Brooke Miller

Send to Kindle

You know that I love acoustic music, and more specifically, acoustic guitar. I have written about a number of great acoustic guitarists in the past few months, among them Andy McKee and Don Ross.

I had heard that Don Ross’ wife was a musician as well, but I didn’t have the time to check her out. Yesterday, as a result of some of my posts on Andy and Don, I received an email from someone who is associated with Don’s wife (he fully disclosed the relationship in the email), pointing me to her new CD release, including links to a few YouTube videos of her.

Her name is Brooke Miller. You can read an interesting bio of her on her label’s site Candyrat Records. That’s the same label that Andy, Don and a number of the other acoustic guitarists that I love record on. I’ve also written about the label, separately, in this post.

So, the first thing I did to check her out was watch a YouTube video of the title song of her new album, You Can See Everything. A number of things immediately spring to mind when watching it. She has a lovely voice, she plays the guitar beautifully, she’s attractive (no, that’s not important, but it doesn’t hurt either, if you’re watching a video). 😉

But, what’s more striking, is that she’s a wonderful lyricist (that’s songwriter for you folks that prefer my usually lower-brow vocabulary). What I really like is that the imagery is rich and deep, without being forced (like someone looking up rhymes in a dictionary). It flows from her and really works.

As an example (a tiny, but beautiful one to me!), the phrase that immediately precedes the title phrase is (together with the title phrase):

A heart can travel, given the right set of wings, you can see everything

I then watched two more YouTube videos (Two Soldiers and Country From The Dome Car). I think that’s all of the videos currently available. All three of the songs are on the new album.

You Can See Everything is a love song, written for her husband, Don Ross. It seems only fitting that he should respond (OK, I don’t know the order they were written in, so perhaps it was she who was responding to him). His is instrumental though, so you can feel his love for her, whereas you can decipher the imagery in her song more directly. Here’s a YouTube video of Don playing (amazingly!) Brooke’s Waltz.

So, I assumed (I know, I know, don’t assume) that the CD was like the videos, meaning, Brooke singing and playing the guitar solo. That would have been fine, and made for a beautiful CD, but I’m not sure I would have rushed out to buy it. Instead of living with my assumption, I went to the Candyrat page for the CD and listened to clips for every song (the links are on the right side of the page).

While I wish that Candyrat followed the lead set by Magnatune in allowing every song by every artist to be streamed for free, an unlimited amount of times, they don’t. What they do (at least on this album) is give you roughly 60 seconds per song (some even more), which is significantly more than the 30 seconds on Amazon. On each song, it’s more than enough to give you a great flavor of the song, music and lyrics.

Wow! I liked her solo, but on the CD, she has a band behind her (including electric guitar, bass, drums, and occasionally what I believe is a violin). There are also rare snippets of harmony, which I guess is Brooke’s voice dubbed in a voice-over. It’s gorgeously produced (I think by Don!). It’s a lush sound, built on top of fantastic songwriting (both lyrics and music). In other words, more exciting than the solo performances on YouTube, not that there’s a single thing wrong with the solo performances!

Now the dilemma, how to buy it? This comes back to my original post about Candyrat. They are a great label, promoting fabulous artists in creative ways, and distributing their music widely in DRM-free packages. Nothing to complain about. But, to download a CD on their site (yes, I’ve bought from them before, and written about it), I have to pay more than to download the same album from Amazon.com.

On Candyrat, this CD is $9.95 to download. On Amazon, it’s $8.99. I still can’t understand that. If there was a definitive statement that the extra $0.96 went exclusively and entirely to the artist, I might happily pay the difference. But, if it’s going to Candyrat, I don’t see why I should pay more, especially since Amazon packages it better, so that it auto injects the album into my iTunes library.