Kevin Miller - Midnight Boy

Hear The Track Here

My first brush with US based folk musician Kevin Miller was with the excellent Light A Candle (February 2009) an excellent, upbeat track and considering my usual bah humbug about feelgood tracks even I felt it good enough to highly recommend it. One of the main drawbacks of a lot of acoustic based musicians is the difficulty of recording simple things like guitars and voices. What may sound great in the bedroom/bathroom/smoke filled club/subway/street corner may not travel successfully into the digital world, and often doesn't. Outside of the quality of the song, Kevin's work on getting everything to sound right made a big impression on me, and I gather I am not the only one.

Midnight Boy is a song about (and I quote) 'a cowboy [who] loses his horse in the high country, and has to say goodbye' Yep, I saw exact same question-mark shaped WTF too when I read that but hey, it takes all kinds right?. Kevin explains further 'I've spent a lot of time in tall, mountain country. When a packer's horse goes down, he's faced with the heartbreak of leaving his best friend behind' Musically, I have to say that without knowing the story this music wouldn't have the same impact which is why I spoke about it here, instead of my usual space consuming rubbish. Americana is fast becoming one of my flavours of the month and I have to say that Kevin's work in this field is exemplary.

Most of us write directly out of our own experiences, and Americana is the true taste of that. In this case of Kevin though, it's a much rougher, harder landscape than most Eastern seaboard based musicians, with its echoes of hard men and even harder country. Obviously then the whole piece has a wild west feel about it even though the instrumentation (acoustic guitar and mandolin) could come from anywhere. Ultimately, I doff my hat to the guy, he's managed to write and perform an excellent modern folk song in the traditional manner. And yes, if you must know, I did cry in the end. It was SOOOO sad. Poor, poor horsey...

Highly Recommended Folk song about the great outdoors.