Tuesday 20th January 2026
The Lodge, The Deaf Institute, Manchester, England
“I just got done makin’ a new record back in August that should be out some time in the next few months,” John R. Miller says from the second stage of the Deaf Institute in Manchester, shortly after his fourth song, ‘Smokestacks on the Skyline’. “Gonna be playin’ some new songs this evening if that’s OK. Basically, if you’re familiar with some of the stuff and there’s somethin’ that you wanna hear and it doesn’t look like we’re gonna do it, just say somethin’ and we’ll do our very best.”
It’s an offer that the crowd of fifty to sixty people take to heart, for the rest of the night is peppered with enthusiastic cries for every Miller-milled song ever pressed to vinyl, and not just the fan-favourites. (“Faustina!”, one woman shouts.) “Ooh,” Miller says sharply after someone requests ‘Dollar Store Tents’, with the same I-might-have-overdone-it look on his face you’d get from someone who’s picked up a heavy box and heard their back go ‘click’.
“Did I say that right?” the woman asks.
“Yes, you did!” Miller replies, pleasantly surprised at the knowledge of his songs, here on the right side of the Atlantic. He laughs, before lapsing into the warm, befuddled, almost Tom Waits-ian mumble he’s charmed us with all night. “Ah well, I came all this way…” he muses, accepting the challenge. “Why not forget a bunch of words, in front of a whole bunch of strangers?” The crowd laughs, and after Miller promises “we’re gonna do our best,” he says “Tom says he’s gonna sneak his way into this one.”
Tom is J. Tom Hnatow (pronounced ‘Nay-toe’), the electric guitarist whose tones and bended notes bring so much to Miller’s sound tonight, adding a loose, laidback mix of J.J. Cale-esque country blues to Miller’s John Prine-esque melodies. From my vantage point from stage-right, Tom is almost completely hidden from view, though I can certainly hear his influence on the night.
That said, my sight of Miller himself is little better. The Lodge, the name for this bar-room that serves as the Deaf Institute’s second venue room (the dull thud of the music in the main room upstairs can occasionally be heard through the ceiling), does not have a raised stage, and Miller decides to remain seated throughout. It’s also standing-room only, aside from those early-birds like myself who are able to clamber atop a raised platform near to the sound deck. But even from this elevated perspective the view is limited, and my visual impressions of the night are limited to the occasional glimpse of a blue checked shirt and the thick-bearded head of Miller moving back and forth under a forest-green cap.
It doesn’t matter a damn, for the sound and the atmosphere is the key for a memorable night tonight. After opener Jacob Coley provides a dreamy soundscape of his own, facilitated by the guitarist Jack Boles and songs with the swirling strength of ‘Treading Water’ – a closer that’s officially released as a single at midnight the same night – Miller and Hnatow lay down their own genial, swampy country blues sound.
The music rolls, never plunging nor raising high. The only two exceptions come later in the night: the fast-paced rockabilly of ‘Conspiracies, Cults & UFOs’ which ends the set, and ‘Forgiven and Forgotten’, which in its composition would reveal itself as tonight’s only song not written by Miller even if Miller himself hadn’t introduced it as one penned by his friend Ward Harrison, intended for a project their band was meant to do until “half of us got fired”.
“Which half?” someone asks, and Miller grins.
“The good half!” another wag replies. Miller laughs.
“Aw, it’s all good,” he says. “We all had a little growin’ up to do, to be honest.”
The pace of these two songs aside, the eighteen songs of Miller’s set simply and wonderfully just move along, as a great river might. And like a river Miller’s music rewards, for his unassuming songwriting hides hooks and phrases and moments that seem to come out of nowhere, like flecks or nuggets of gold found in the river mud. On nights like this, the motivation of the music fan who attends the smaller gigs, supports the lesser-known artists, becomes understandable. It’s like panning for gold, and goddamn if it doesn’t feel good when you find a sizeable chunk to hold in your hands.
“Just make sure you do ‘Basements’!” one of my fellow panners of gold shouts after John R. Miller’s initial offer to play songs on request.
“All right,” Miller replies in his languid American burr. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
And in truth, it’s not only the audience who take to heart his offer. Miller’s promise to “do our very best” is a promise he fulfils before he even makes it, coming out of the blocks to open with his stellar ‘Shenandoah Shakedown’ and the wistful ‘Coming Down’, a song which once caught the ear of Tyler Childers, a man who knows a thing or two about songwriting. By the time of the third song, ‘Red Eyes’, the stage is set, with those bended electric notes from Hnatow and a simple heartbeat-like percussive sound from the pedalboard at Miller’s feet. (He also wears one of those small foot tambourines on his left boot for added percussion.)
