ALBUM REVIEW: Buddy & Julie Miller Share Pain and Hope on ‘In The Throes’
Four years after their acclaimed Breakdown on 20th Ave. South, Buddy and Julie Miller return with a gem of an album. To listen to this album is to be “in the throes” of a compelling attraction to intimately delivered songs about departure, courage, endurance and resolution, and love. Joining the Millers on the album are Fred Eltringham on drums and percussion, Viktor Krauss and Byron House on bass, Tim Lauer on keyboards, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, and Matt Slocum on cello. Special guests include Emmylou Harris, Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams, Regina McCrary, and Gulf Morlix.
The album opens with the sparse, wraithlike “You’re My Thrill.” Buddy’s swirling guitar picking creates a layer of haunting sound over which Julie’s warm vocals float; the song wraps listeners in its ethereal folk tendrils, reassuring them that the thrill of love transcends the blues and loneliness. The driving title track rocks along the path of absence, longing, reunion, with the scalding guitar solo on the instrumental bridge evoking the climax of reunion after one partner has been gone too long.
Julie co-wrote “Don’t Make Her Cry” with Bob Dylan and Regina McCrary, who also lends her vocals to the song. Buddy sings lead on this soulful performance, whose slow, swaying rhythm, crystalline guitar work, soaring B3 organ, and poignant harmonies come straight out of Muscle Shoals.
Harris’ echoing harmonies wrap around one another on the evocative “The Last Bridge You Will Cross” — a tribute to the late John Lewis and his persistent response to hatred with love and forgiveness. The psychedelic roots rocker “The Painkillers Ain’t Workin’ ” pleads for a little anesthetic of love to erase the exquisite pain of needing love, while Buddy’s yearning vocals on the aching “Tattooed Tear” reveal a lover wearing the pain of his heart on his sleeve in the form of a tear inked permanently on his arm. The spiraling harmonies of Campbell and Williams transport listeners on “We’re Leavin’,” a joyous gospel acclamation of community and unity.
With In the Throes, Buddy and Julie Miller deliver soulful songwriting that arises out an intimacy of two souls sharing pain and hope and love and holding sacred their experience in their warm vocals and music. These two singers and songwriters reveal the depth of their musical and spiritual presence on the album, inviting listeners into its enveloping warmth.