Julia Miller (spoon river demo)

            When reality has seemed broken, I've always repaired to my head to try to slip into a more comfortable mood. Being raised in Calif, I'm used to straddling a fault line or two. I've rolled with a number of quakes — ridden out the shifts & hung on through the aftershocks. But, while events below or above the crust, coming from all directions, can stop us in our ambling tracks, they can also allow for open space to close in with idling time to sort through mental, as well as physical, possessions — things either left to the elements, taken for granted or buried under the talus of our pasts.

Well, with this head case, the physical space is an attic of unconscious boxes full of the evidence of an earlier creative life — notes & recordings. Among the items I recently found are collections of demos that I used to make a few albums. Since you're with me here, let's sort through them together & try this particular one on for size:

            The life of this project began in a Death Valley motel week in 1995 with a four-track cassette recorder & a book: Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. The tape was forgotten in a pickup truck glove compartment, then dug out & reexamined in a shuttered medical complex dental office-turned-artist-studio in Edmonton AB with an eight-track minidisc recorder in 1998. I drove the machine carrying the demos to Tucson AZ in 1999 to undergo reconstruction at Wavelab recording studio with the help of musicians John Convertino & Joey Burns, engineer Craig Schumacher & producer JD Foster. After a little over a week there, the outcome was a final mix leading to the 2000 release of The Hill.

            Some ultimate tracks used for the album were from my original minidisc sketches.  Others were rerecorded at the studio — one of which was a song utilizing Masters' poem Julia Miller.

The rough drafts I uncovered in my attic are a mix of references that I'd brought along to work from once I arrived in Tucson. A few of the songs were repeated in the form of working variations. Over the next few months, I'll be posting some of those other demos, as well. For Julia Miller, there are three versions. We'll begin our venture behind The Hill with a look at one of these.

The album version of Julia Miller is pared down to just two guitars & a voice. I imagine I moved on past the demos because I just wanted the poem represented simply & with a reconsidered performance. The renditions I brought with me were interwoven at a faster tempo with additional layers of guitars. I probably felt that the jangly mood didn't fit with the lean, heavy story — Julia Miller's powerful voice calling out from the page while drifting into her abyss, yet not ending in silence — & maybe thought it required more of a raw feeling without entertaining a euphonious presentation.

            In my opinion, the key word of this poem is "betrayal." Whether published originally in 1915 as words or recommitted in 2022 as an unjustifiable judicial act, Julia Miller's story still lives on as an unfortunate eternal flame — especially in light of a seemingly ever-ongoing shockwave of betrayals whose effects will be felt by all for decades &, by some, for lifetimes, however endured within individual resolutions . . .

. . . & as such, the foundation will continue to shift: the next posts concerning the unearthed demos & making of The Hill will explore the situational & technical aspects of the recording journey along with more unreleased versions of other songs. I'm shifty like that — always have been — it keeps me balanced. Let's repair together. This is Julia Miller (spoon river demo):