Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It: Lynn Miles

It’s a little tricky trying to make this feature work for Lynn Miles, partly because her albums are almost all universally excellent, filled with songs about affairs of the heart in one form or another (and that is far from stating that they all sound the same), and, secondly, their consistently high quality makes the ‘elimination’ process more difficult than usual.

But first things first – Lynn Miles is one of the very best songwriters of the last 30 years, up there with the likes of… well, name any number of top female songwriters. She also happens to be one of the best, most expressive and honest singers of the same period (just take a listen to ‘I Knew It Was Love’ for an example from “Slightly Haunted”). She sounds on occasion like Nanci Griffith, Emmylou Harris, or Lucinda Williams and occasionally like her erstwhile compatriot, Canadian Joni Mitchell. She has won Juno awards (Canadian Grammy) and has been nominated on a number of occasions for folk awards in the song, album and ensemble categories.

Miles comes from Cowansville, Quebec, studied in Ottawa, and spent some time in Nashville, Austin and LA before returning to Canada. She spent her late teens and twenties studying voice and classical music history. She started writing songs from the age of ten, and besides her recording career of 17 albums (18 if you include the duet album “Heartbreak Song for the Radio” with fellow Canadian Lynne Hanson, as The Lynnes), she has written more than 1000 songs (“three of them are happy”, she says). To afford the life she wanted, she taught music (Alanis Morissette was a 14-year-old student of hers) and played in bars and clubs.

She made her first recording in 1987, a self-titled demo cassette that did the rounds with her as she ventured outside her local venues. And this cassette made its way to Snowy River Records, who released her sophomore album “Chalk This One Up to the Moon” in 1991. Miles was by then 33 years old and had done the hard yards to enable her to deliver an album of immense promise. Listen to ‘It’s Hockey Night in Canada’. With a typical and beautiful Miles melody (she has an innate ability to churn out hummable melodies at will), it is a song that uses Canada’s predominantly male passion – hockey – to address the inequalities of youth and hope for the future “There is a Zamboni of sorts in all our souls / and the streets of old Montreal are cold / Equal ice time is all we need / to catch our breath and build our speed”.  (A Zamboni is a machine that cleans and smooths ice rinks – a great metaphor). The album became so highly regarded that it was re-released 25 years later.

But, onward to a decision made. I have decided to leave out of consideration the four albums that constitute a side project by Miles. They are “Black Flowers” Volumes 1-4 (2008-2014), and their content is songs written by Miles, nearly all having appeared on previous albums (extraordinary in some respects that apart from just a very few songs in her catalogue, every song is a solo write). These 40-odd songs were re-recorded with Miles on just piano or acoustic guitar. I’ve also left out of consideration the duet album with Lynne Hanson and the Christmas-period album “Winter”. They are all wonderful and should be explored, but to these ears, they add little to the main body of work.

Can’t Live With It: “Night In a Strange Town” (1991).

At the end of the day, this is the album that sits a little less comfortably for me amongst her oeuvre.  “Night in a Strange Town” was recorded in Los Angeles during a four-year period of Miles’ life as she was seeking out perhaps a more commercial approach for some consequential success. And it shows. The album was produced by multi-Grammy winner Larry Klein (Shawn Colvin, Joni Mitchell and myriad others), and the session men were ace LA players such as Dean Parks, Greg Leisz, Jim Cox and Kevin Breit. The album includes as many excellent songs as Miles has put on any other record but they were largely hosed down in a California sheen of LA cool and ultra-commercial production. It never stopped Miles writing songs for the album (you cannot ever imagine her having writer’s block), and although she pronounced that her period in LA was anything but happy, the album title is inclined to tell a slightly different story, and the lyrics expanded upon those thoughts. The first track, ‘Anywhere,’ starts off “I’m so tired of this town/ this town is tired of me / I feel like I’ve been walking down a long dark road/ now I’m standing at the edge of the sea”. And later, on ‘Sunset Boulevard‘ in a quasi-spoken verse, “grooming is everything, and your car is your purse / don’t give the right of way even if it’s hearse / just forget about that loser cause he ain’t goin far / anyway the Marlboro man is waitin’ for you / Down on Sunset Boulevard”. Much of the rest of the album throws up very little levity, yearning for love but resigned to the lack of it. As in the melancholy ‘Yeah Yeah’ – “are you happy now / do you ever think of me / is independence everything / that you thought it would because I’m OK / I’m just floating for a while / I don’t feel like crying / but I’m not gonna smile / Yeah Yeah”. And along with all these simple lines that resonate so much, there are the glorious couplets of ‘Map of My Heart’  – on this map of my heart / I’ve drawn every single scar / and when I close my eyes / I can feel exactly where they are / I drew a big room for forgiveness / I drew a big room for forgetting / I drew a great big room for mercy / and the biggest for regretting”. I might regret this choice myself on the next listening go-round.

