When you lose someone you love, you don’t just lose them once; you lose them in every moment you’re reminded they aren’t with you: in the drive-thru line, at the bar, or in the home you shared. You bury their body, sure, but living with the grief becomes its own perpetual “laying to rest” ritual. In his second full-length album, Losin’, Colin Miller – the multi-instrumentalist and songwriter from Asheville, North Carolina – looks deep into the shuttered places heartbreak stirs inside us all.
Losin’ is the follow-up to Miller’s much-praised release Haw Creek, where listeners were ushered into his home and place of inspiration: the community of Haw Creek located in East Asheville, North Carolina. His house and studio was owned by Gary King, who Miller describes as a father figure to him during his high school, college, and early adult life. He rented Gary’s house for thirteen years and took after the property, mowing the untended tobacco fields and creating music while Gary grew old next door and the abandoned cars he collected for years sunk into the woods behind his house.
In his early life, Gary was a truck driver, the owner of King Automotive, and a member of Street-Tiques Car Club. As his health began to decline, Miller adopted a caretaker role which meant going to the main house where Gary lived to give him haircuts, watch NASCAR races, bring groceries, and supervise him as he insisted on smoking cigarettes close to his oxygen tank. On July 8th of 2022, Gary passed away and his obituary mentions Miller in a long list of family and special friends. Gary was family — a support net, a lighthouse, and always just a call away as Colin navigated early adulthood relationships and fears.
Miller stayed in the house for two years after Gary passed away, still mowing the yard on the hand-me-down mower, grilling with friends on the front porch, and writing these songs. He knew it would eventually sell but dreamed of buying the land to save it along with some of the memories he accumulated. Yet, he knew this place was fleeting. People came by now and then to buy things from the family – his tractor, his truck, his tools — and Colin bought powerball tickets and scratch-offs to try to win enough to buy the home. In the spring of 2024 the inevitable came, and the property was sold, likely to be torn down for development. Colin and the others that lived on the land and grew close with Gary relocated and tried to move on.
Losin’ is the story of grief’s impact on the psyche. You can’t help but note the biographical moments in “Porchlight” and “Cadillac”, arguably the most pop-forward songs on the album that highlight Miller’s strong narrative voice and knack for catchy hooks. Some of the album's most beautiful lines are tucked between liminal lyric thoughts: “You got your shadow, / I got mine,” Miller sings in from a place of meditation and introspection. In “Cadillac”, verses come like postcards of memories layered behind a crunchy guitar riff: “NASCAR crash on the big screen / Shirtless in the July heat” and “Turn your lazy eye / Put me in the brights.” Before the pedal steel guitar whines one more time, Miller shows us the funeral ride: “In the blood-black tinted window Cadillac / It’s a good day at the wreck-yard / It’s a bad day for my heart.”
From the pit of grief, Miller brings forward “Has Been”, “Four Wheeler”, and “Little Devil”. These songs all embody a type of lyrical minimalism accompanied by ambient echoed instrumentation. It's like he lets the swelling soundscapes take over when he doesn’t have much to say. But in “Lost Again,” Miller gets back on the microphone to unabashedly plead for some relief: “I don’t need another Christmas morning / I don’t need another birthday picture cake / I just need you here for a second.” Here, he’s strong and not afraid to bare himself in all of his hurt: “So excuse me for looking like I lost my best friend.”
From the start, Miller acknowledges that living inside of this grief is not an option forever. In “Birdhouse”, the first track on the nine-song album, he sings, “If I stay here, I will die in silence here.” Fittingly and to starve off the swells of loneliness, Miller partners with Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studio and enlists his best friends and support systems to play on the record: Jake Lenderman (MJ Lenderman / Wednesday) offers drums and lead lines, Xandy Chelmis (MJ Lenderman / Wednesday) provides the pedal steel, and Ethan Baechtold (MJ Lenderman / Wednesday) on the bass and keys. As much as Losin’ is a record about grief, it’s also a celebration of life, complete with collaboration from some of Miller’s best friends still above ground.
“I Need a Friend” and “Thunder Road” are the record’s best examples of the unique cocktail Miller brings to music today. He is at his sharpest when he lets his songwriting, pop hooks, and ambient influence blend together to tell stories. On Losin’, these stories are as much observable and open as they are close-cutting and personal. How fitting that the record, inspired by the car lover, Gary King, bookends with a beautiful tribute to both him and Springsteen. In “Thunder Road”, Miller sings on the final verse, “I’m bad to be your one and only / Living junior / Lay right next to your snow angel forever.” In an album that is fraught with desperation, there are notable moments of wake and resurrection which compliment the heavy emotional swells we feel as listeners. So, listen and take in the times when you have been visited by those who have moved on. Hold the objects they left you in your hands in the sunlight. Visit the places you went together. You will see them living eternally in everything.
