Photo by Charlie Boss
Colin Miller’s latest album, Losin’, traces the complicated terrain of mourning, memory, and enduring friendship. It follows 2023’s Haw Creek, a record steeped in a sense of place—the tight-knit neighborhood in East Asheville, North Carolina where Miller lived, worked, and made music. The house he lived in was once owned by Gary King, a former truck driver. King also owned the surrounding property, making him Miller’s neighbor and a significant mentor. His influence extended beyond Miller’s life and work, even inspiring Wednesday, whose members Jake Lenderman and Karly Hartzman lived with Miller. They memorialized their landlord, friend, and neighbor in their 2021 song “Gary” from the album Twin Plagues.
As King aged, Miller became part of his daily care—trimming his hair, running errands, doing yard work, and sitting beside him for cigarette breaks and NASCAR reruns, even as an oxygen tank hummed nearby. When Gary passed away in the summer of 2022, his property was put up for sale according to his wishes, a move that essentially brought an end to the close-knit musical community that had thrived for so many years. Miller’s grief didn’t just settle into silence—it moved through the rooms and rhythms of Losin’, a record animated by community. Made with close friends and regular collaborators like Lenderman (in whose band Miller plays drums), Xandy Chelmis, and Ethan Baechtold, and co-produced with Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun, Losin’ is a testament to the people we hold onto, and the ones who hold us up.
During my conversation with Aaron Dowdy of Fust in 2023, when I asked about notable artists emerging from North Carolina, Miller’s name was promptly offered. This recommendation resonates deeply, as both Miller and Dowdy navigate similar rural country landscapes and employ a comparable storytelling approach in their songwriting—their records would find a natural kinship side-by-side on a listener’s shelf. While our discussion could have been streamlined for brevity, Miller’s friendly Southern charm rendered the entire exchange thoroughly engaging, and thus, I present the interview in its entirety.
What’s your musician origin story? How did you start this whole thing?
COLIN: I learned a few chords on guitar when I was about 7. I picked up the opening to “Blackbird,” and my dad taught me “Smoke on the Water” and stuff like that. I liked guitar and music, but I was kind of apprehensive because I didn’t know where to start. I think because I was hesitant, my parents didn’t push me into lessons, and we also didn’t have a lot of money growing up. Even when I asked for lessons, it was like, “You pay for that yourself.”
I really started getting into it when I was about 11. A big turning point was watching that movie Once. My brother, who was going to school in Wales on a scholarship at this fancy boarding school, brought it back and said, “This is about a guy who plays guitar on the street, and it’s just good songs – just him and the guitar.” I fell in love with it. I learned every single song and became a devout Swell Season fan.
That was my introduction to so much music. I became a huge fan of everything Glen Hansard did – The Frames and everything. Funnily enough, my dad had watched The Commitments, which Hansard is in. So I became a huge Glen Hansard fan at like 12. Because he has this busking background and does all these covers, when they were on tour, I would be on YouTube looking up the previous night’s show to see if anyone had posted anything. They always did covers during the encore, so I discovered “Astral Weeks” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” through that, and then I would learn those songs.
Looking back, it was like I was taking this class on classic rock by way of an indie musician that I really loved. That was kind of my start.
Did you see Swell Season has a new album coming out and is going on tour?
COLIN: Yeah, my fiancée got tickets to go see them at the Peace Center in Greenville. It’s funny, like Jake is—in a sense, I’m like label mates with him. There’s a chance that he was going to come to the Dublin show. Jake’s met Patterson Hood and J. Mascis at this point, and for me, that analog is Glen Hansard. I haven’t met him yet, but it’s like each day I get closer to meeting my school idol, and I look forward to it.
When you picked up the guitar, was it just to emulate what you were listening to? Or was it the idea of wanting to start writing your own stuff, perform with friends, and make a band? Did you have dreams, even at 11 or 12, of doing something with it?
COLIN: I think deep down I did at the time. I just hated school, and I knew that music meant a lot to me. We didn’t really dig deeper than that, but anything I heard, I was looking up the chords and trying to learn it every single day. I spent so much time in front of the computer just playing songs to myself.
I really yearned to play with other people. There were two kids that played music in my middle school—I went to a small artsy charter school. One kid played drums, and one played guitar. I remember annoying them so much, going on their MySpace pages and saying “We should jam, guys.” They would make fun of me for it, but I was close enough friends with them that at one point we did jam, and it sucked, and then I didn’t want to do it again. I was so apprehensive about it.
