotionally exemplative expressions of how loss affects us and how grief manifests itself in our lives long after that initial loss occurs. Miller’s own personal loss of his surrogate-grandfather, father figure, and landlord, Gary King, inspired the album’s concepts and a majority of its writing. King passed away in 2022, leaving Miller to sort through the weight of his death and come to terms with the inevitable sale of his Haw Creek property. Aside from being Miller’s home since the age of 15, he, alongside lifelong friends and collaborators like Jake Lenderman, Karly Hartzman of Wednesday, and Indigo De Souza, wrote and recorded a majority of their discographies here, becoming a safe haven and collective of sorts. 

“ The whole process of writing the album was happening as all that was happening in my life. Me and everybody around me was kind of losing our sense of home. It just felt like an important thing to write about because I was just feeling pushed out of the comfort I had known. It goes beyond just the comfort zone. My sense of home was being kind of rocked, and I didn’t really know what else to do about it besides just write. I had never done that. I’d never written about something that was happening in the moment,” said Miller.

Losin’ explores these feelings as they unfolded for Miller in the time following the loss of King and Haw Creek, but these songs also contain a sense of knowledge and wisdom that can only come with distance, time, and an acceptance of the effects of that loss. On the album’s excellent lead single, “Cadillac,” Miller lends us a descriptive picture of King, shirtless in the summer, smoking while utilizing an oxygen tank, and maintaining a sense of rebellion, that these dangerous, contradictory actions wouldn’t harm King as they would others. He sings, “Baby, you were born to run that red light, in the blood-black tinted window Cadillac.”

The songs on the album swell with contributions from longtime friends Xandy Chemlis, Jake Lenderman, and Ethan Baechtold of Wednesday and MJ Lenderman & the Wind. Miller always knew his friends would be integral to the process of the album’s creation, in comparison to Miller’s debut full-length, Haw Creek, a much more insular album relying on drum machines and hushed vocals from Miller. You can hear the spirit of Miller’s friends run deeply through the roots of these songs, as they surround Miller’s vocals and rhythm guitar. Whether it’s the clear feeling of an MJ Lenderman guitar riff or a Xandy Chemlis steel pedal line on a track, the shared sense of camaraderie and love is felt and communicated by all parties throughout the album’s runtime. 

“I knew from the beginning I was gonna involve my friends more. On each album I work on, I want it to feel different in its creative process.  One of my favorite songwriters, Richard Buckner, said in an interview that each time he records, he has to rearrange his studio and change his physical space. That resonated with me, but I think my version of that is that I need to approach it with some difference. It needed to be cooked different to feel like it has its own life and personality to become its own thing. I wanted to work with my friends as a constraint. On my first album, Xandy and Ethan contributed a little bit to a song here or there, but I brought them in, and I was like, ‘Here’s essentially the part I want you to play, or the zone I want you to mess around in.’ On this one, it was coming from a place of change in my life, and it naturally went to a place of wanting to have my friends on this one. That’s where I was feeling in my life, leaning on friends through this hard time and seeing the beautiful things that community can bring,” said Miller. 

While the songs of Losin’ contain the liveliness of Miller’s dearest friends and collaborators, they remain deeply personal and feel singular in how they express the emotions felt in the last few years of his life. Finalizing the writing of the album didn’t happen in a straight line, as Miller continued to find new things to say and older material to rework.

“Some of the songs I was writing during the recording process, and some I was still chewing on and reworking. ‘Birdhouse’ was a song I had lyrics and melody to hanging around on a hard drive. I found that it worked with what I was feeling, even though I had originally written it in a different place. With small adjustments, it really fit how I was feeling. ‘I Need a Friend’ existed on a previous EP, but I chose to rerecord it. With this batch of songs, it just applied to missing Gary and my sense of home. It took on a new meaning. Putting it on the record in a different form allows that to be an official declaration of that change of feeling, and a personal marker of that song feeling relevant again in a different way,” said Miller.

Each song’s creation came to its finished product differently for Miller, some more confidently, some needing more time and intention. 

“Some didn’t feel good until the very last moment, and I was just like, ‘I’ve put my best foot forward with this song.’ It feels good, but maybe shakier than the others. Then you show it to a friend and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s my favorite one!’ I’m like, ‘Oh, man.’ I don’t know if that’s helpful or harder to hear, but the songs come together at different times,” said Miller. 

Considering the intentionality that went into them, “Birdhouse” and “I Need a Friend” are two of the album’s songs that carry the weight of grief heaviest on their backs. The album’s opening track, “Birdhouse,” begins with a crooning guitar line that leads us to Miller’s narrator, sitting alone in the titular bar, repeating the self-aware refrain, “I know I should have left. I coulda done it on my own. If I stay here, I will die in silence here.” Grief is something we must acknowledge, spend time with, and learn from, but remaining with it for too long will ultimately lead us to a heavier place than we initially came from. On “I Need a Friend,” Miller directly expresses his isolation and considers other potential, alternate outcomes of life while “waiting for a call that never came,” closing the track with the line, “Maybe I just needed to be the one who leaves first.” 

