Buddy and Julie Miller-
Buddy and Julie MIller

Small Planes Shows High Points
of Innocence Mission's Unreleased History

a review by Jeffrey Overstreet

Copyright (c) 2001  by Jeffrey Overstreet.
Reproduction is forbidden without permission of the author.
Contact Jeffrey Overstreet at joverstreet@gmail.com.

Most of the albums that I love are albums that build me a bridge from one appreciation of music to a broader appreciation of music.  

When Daniel Lanois produced Emmylou Harris's "Wrecking Ball", the fusion of his atmospheric, spiritual ambience with Harris's famous country soul gave me a way to appreciate a country music artist for the first time.  The floodgates opened, and I began discovering all sorts of music that I had previously written off. 

Buddy Miller stepped in for Daniel Lanois on Emmylou's tour, and played on the subsequent albums "Spyboy" and "Red Dirt Girl", and right away I liked the way he too mixed rock guitar stylings with hints of country.   I fell in love with Emmylou's performance of "All my Tears", a song by Buddy's wife, Julie Miller.  That led me to enjoying Julie's own solo work, soul-searching gospel pop. 

Now we have the first joint venture of Julie and Buddy Miller.  And it looks to be a surprisingly strong bridge between Buddy's good-ol'-boy country twang and Julie's sentimental pop gospel.  It just might help me get over one of my last stylistic phobias... that nasal, twangy country music that so much of the rest of the nation seems to love.

But there's a reason.  So much of the Top-40 Country stuff is just "you broke my heart stuff." Buddy and Julie have a fuller, richer vision of love's hard road; they see the eternal conflict to which the particulars are joined. So, while they can sing to the heartbeat of carnal infatuation ("You Make My Heart Beat Too Fast"), those songs become just one aspect of the larger story of love, which comes clear in the stormy, vivid metaphors of "The River's Gonna Run".

And together they create a unique tension--Buddy's soulful, husky tones are the dusty earth under the bright, quick lightning of Julie's sharp delivery. Buddy's guitars give us a vast canvas of bright, bold colors. His solos are rough-edged, enthusiastic, and spontaneous, but he also borrows from the shimmering, atmospheric tones of Daniel Lanois.

While at times they veer towards sentimentality, their sincerity lifts the sometimes sappy lyrics to heartfelt testimony. That's why this album is so appropriately self-titled, and why it's "the real thing" when held up against so much of contemporary country music... You can tell that they mean it.