It was my first instance of realizing, “Oh, they’re not doing the same thing I am when we go home from school.” They knew the riff to “Iron Man” and that was about it. I found my people in high school with Xandy Chelmis. Xandy was my first real musical friend, and we’ve been playing together ever since. I was 15, he was 16, and now I’m 30 and he’s about to turn 31. As soon as I found people who wanted to do it, I really latched on, and it’s been a slow accumulation of that ever since.
I interviewed Shawn from Cryogeyser and she told me that Karly describes Wednesday’s music as “regional music.” I was like, “Damn! That is a great description.” I’m always trying to attach labels like Americana, alt-country, folk—whatever. As soon as I heard “regional music” and connected that to Wednesday’s music, it made so much sense to me. Do you feel like you’re a regional music artist? Does that make sense to you?
COLIN: Yeah, I feel like I make music that’s very specific to this area that I’m in—to Asheville specifically—because of the confluence of genres here. The local music scene didn’t have many big names, but it was generically diverse. I didn’t really think about that as a kid, but there were tons of bluegrass bands, tons of bands that were essentially indie bands, and then punk bands. There was a pretty active punk scene. There still is, but I think it was really active when I was in middle and high school. That wasn’t really my scene, but as I’ve come up in the Asheville music scene, I’ve felt the influence of that. I’ve seen the holdouts from when that was a really big deal, and I’ve seen a lot of those musicians who used to be in punk bands start to write country songs. And they’re awesome. So “regional music” is kind of a perfect catch-all—you could say it about anywhere, but it’s a good way to sum up a mixture of genres.
What’s in the water in Asheville? What do you think is special about Asheville that produces so much good music?
COLIN: Well, I think North Carolina has a really good music tradition. There are a lot of good bands from North Carolina, but Asheville specifically—I feel like a big thing that I felt as a kid, and I think this sentiment is shared, is that the idea of local music wasn’t cool. There were cool musicians who lived in town and had a connection to Asheville, but they weren’t “Asheville musicians.”
Now, you have Moses Sumney, Dave Hartley from The War on Drugs, Angel Olsen — cool musicians who are like, “Yeah, I’m in Asheville,” even though they’re not originally from here. It’s a chosen home. That wasn’t around when I was a kid.
I wouldn’t go to those cool punk concerts. I would get dragged to street festivals with my parents and sit through local music that I hated. I was probably just being very picky and very annoyed that I wasn’t listening to The Fray at “Downtown After 5,” which is a little summer festival we have here. I think I was quick to knock local music, and I don’t think I was necessarily right to do that, but I do think it inspired me to feel like I could make music that I really liked in Asheville that connected to this other music that wasn’t really represented here.
Harvest Records was a really good force for bringing through a lot of awesome bands. In high school, I saw Destroyer and The War on Drugs and just a bunch of great bands that I listened to. I was like, “Wait, they’re coming to town? Really?” So I got to experience seeing a band I really liked in a small venue.
Then also going to more selective festivals—Moogfest 2010 was a really big live music thing for me because Caribou played that, and Battles played that, and Jonsi played that. I had never heard of Caribou or Battles, but I had heard of Jonsi, so I knew some of the people that were going. I went to that festival with Xandy, and we walked probably two miles to downtown in freezing cold in Halloween outfits. My mind was blown by so many incredible bands.
So to answer your question simply: I didn’t feel like what I wanted to hear was coming from here, so I thought, “What if I did that?” Because I don’t want to move to New York—I like Asheville, I like my home here, I like the people here. My dream was basically to make music and play in bands that other people love as much as these other bands from bigger cities or places with a deeper tradition of good bands coming from them, like Athens.
I live in Columbus, Ohio. In the 30+ years that I’ve lived here, I’ve seen plenty of great bands who think the pinnacle of their career is to put out a CD. There are very few bands who dreamed bigger and put an effort into playing out of town shows. I’m thinking of bands like Two Cow Garage, Twenty-One Pilots, O.A.R., CAAMP. But, the number of Columbus bands that have reached beyond and don’t consider themselves local bands is very few and far between.
COLIN: Yeah, that jogs my memory. In They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib, a writer from Columbus, there’s an essay/short story where he talks about driving to Illinois all the time, feeling like you had to go all these different places to get your music heard.
How did you start playing out of town? Was there somebody, a mentor, that you looked up to—like, “Man, they get to go on these little vacations and play stuff”? Or was it like, “I just don’t want to sit home this weekend, so let’s figure out what we can do”?
