“I was at a Britney Spears crossroads,” Miller says cheekily down the phone as he nurses a hangover. “I’d lost my job, every plan that I had fell through, and I was left with absolutely nothing to do. For some reason I still had a guitar and a computer and my friend let me set up a studio in her lounge room so I recorded a bunch of stuff there.”
With that time in the not too distant past, he has a debut album in his hands ready for release. “It all feels odd,” he says. “Especially when connected to these recordings that were literally made to give to friends on the weekends.”
That is how the tale goes, a young man starts making music to fill in time, leaving copies of his CDs in random place for strangers to find, with no marketing, no information about who made them and no motive to ever do anything more than that. “I didn’t have any intentions at all,” he admits. “I don’t play any instruments very well and I only bought my first electric guitar late last year. I had a four-track that I wanted to do something significant with so I decided I’d use the recording equipment and the guitar to make some music to show to my friends at the pub on a Saturday night. I just kept doing it every week, getting CD-Rs and colouring them by hand, and then I started doing 50 at a time. When I went to the pub to show my friends I’d leave a bunch at the pub on the mantelpiece and then leave some on the train on the way home and drop some into a record store and stuff. I felt guilty for having so much time on my hands so I thought I’d share my boredom with other people. I also love finding things so I thought ‘Where can I leave these that no one would expect to find them?’”
From there things seem to move quickly despite Miller’s best efforts to prevent that. “As soon as I started leaving CDs around people found a way to get in contact with me on the internet,” he laughs. “All I had was an email address with Bored Nothing in the title and people found it and every day I’d get like six booking offers and management and labels emailing me which was a pain in the arse ‘cause I’m not interested in any of that stuff. So I was just saying no to everyone for six months and then I thought maybe I could get some of my friends to learn some instruments and be in a band.”
At this point, it might seem that Miller’s either playing a role or taking it all for granted. He’s not at all and any pretence that could be inferred by his slacker-approach to music is simply not correct. He comes across as a truly nice guy with a genuinely pure approach to creativity. Right at this moment, there are literally thousands of Australian artists madly emailing managers and booking agents desperate for a foot in the door and here is someone who makes little effort, declares that he’s not really a very good musician, and manages to have labels hounding him to join their roster. “I think, I mean this might sound a bit juvenile, but I think anyone who’s interested in that kind of stuff is a douchebag,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s good to be ambitious but that stuff is all shit. I like making music, it keeps me happy, I’d do it for free, I was doing it for free, and I think it’s a negative attitude to desire success. It’s a creative art and success is the devil to that; you should just want to make yourself and other people happy. That sort of attitude towards fame literally makes me want to die.”
When asked about his plans for the future, a question that’s usually met with a two-year schedule of gigging, recording and strategically marketed releases, Miller only knows what he’s doing the next day. “I’m certainly no middle class rich kid. I spend most of my time watching Seinfeld re-runs and eating frozen pizza while recording these days,” he says.
BY KRISSI WEISS
