Concert at the Cove, Deep Cove Shaw Theatre, Friday, June 1, 7:30 p.m. featuring Bruce Miller, Norman Foote, Linda Kidder and Warren Marx with special guest: Rae Armour.
There is a guiding force in the Universe and it found Bruce Miller while he was eating waffles.
The force isn’t God, the songwriter explains, it’s closer to what George Carlin called: The Big Electron.
Miller was eating by himself at Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, an off-the-highway dry diner with rocking chairs out front and grilled catfish inside, when he heard Reba McEntire belting out “The Fear of Being Alone.”
It was his song.
Just a few months earlier, a woman Miller was dating mentioned how great it was to have “a boyfriend.” Suddenly feeling like a romantic placeholder, Miller realized she wasn’t in love with him. She just didn’t want to be alone. He related the observation to fellow songwriter Walt Aldridge and 30 minutes later it was a song.
Miller had written lots of songs but he’d never heard one at Cracker Barrel before. If he’d been at Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers or Biscuitville, he might not have gleaned as much significance from hearing his music over the speakers. But if a song at Cracker Barrel wasn’t popular yet you could bet it was about to be.
“I wanted to jump up from my waffles and bacon and just announce to the whole room: ‘Hey, that’s me!’” Miller remembers. “I knew that once I heard my song in Cracker Barrel that I’d made it.”
Miller had given up on making it just a few years earlier; at least he thought he had.
After a decade of cranking out tunes in Los Angeles, Miller pulled out like the guy in the Jerry Jeff Walker song and said adios to all that concrete.
He’d written a song that almost ended up on a Gladys Knight album. His collaboration with Robert Lamm from Chicago got rejected. It seemed like he finally put a chip in the glass ceiling when Johnny Lee, who got famous lookin’ for love in all the wrong places, decided to lay down Miller’s tune.
“I Could Get Used To This” was picked to click. It was tipped for the top. So much so that Miller says Warner Bros. toyed with the idea of offering him a lucrative writing contract.
While Miller was hanging out in Kenya on an extended vacation, the song shot to No. 50 on the Billboard Hot Country chart, right between Conway Twitty and George Jones. It died, and his songwriting contract died with it.
In the musical Gypsy, Stephen Sondheim wrote: “You either have it, or you’ve had it.”
Miller had it.
He got the royalties from “I Could Get Used To This” and headed to school.
Miller had never done anything outside music but looking at his two young kids, he wondered what would happen if music didn’t work out.
While he was in Kenya he’d met some Canadian engineers working on a water project and the idea of being an engineer stayed with him.
Despite an affinity for the written word (Miller references George Orwell, the novel Look Homeward, Angel and rapper Ice-T during our interview) he was never particularly interested in academics.
“I didn’t finish the Grade 12 exams because I was stoned on acid. I was 16 years old and I just didn’t give a s#!@. All I wanted to do was play in a rock ‘n’ roll band.”
But Miller graduated from UBC’s engineering program and started work. He was through with the music business. However, the music business wasn’t through with him.
He taught a songwriting seminar on Gabriola Island and ended up playing a few of his tunes in a little club. There were a few heavy hitters from Nashville in the crowd, one of whom pulled Miller aside and told him: “Y’all are pretty good. Y’all oughta come to Nashville.”
He resisted, he argued, but he ended up in Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, walking down a recording studio corridor adorned with records by Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and Percy Sledge.
At the end of the corridor was Rick Hall, the studio’s founder. He asked Miller to play something.
Miller sang about a woman’s silvery reflection in a lake surrounded by willow trees and wild rice and shooting stars in the August sky.
As Miller recollects, Hall said five words when “She Used to Swim Here” was over: “OK, what do you want?”
Miller was a songwriter again. And after McEntire rocked Cracker Barrel, Miller had his songs cut by The Dixie Chicks and Rascal Flatts.
He’s planning to play those songs on Friday, along with some older tunes and “Secret Cargo,” a piece of Americana that recounts his days as a kid in northern California, watching weapons of mass destruction roll by on a train bound for a military base.
“Secret cargo rolling through the night on a long white train, secret cargo rolling through the night going to blow the world away,” Miller sings.
Those lyrics “just came,” he explains.
“That’s one of the most frustrating things of being a songwriter . . . you never know when the inspiration’s going to hit,” he explains. “Many writers, that’s what turns them into alcoholics.”
The important thing is write every day and to remember that inspiration has a way of absenting itself from artists who are “drunk or hungover or sleeping.”
Discussing the harmonic convergence of writing a song, Miller references that Big Electron force again.
“(It’s) not random and it’s not predetermined but it’s guiding things in my life.”