COLIN: Karly was the biggest force in starting to tour, but so was Xandy. We had a band called Brucemont before Wednesday, and before MJ had kind of happened, in the early phases. Xandy would somehow get us offers to play some chef’s retreat in rural Virginia. My buddy Lewis, who was in that band, went to App State, so our first show ever was out of town in Boone because he set it up. It was just a house show.
Then I think we just got reached out to from different regional DIY spaces that were like, “Hey, do you want to come play a show?” So that still felt local. It wasn’t technically, but it was regional—barely. Maybe two hours, maybe three hours away. But then it really changed when Wednesday started taking off. Karly has this incredible sheer force of will—Karly’s just always working, always hustling in some different way, and was really the first person who started our crew of bands touring.
We did the first MJ/Wednesday tour in winter 2018, and we got home on Christmas Eve at 8 a.m. We played a show in Baltimore on December 23rd and then drove through the night so we would be home for Christmas Eve. Right after that was Indigo De Souza’s first tour, which me and Jake also went on. This was minivan touring. So it was a mixture of things.
In terms of mentors—Karly had been on tour as a photographer before. And I think we just knew people who went on tour. Just the idea of touring and having a record deal, even if it was small, even if it was just a buddy who made a short run of records—that was so pie-in-the-sky when you haven’t experienced that before.
That was what made us all start to get out of town and tour. Those first tours were brutal. I remember we played several shows on that MJ/Wednesday tour where people either forgot the show was happening—we just rolled up, and they were like, “Oh no,” and then quickly invited some friends so there was somebody—or they invited friends, but did it in the most poorly organized way possible. We only played to about one person and got paid out of somebody’s pocket. Full-on pity money.
I saw one of those shows in Columbus. I saw a touring band from New York where I was the only person watching. The opening band’s friends all had gone out to the pation and hadn’t come back into the club yet when the headliner started. I can’t imagine how disheartening that is—to be playing in front of one person.
COLIN: Very. At that point, it’s just band practice somewhere else. There is something almost freeing about that. At this point, I’ve played to a lot of people. It’s not ideal at all to play to an empty room, but it’s humbling—my first solo tour was last August, and a similar thing happened where it just wasn’t organized right, so there weren’t many people there. It made me really appreciative of the work I’ve put in and the places I’ve played. It’s humbling that at any point, you could go back there.
It was tough, but it was also freeing in a way, playing just because I was playing my songs for the first time in a place I’d never been before. That’s like a gift in and of itself.
You go from playing on tour by yourself in front of no crowds to watching Wednesday and Jake kind of blow up the way they have—was that something, when the three of you were hanging out drinking beers on your back patio, that was the dream? Was it like, “Man, someday people are gonna catch on to this and this is going to be a big thing”? Or are you blown away by how big things have gotten?
COLIN: It’s definitely surpassed my expectations. I thought that we would be niche—like devout, but relatively small following. The fact that we were all making music, all believed in it, and were all friends—that felt so special. It also felt like the more we found out about other bands, we were like, “Oh yeah, that’s how it happens.” It is groups of friends that all have their own projects that they take seriously, and then they support each other and take each other on tour.
So I was like, all I know is these songs are good, and I trust that it will grow slowly. And then everything just—yeah, it popped off. And now a lot of people are listening to my music, and it still kind of feels surreal. You can’t really expect stuff like that.
What’s wild is that it’s not just happening to one person in the group—it’s happening kind of en masse. And that’s such a wild, beautiful thing. Like, I know the music is good, but there’s something kind of inexplicable about how it’s resonating. Some people are really into Wednesday but not into my music, or they love MJ but not Wednesday. There are all these crisscrossing paths, but they all kind of originate from the same place. It’s amazing to see everyone go their own way but still rise up at the same time. It definitely makes you want to stay grounded. Just be grateful for it all.
My neighbor told his daughter we got tickets to MJ’s show in Cleveland, and she was like, “I tried to get them in New York and it was already sold out!” It blows my mind that the younger generation is so into it too. It gives me hope. Thank God the kids have taste.
COLIN: Yeah, I see it up close when I’m on tour with MJ. It’s insane. I’ve seen 8-year-olds with the big ear protection headphones in the front row—standing there for hours, showing up for the opener, fully locked in. That kind of devotion is unreal. And seeing people show up as families—like a 60-year-old dad and a 20-year-old son both vibing to the same set—that’s such a powerful thing to witness. It’s rare and really meaningful.
Part of me wishes I could’ve seen you guys in a small room, like a 500-cap spot that wasn’t totally packed. But the other part of me is just so stoked that it’s blowing up for you all. You can’t have it both ways, right? But still—it’s cool to witness this rise.
