This week’s release of an 11-song album couldn’t have come soon enough for Tyler Joe Miller.
The Surrey-raised and -based musician says he’s been keen for people to hear his new country songs for quite some time.
A few already-familiar cuts are also featured on Spillin’ My Truth (MDM Recordings Inc./Universal Music Canada), blessed with party songs, tender ballads and everything in between.
“It’s just so nice to finally get more music out because we’re just so used to putting out like, single by single,” Miller said Friday (Aug. 25) in a phone call from Toronto.
“It’s been a couple of years since I released my actual first EP,” he continued. “We’re playing so much now and we play new songs, which is good and fun, but you know, we want the crowd to be able to sing these songs back with us. So just getting more content out there, we’re stoked about it. A bunch of these songs we’d recorded a year or two years ago. It’s relieving for me to finally get this music out there.”
This summer Miller and band have been hitting big festival stages across Canada, including Gone Country in Cloverdale. The July 22 benefit concert was a real highlight for Miller, who lives up the road from the Bill Reid amphitheatre where the event is held every year.
“It was really cool,” he raved. “One, I had my family there and, you know, people found out they were my family so they kind of pushed them to the front, really cool. That was special but also, and I said this at the show, that I’m here in my hometown playing for 7,000 fans, but also, these were the people that I stand in line at the grocery store with. These are people that catch me buying toilet paper,” he added with a laugh.
The sold-out concert raised more than $1 million for cancer-fighting causes championed by local twins Chris and Jamie Ruscheinski.
“That’s incredible,” Miller said. “And it’s cool, too, because I used to get tickets to go to Gone Country ever year. I would be there with friends and stuff and just enjoy the music, and this year I got to actually be one of the artists on the other side of the stage. That was pretty damn cool.”
The fun, post-hangover number “Shoulda Known Better” kicks off Miller’s new album, but he says the “focus track” right now is the ballad “Better Than Nothing at All,” which features vocals by fellow Canadian musician Carolyn Dawn Johnson.
Another song, the faster, guitar-riffing “Never Met A Beer” (…”I didn’t like”), was recorded with Matt Lang — NOT star producer Mutt Lange, as some have mistakenly believed. Regardless, the song is nominated for “Musical Collaboration of the Year” at the 2023 Canadian Country Music Awards, with nomination nods for two other cuts (“Wild As Her,” for Single of the Year, and “Back to Drinkin’ Whiskey, for Songwriter).
• RELATED STORY, from May 2020: Humbled by hit song ‘Pillow Talkin,’ Surrey musician aims to build on humanitarian work.
Back in the spring of 2020 Miller first hit with “Pillow Talkin’,” a song that made him the first Canadian independent country artist with a number-one debut single.
A decade-plus ago Miller went to school at Frank Hurt Secondary in Newton. While at church, he discovered a love of playing music. A carpenter and contractor by trade, he’s also worked to build houses in Guatemala with The Climb Outreach Society.
“We’re trying to get back there, and we haven’t been back since COVID times,” Miller explained. “Since then we started blowing up with music — we actually got the call to come back (to Canada) because of the pandemic, and we haven’t been able to go back down since.
“We’re trying to figure out what the next steps are with our organization and then figure out where we wanna focus, because we also want to focus on some stuff in our own backyard, in Canada, too.
“The whole point of doing this country music thing was to build a platform and be able to use that platform to help people and, you know, influence others to help,” Miller added. “Right now it’s just been a lot of building that platform and so we’re just trying to figure out exactly how to merge, you know, those two things, my two passions of helping people and doing the nonprofit stuff and then bring that into the music aspect as well.”
Now in his 30s, Miller can fondly look back on some other work he’s done in life.
“It’s funny because I used to deliver this newspaper when I was a kid,” he told the Now-Leader. “I had my paper route. Yeah, so when I saw your name on the interview schedule I thought, ‘Man, I used to be tossing this paper around door to door and now I’m in it,’ you know.”
tom.zillich@surreynowleader.com
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