Colin Miller Nabs a Winner on Losin’
In vignettes of colorful and country-fried bedroom-folk, the Asheville multi-instrumentalist tames his small-life suffering with a rural language spoken in the pitch-black of maudlin adulthood.

Colin Miller makes the kind of music you already know the words to on a first listen. At least that’s how I felt when the weeping guitars went subterranean during “Birdhouse” and I suddenly began singing “If I stay here, I will die in silence here” along with him. The multi-instrumentalist’s new LP, Losin’, is yet another example of a Tar Heel entering Drop of Sun Studios and exiting with the best album of their career. There’s something in the water in the Carolinas; recent recordings like Fust’s Big Ugly, Merce Lemon’s Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks, and Wild Pink’s Dulling the Horns make for a good sampler of producer/engineer/mixer Alex Farrar’s potent, near-bulletproof curriculum vitae, all of which either came to life or crossed the finish line at the Asheville studio in the last year.
Miller has been noodling around in that community for a minute now. He’s famously the drummer in Lenderman’s live band the Wind, and his debut record, 2023’s Haw Creek—named after an east-side neighborhood in Asheville—was a remarkably empathetic portrait of his hometown. “Just to Be Around You” was colloquially minimal yet immediately familiar. “I did donuts outside of your work at the Dollar Tree. I know you saw me, and the morning light kissed my dirt bike” landed like a weekend still-happening anywhere but nowhere in particular. Haw Creek was scrappy and stripped back, featuring breakbeat samples more in-line with Hovvdy’s lo-fi era than, say, the country rock spilling out of Drop of Sun nowadays. It was singer-songwriter music heavy on the songwriter half—tracks like “Sweetheartmetalbaby” and “Never Wanna” worked because their connections were too tender, too soulful to ignore. You could sing into the mouth of a holler and the sounds of Haw Creek would echo back.
The contemporary Appalachian Songbook is in good hands, thanks to songwriters like Miller. Losin’ is a tremendous motif of grief, place, and lives remembered like road signs. Miller recorded the album in service to his late landlord-turned-father-figure Gary King, who passed away in July 2022. He’d rented King’s house for 13 years and became the property’s (and King’s) caretaker, mowing tobacco fields and watching rusted automobiles fall into the earth. You can feel King, once a truck driver, auto-shop owner, and car club regular in Asheville, in these nine songs. King’s family and friends sold off his possessions piece by piece for two years while Miller hung around on the property, writing the music that would become Losin’.
Losin’ is a filled-out upgrade from the Haw Creek material, and Miller has bettered himself in all pertinent areas—singing, writing, playing, the whole enchilada. “Porchlight,” which swerves and aches from Xandy Chelmis’ pedal steel, is a lost-in-translation, ships-in-the-night tale of heartache. But our narrator isn’t some hangdog sap. He might be waiting up for an old flame back home, but someone in Beaumont, Texas is just as sweet on him. Lenderman swaps roles with Miller and steps behind the drum kit, cutting loose on a snare rattling like a box of bang snaps. “Porchlight” is a track with harmonies that could roar in 105.5: The Outlaw’s daily rotation, and “Darlin’, you know you’re still my #1 tube-top angel” may very well go down as the lyric of the year.