COLIN: Man, you should have come to last tour. We were in an 800-capacity venue sold out, and then the next day it was like 150. We’ve had a couple interesting tours where it spans the gamut of size. But we’re so used to playing small places that it’s always easy to adjust to that. And the energy you get from a smaller venue is so special.
All right, let’s talk about your record. It feels to me like this is an album that had to be written. Given your past couple years, you had to document this, maybe not consciously. Do you treat it as storytelling, as therapy? What drove this album? I know the subject matter, but was it cathartic for you to get this stuff out, or was it like “I have to tell my story and somebody else’s story”?
COLIN: I think anytime you’re putting out a project, it really always needs to be the thing that you’re most interested in writing. I had been working on all these other songs from my first album and finished those, and that was tied up and done. But the songs had been so old at that point—I’d worked on them for a long time. So I just wanted to approach it differently. I knew I wanted to approach the next one differently.
And then Gary died that summer when I finished most of that first record. I was like, “Well, I’m deep in grief,” because not only had I lost my friend, but I knew this person very well, and I knew that the house I’m in, the houses around me, and the land that I’m on was all going to get sold to the highest bidder. This starts the ticking clock of me leaving this place, and I just thought, “This is gonna suck. This is gonna be awful.”
I had never written about something that was happening in real time. It was always about a breakup or conflict in my life that had already happened, or a friend breakup that had happened, and I felt like I needed to revisit it—it would be cathartic to put it down. But this time I was like, “Well, I want to write another album, and I want to keep it going. And this really hurts right now.”
So a couple months after Gary died, I started writing as many things down as I could. I filled up tapes on a 4-track cassette with musical ideas, and I would use older lyrical ideas if they spoke to what I was feeling. I would start building those into songs, or just start fresh.
Then I went on tour with MJ opening for Plains [Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) and Jess Williamson]. When we came back, I listened to the stuff I had put on tape and whittled it down to about 10 ideas that I liked. I reached out to Alex around that time and asked if he’d be down to record my next album.
In December of that year, my brother and sister-in-law went to visit a friend in Alaska and needed me to watch their dog in Wyoming for 10 days. I was like, “This is perfect—I’m just gonna be out there on the range hanging out with a dog. I’m gonna be holed up and work on these demos.” That’s when the polar vortex happened a couple of years ago. It was negative 50 degrees outside, so I was even more locked in, which forced me to really finish all the songs and ideas. Then I recorded them the next February.
It was a really fast process compared to the last one where I had put out EPs while I was still working on that album. This time I was moving fast, cooking, because I wanted to approach it differently. It felt grounding to have a project to come back to and continue processing this stuff. With any grief process, some days are easier, and some days are way harder. That became true of how the writing process went—some songs I wrote in five minutes, and for others I was writing right down to the moment we were like, “Okay, we gotta record vocals, it’s time.”
I feel proud, and I feel like I got all of them to a good place. It felt very emblematic in a lot of ways of the grieving process.
There are some songs that, knowing the backstory, are written about or for Gary, right? And then there are songs that sound like they’re about relationships you’ve been in. Those songs, the ones that feel like romantic breakup songs, those aren’t really about losing Gary but you sing them as if you’re breaking up with a partner, right?
COLIN: In a way, yeah. Or it was me writing from Gary’s perspective. There are several lyrics that feel like kind of false memories—images that feel like something I have experienced, but are almost like things I’ve heard about while having experienced something similar.
Like a charity football game—I’ve never been to a charity football game, but I’ve been to a charity basketball game. Lyrically, I feel like it’s the Bob Dylan rule: it’s important to follow what sounds good, and then let meaning be derived either explicitly or implicitly.
I think I’m having trouble answering your question fully because there is no song that is like a breakup song, at least from my angle. But I intentionally wrote it so that it would be able to go beyond just my experience of missing my friend.
I feel like the bigger things I pulled from that were true to me were less about breakup experiences and more about seeing a friend do something that really troubles you and makes you wonder, “Do I need to bring this up?” Those conflict things that kind of exist in silence. Those are moments of intense change—when you realize that someone might not be in the state that you thought they were, or as healthy as you thought they were. I wrote a lot of things from that perspective. But there are no breakup songs on this album.
On “Porchlight,” you sing, “I found a stranger’s boots in the living room/I really can’t blame you/cos somewhere down in Beaumont/I got someone who’s sweet on me too.” I took that as you being cheated on. Are you saying that’s not about you or a relationship you were in?