I am sure there will be Lynn Miles fans (and there are plenty) out there, shouting, “No! No! That’s her best album“. But is it? For all the years since, she has been on a roll, and every album has received deservedly and highly acclaimed reviews – “Unravel”, “Love Sweet Love”, “Fall for Beauty”, “Downpour”, “We’ll Look for Stars” and “TumbleWeedyWorld”.  And so to…

Can’t Live Without It: “Slightly Haunted” (1996)

Miles’ third album, “Slightly Haunted”, was a mini-masterpiece and, as became the norm, an album title that captured the essence of the songs. It was a considerable step up in terms of production values, range of songs and vocal interpretation, and included, for the first time, the multi-talented multi-instrumentalist Ian Lefeuvre; he played only on electric guitar on this album (wonderfully well, as it happens) whereas, on the following three, he displayed his skills on various instruments and sympathetic production techniques. Well, the songs covered many of the subjects familiar to Miles’ aficionados, such as alienation and the search for comfort, and with elements of reminiscence.

From its first track, ‘You Don’t Love Me Anymore’ (with its nod to Nanci Griffith’s ‘Love at the Five and Dime”s opening guitar licks), right through to the closer ‘I’m Still Here‘, this album does everything right. A little less folksy, a little more country (more than 20 years later, “Downpour” had a similar feel) and the lyrics, well, Miles can throw out couplets as good as the melodies she writes: “I never told you that I would / do what you wanted / but I tried to tell you that / I’m slightly haunted” from ‘I Always Told You the Truth’. Relatable stuff. This was the album that proved Miles could really write and really sing, her phrasing out of this world. ‘I Loved a Cowboy‘ is a lilting tale about a past love: “I would go out riding for two weeks at a time / and I knew the only lonely heart was never his but mine”. Lefeuvre’s guitar playing is a match for the exquisite Bo Ramsey (Lucinda Williams, Jeffrey Foucault, Greg Brown). Miles swoops and soothes on ‘Loneliness‘, which is just her and her guitar. And the most she has sounded like Joni Mitchell.

And the great songs come thick and fast. ‘I knew it was love’ has a very passionate couple of verses about this perfect love: “And this love poured down like rain / and lived out on the line / and we spun like hurricanes / and I was yours, and you were mine”  until the third verse starts with “Now you wonder where it’s gone / well, looking back I think I know “, and Miles is set fair with her typical melancholy.  ‘Long Time Gone‘ has reverbed harmonica by Willie P Bennett throughout, giving the track a punchier sound.

As has been alluded to already, Miles’ influences are many but this album seems to highlight them more than any other – apart from those mentioned above, the beautiful ballad ‘Last Night’ (with just acoustic guitar and a haunting choir in the background has a Shawn Colvin feel and the long and haunting ‘The Heart that Loves in Winter’, with its ominous bass line, sounds like Alison Moorer (without the twang) on a song that contains a frequent metaphor in Miles’ songs – nature. And ‘I’m still  here‘ ends the album with yet another slice of melancholia, which is just sublime – the very word that ends the album: ”How many nights did I spend/standing too close to the edge / laughing and drinking and speeding cars / and killing all my time / how many times did I break / in two just like a little doll / Felt like there was nothing so sublime.”

A number of writers have written about why she was/is not a major star (including our own Rick Bayles here), but there is no rhyme or reason to it. It would have been wonderful to see her achieve the level of success of some of her contemporaries, especially as her talent exceeds many of theirs.  Get to see her live if you can – a New York Times writer noted many years ago: “She makes being forlorn seem like a state of grace”.