For Miller, one of the most cathartic songs to create for the album was “Lost Again,” a song where Miller bluntly wishes for more time, opening with the lines, “I don’t need another Christmas morning. I don’t need another birthday picture cake, I just need you here for a second.” It’s heartbreaking in its delivery, as his vocals swirl into his higher register, wishing for more time with his best friend, Gary. The truest sweetness of Miller’s performance and writing shines in the moments where vulnerability is on full display. The moments where these feelings are only shrouded by the intentional and poetic delivery of lines that reshape desperation for things that can’t be actualized, but are wanted all the same, into direct, unwavering lyricism. 

“‘Lost Again’ feels like a triumph of working hard on a song. That one jumps out in terms of just wanting it to feel good and working on it for a long time, and then trying to get it to a place that feels right,” said Miller. 

The artwork for the singles, “Cadillac” and “Porchlight,” and the album itself, feels like an extension of the memory that Losin’ remains grounded in. Miller created the artwork for the singles while Matthew Reed, known as tvbeaches, painted and photographed the album cover. Reed has also created artwork for multiple MJ Lenderman projects like Manning Fireworks and Ghost Of Your Guitar Solo, and Friendship’s upcoming album, Caveman Wakes Up, among others. These surrealist images pair perfectly with the dream-like quality of Miller’s music and the intangible area of time it resides in. 

“He created the album artwork before I had done the single art, mainly because I didn’t know what I wanted the art to be.  And so it’s just like entrusting a friend to help bring that part of the record’s life into reality,” said Miller. 

The half-painted, half-photographed album artwork depicts Reed sitting in a ghillie suit, shrouded in blue and orange projector lights, with an image of a few figures holding checkered, NASCAR flags. In ways, these flags echo Miller’s single artwork for “Cadillac,” which he composed through 3D scans of old photos from a historic Asheville speedway, honoring King’s past as a racecar driver in the 1970s and 1980s.

“ There was a speedway in Asheville called Amboy Speedway. I knew that was where he raced from the stories he told me. I found a Facebook group of people who had grown up going to that racetrack. They had a bunch of albums of pictures people had scanned, just like a little memory lane sort of group. Right after Gary died, I found it and was like, ‘Oh man, it would be really cool if I could find pictures of Gary just to see him and have him around.’ There weren’t, but I was checking that group from when he died through the time I was recording the album. I took a 3D scan of my laptop screen and approached it the same way I approached the scan of my living room for ‘Porchlight’s single cover. It’s like a phone camera taking a scan of another screen,” said Miller. 

The layers of a phone camera taking a photo of a scan of another photo on another screen feel like a somewhat humorous, yet uncanny approach to visually representing the way memory feels. Whether it’s an imagined photo of King at the racetrack or Miller’s PS2-esque 3D scan of his Haw Creek home’s living room, it immortalizes King and his property in a way that lives on throughout the music. 

The last year has been a busy one for Miller, touring internationally with MJ Lenderman & The Wind and working as a producer for various projects like Florry’s upcoming album, Sounds Like… and Walker Rider’s Fair. He expresses nothing but gratitude for it all.

“ It’s been pretty surreal. It makes me really grateful to just be in a band that consists of pretty much all my closest friends. It makes it a lot easier for sure. It’s also been cool and motivating to see people just responding to the singles and enjoying the songs,” said Miller.

He’s also preparing to open up for Lenderman’s next leg of North American dates this summer, beginning in June. Intentionality is something that plays a large role in performing the songs from such a direct and personal collection of them.

“ The biggest thing is spending time with the songs themselves in the playable form and just evaluating which songs feel good to play or which songs maybe are important to me and important to be on the record, but not necessarily ones that have to be played live and just checking in with myself about what feels comfortable and good to play,” said Miller. 

Losin’ is an album that explores how grappling with the effects of grief and loss is not always a simple, linear process. Our feelings surrounding it shift continuously, and finding the right space to place those feelings is never final. Throughout the nine-track record, Miller finds a way to showcase the flow of these emotions, taking the listener through the moments of understanding it, spending time with it, and ultimately knowing when it’s time to grow from it. The album’s closer, “Thunder Road,” lilts with a wistful refrain that brings us to a peaceful environment to place the emotions that surround loss. “Pedal to the metal, I got you on my mind. And you can put your shoes under my bed, anytime.” Maybe it’s not possible to sit with our grief forever, but it’s possible to accept and acknowledge it, and continue to honor a legacy.

Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week, we are pairing our guest list with our feature of Colin Miller.

Listen to the playlist here!

Losin’ is set to be released this Friday, April 25th via Mtn. Laurel Recording Co., which you can pre-order now as well as on vinyl.

Written by Helen Howard | Featured Photo by Charlie Boss