COLIN: No, that was me transposing a story that Gary told me about being a truck driver and finding out that his wife had been cheating on him. And that he was also cheating on her. That’s probably all I should divulge about that.
You lived in a community-based setting where your friends lived with you and came in and out of different houses. You built this little community. I was reading about your relationship with Gary, and I read some article—might have been the Jake article—something about him coming out sometimes when people would show up and he didn’t know who they were, and he’d have a gun because he’s like, “Who are these people on my property?” Was he a fan of your music?
COLIN: Yeah, I think he liked it. He liked that it was country music. He had the Asheville station 99.9 KISS Country on a little radio in his sun room. If you went into the house, you would pass through the room where this radio was playing, and as far as I know, that radio is still playing. It played for all 15 years that I lived there. It is still playing, because the property has not changed hands yet. The only reason it would have stopped is if they turned the electricity off, but it’s probably plugged in and dialed to that station.
He loved country music, and we would talk about country music and listen to it together. So I think that’s the only type of music that he understood deeply. But yeah, I think he liked my music. He would give us hell about everything.
He never brandished a gun on anybody in a “you’re trespassing” sort of way. He would only brandish a gun if you were really close with him, and he would do it as a joke. I think me and Jake and my friend Lewis, who Jake, Karly and I lived with—I’m pretty sure we’ve all at different times had the gun pointed at us in jest. But you know how un-jest could it be when it’s a loaded gun.
A college roommate of mine said the third song on the album was always the hit. So, I have three questions for you about “Cadillac.” Is it indicative of the rest of the album, What’s the story behind the song? And is there a reason that it’s number three on the album?
COLIN: It’s track three because I didn’t want to start with one of the most upbeat ones. I really like albums that lead in almost like an SNL cold open style—they challenge you from the front. If you know a single off of it, you’ve actually got to wait to hear it. I think it’s a nice tactic to ask people to listen to the album from start to finish and to challenge them from the offset. So that’s why it’s track three.
I think it’s indicative of the album, for sure. That’s why I chose “Cadillac” or “Porch Light” as singles, because I felt like they stood alone well as individual songs, but then they also connect to the rest of the songs and give the vibe of the record pretty effectively.
“Cadillac” is kind of about Gary’s funeral—the Cadillac is the hearse. It references his lazy glass eye and has Gary’s thinking in it. Of all the songs, it maybe feels like the most like trying to commune with the dead a little bit. It feels like the one where I’m really trying to directly talk to Gary. I feel like it’s one of the ones that he would listen to and actually be like, “This one’s nice.”
When I wrote it, it didn’t come out immediately, but as I was writing it, I felt really confident about it. It was one of those songs where, when I wrote it in the midst of the others and finished it, I was like, “Okay, this is cathartic, and this is standing amongst other songs that feel like they’re telling this story effectively.” It just kind of checked all the boxes.
Do you feel like when you’re singing these songs live, you’re reliving the experiences? Is it hard to sing these songs? Do you find yourself getting choked up when you’re singing anything?
COLIN: “Lost Again”—I don’t know if I’ll be able to play it fully, to be frank. But I think I approach performing differently too. I get kind of lost in a performance—it feels like a very temporal space, and I’m focused on playing everything right and hitting the notes. That’s what I’m thinking about the most, so I’m focused on doing the best performance. I’ve practiced “Lost Again” and not gotten choked up, but every single time I listen to it, I do.
That song has the most intense parts—it references Gary’s decline, when I really saw it becoming a sharp decline. It’s about his friends and I having that sobering moment where you’re talking about someone, and you both know the way it’s gonna go and how it’s gonna go, probably pretty soon.
That song was so hard to write because I wanted to talk about that feeling as honestly as possible without it being so brutally honest that I wouldn’t be proud of the lyrics or how it got put together. The feelings would be honest, the writing would be honest, but I would never want to sing it—it would be a one-and-done thing, and that’s not the album I wanted to write.
So yeah, there are definitely songs on the album that will be hard to perform, and songs that will always be hard to listen to. But the way grief goes—some days are easier, some days are harder—that will be represented in performing these songs. I’m sure songs that I think I’ve got down pat will kick my ass someday. That’s the nature of playing songs honestly—that’s the nature of the game.
So you didn’t really have a choice to leave what you knew as home, and I know that you’re playing in Jake’s band. So it’s not so much like a forced college graduation where you all go off in your own separate directions and in 10 years you get together for a reunion. But have your personal relationships with people that you hung out with when everything was “normal” changed?
