‘I’m comfortable playing on my own again’
Misty Miller is going back to basics, writes Alexandra Warren.
The 27-year-old singer from Peckham is releasing a 12-track cassette called Home Recordings and Voodoo Sessions, made during a year of on and off lockdown.
She said: “It’s just me and a guitar. It’s very simple.
“It’s how you’d hear me if you came and hung out with me and I played to you.”
The sides of the cassette are different but complementary. Side A is mainly new songs, recorded by Ms Miller last summer at home on her laptop or phone.
Naturally, the events of the time are reflected in the music.
She said: “I’d say there’s three or four which are very of the lockdown time.
“The first song on the tape I wrote with my brother and a friend of mine in April last year.
“It kind of summed up the ethos we were all having at the beginning of lockdown. It’s like a mantra to being okay.”
Recorded at Voodoo Saloon with a friend, Declan Shields- Appleton of the band Sleep Eaters, Side B contains older songs that had never made it into a release.
She said: “There are just so many songs that never get heard. For some reason they slip through the cracks.
“The whole cassette is probably spanning five years worth of writing but dotted around. The songs that didn’t get chosen.”
The recording studio is deep in the Essex countryside, and hints of this have seeped into the music. During the recording of one song the heavens opened, adding the drumming of rain on the roof to the song.
She said: “For a moment we thought we weren’t going to be able to use it because the rain was really intense but in the end I think it works. I think it’s okay.
“You’re getting a lot of the elements in that session.
“You can hear little creaks in the floorboards and you can hear birds tweeting.”
Ms Miller’s creative process is organic too. Sometimes she sits down with the intention of writing, starting with an idea and building some chords around it.
But more often than not songs come from trying to get a feeling out into the world.
She said: “Whichever one it is it’s always autobiographical. It feels like a necessary process for me, and sometimes it’s a better way of explaining to people how I’m feeling.”
Ms Miller is enjoying the creative control she’s had over her work in the last few years.
She said: “I always wrote in the same way but before there were just so many fingers in the pie.”
She was discovered at 15 and released a self-titled album of ukulele accompanied folk songs in 2011.
This was followed by a grunge album The Whole Family Is Worried in 2016, after which she left the label.
She said: “I had a really bad experience. Back then as an artist, but especially a female artist at a major label, the only thing they really knew how to do was over-stylise you.
“There’s this unnecessary focus on how the music is being displayed and actually it shouldn’t really matter that much.
“The music should be more important, but I spent a long time in the world where the image was more important.”
After parting ways with Sony, she was set on never doing music again, and it wasn’t until 2019 when she returned to releasing music under her own name.
An EP called Fruit came out in 2019, followed by River Songs in 2020.
Ms Miller said: “This will be the third release in the similar, completely independent vein. Man, it’s so much nicer to have full control.”
In exerting her own vision, she’s dispensed with the band, and the stylist, leaving her once again as a girl with a guitar.
She said: “I’ve come back to being comfortable just playing on my own again. I’ve come full circle.”
Misty Miller is supporting Iraina Mancini at Paper Dress Vintage on June 10.
Home Recordings and Voodoo Sessions comes out on May 24 and individual numbered copies will be available to buy on bandcamp.
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An accompanying music video features local residents and his accompanying billboard campaign.
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Blinkie – Stronger (feat. House Gospel Choir)
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Compiled by Alexandra Warren – alexandra@slpmedia.co.uk