COLIN: They’ve not changed a lot, but they have changed. Jake doesn’t live in town anymore. Karly doesn’t live in town. Ethan doesn’t live in town, but because I’m on tour, I see them all the time.
It’s tough because when we have off time, me and Xandy talk about how it’s important to hang out away from tour. But it’s harder when you have 10 days off and the person you’re on tour with, who you want to hang out with, now lives 3 or 4 hours away—and you’re gonna see them in 10 days anyway.
So yeah, it’s changed. But I think we’ve all had the experience of meeting people on tour that we connect with so deeply, whether that’s a band we’re touring with or just people we met in a city where we’re playing one night and then gone the next day. We’ve all gotten pretty used to how friendships change and how to create friendships that can withstand that—how to check in on each other and have a rich life on the phone with each other, or just planning to see each other. I think we’re all pretty good about that.
To answer your question—yes, that does change. It changes anytime you go from living within 15 minutes of someone to even just doubling that distance. It’ll be subtle because you can still see them, it’s just a bit longer of a drive, but it usually signifies a phase of life when something like that happens. It feels like we all experienced this really special phase of life together, and that’s a really good foundation for our friendships going forward.
I have always loved reading liner notes. If I was a kid picking up your album and I see Jake plays drums and other members of Wednesday serve as your backing band, I’d be stoked. I’m guessing that they won’t be your backing band when you go on tour.
COLIN: No, probably not. And I think that’s the fun of it. Most albums are like that, where you have these people that you can hang out with and get their take and impression on the album, and then it’s kind of caught in amber like that. It’s so special because it sets the direction for what the live form of it will take.
I think the fun thing about touring is that you’re able to play with more people and different people. We’re at the point where we’re extremely excited to be including people that weren’t in those two houses, because it’s getting to the point where it’s untenable for all of our schedules. We’d love to keep hanging out and have it be just all of us because we know each other, but that’s impossible.
It’s also a sweeter thing getting to involve musicians that we’ve admired for so long and getting to tour with them and spend a ton of time with them on the road. That then perpetuates the whole thing—the next album, for whatever band it is, might have that person’s impression on it because of that experience on tour with them and how they played the songs subtly different than others used to. That’s so special.
So there’s this nice conversation between studio lineup and tour lineup that makes the whole thing grow and feel fresh each time you go into the studio or go on tour.
So economically, I don’t know if you plan to tour or how much you’re going to tour. Will you do a band, or will it be just you playing solo, or is it a mix of stuff?
COLIN: I don’t really know, because I’ve been touring so much with Jake that I want to be home. I love being home because I love working on other people’s records. I love writing, and I love recording.
That’s your whole other life, right—you produce bands and work with bands in the studio?
COLIN: My friend Wyatt Dronen, who has the project Walker Rider, just released something today that we had recorded. I was just so stoked that I was home when he was available and had a budget to come to Asheville and record with me. We recorded it at my house in Black Mountain. Landon George, who is the bassist in Wednesday—just a phenomenal musician and person—threw some stuff on it too.
When I’m home, I max out my time with writing, practicing, and working on other people’s stuff just to keep all that blood flowing because I love that stuff just like I love tour. But the tough thing about tour is I’m away from my fiancée, my dog, my friends, my house, and all my stuff.
So I’m probably not going to tour six months this year. But I love tour, and the economics part of it is a really harsh reality. It would be an amazing thing to see the types of tours people would have and how fun they would be if people were paid ten times as much from streaming. It’s a harsh reality that a lot of shows have to happen for life as a musician to happen.
For me, as excited as I am about this record, I also have to be honest about my own energy level as a person. If I were to approach it as just dates on a calendar, as if I’m just a robot that’s not going to have to live out the energy expense that is tour, let alone the financial one—it gets taxing. It makes me start to worry that I would play a bad show. I really just want to play good shows, so I think I’m going to be more selective with my own shows because I can be. And that makes me excited.
Last question. I first heard your name when I interviewed Aaron Dowdy of Fust and asked him what artists he liked at the moment. So, now I’ll ask you, what bands will I be interviewing a year from now and say to them, “Colin told me about you”?
COLIN: Well, Wyatt from Walker Rider is very special. He’s an incredible musician, writer, and person. He has an album—I’m blanking on the name right now—but it’s from several years ago with a blue cover and a picture of him where his face is kind of washed out. It’s just an incredible record. And also Merce Lemon. Love her. It was a real pleasure working on that last album she put out. She’s just a good musician friend.