“This is not gonna really expand very much,” Miller drawls after ‘Coming Down’, plucking on his acoustic guitar as the audience laughs. “We’re startin’ off pretty low-key. In the middle there will be some…. semblance of dynamic, and y’all can go home wondering what you were doing here.”
Following on from the known flecks of gold in ‘Red Eyes’ – “Hoping I find better soil,” runs one lyric – Miller shows there’s plenty left undiscovered in his muddy stream for those who provide ears to listen. “I feel better in the stillness, I can hear the unheard song,” he sings in his first unreleased number of the night, allowing us to hear the J. J. Cale-esque country blues vested in this unheard song. “You’re the only thing I’m doing wrong.”
After this taste of the unknown, Miller returns to the tried-and-true of ‘Lookin’ Over My Shoulder’ before making his first bold venture into audience requests. He thanks someone for reminding him of ‘Old Dance Floor’, promising that “we’ll try to stumble through it now.” But ‘stumble’ proves to be the wrong word, for Miller and his guitarist roll through the song and the rest of the night with a laidback ease.
It’s an appropriate song to announce this new, looser phase of his set, with its lines about how “I don’t have a mind for makin’ plans… But I ain’t nobody’s fool.” Miller is one of those songwriters who sounds best when they’re free and able to breathe, when they can sit down and laugh and take both requests from a warm crowd and swigs from a cold beer – and the tall green can of Heineken at his feet doesn’t look like one of those 0.0% abominations either. He’s one of those artists who sound better stripped back, unburdened, and ‘Old Dance Floor’ manages to sound better here with only Hnatow and a small gathering of Mancunians than it does with a full band on the record.
“We’re just gonna do a whole bunch of stuff that we didn’t rehearse,” Miller says to laughter, after asking Hnatow if he wants to give his ‘Half Ton Van’ song “a shot on the flat”. The obliging Tom pulls the flat guitar onto his lap to provide some country slide to the song. The choice almost trips them up, with Miller pausing and grinning towards the end of the first verse. “Hang on… So I haven’t actually sang this in a while,” he admits. When he picks it up again, the charmed audience is carried right back along, singing “does anybody want to buy a half ton van?” during its Roger Miller-esque chorus.
After obliging the crowd further with the previously-requested ‘Basements’ and the countrified “two-steppin'” tune ‘Garden of Fools’, Miller treats us to another unreleased number, an absorbing road song with a “Hail Mary” refrain that seems to make its way onto setlists under the name ‘Toll Booth’. But before it starts, there’s yet another audience request – and it’s one that Miller, even with his whole songbook in his head, could not have anticipated.
“‘Scuse me, can I put a monkey on your mike stand?” a man asks, stepping forward.
The seated Miller takes it in his stride.
“Why the hell not?” he replies. A small, plush toy simian is propped against the black joist of his microphone. “No bad time to ask me that offer,” Miller deadpans.
“It’s her dad’s Christmas present,” the man explains – as though that were enough of an explanation – while gesturing to his companion.
Miller noodles with his guitar. “Ah, I don’t know what I’m doing any more,” he says with mock-weary befuddlement.
When an artist and his audience have been bound together not only by shared warmth and laughter but by something as symbolic and sanctified as a toy monkey, the bond is unbreakable. Miller’s offer to play requests has paid dividends, and what’s more, this monkey’s paw isn’t here to curl. When Miller struggles to start the requested ‘Parking Lots’ – “Uh, what are the first words to that song?” he grins. “If I remember the original line, I promise I’ll have the whole song” – the ramshackle nature of it only makes it all the more endearing. There’s an authenticity to such an approach, suitable to a small stage in an inviting and intimate venue.
Someone with Google on their phone throws out the opening line. “Hell yeah, man!” Miller responds, before losing his way again two minutes later. “Shit, I was doing so well,” he remarks disarmingly, before joking about how “that was all I wrote about back then” when picking up for a second time the lyrics about lighting another cigarette and taking another drink. There’s much to be said for an approach like this, a bona fide troubadour coming to your town and singing a song he wrote “fifteen years ago… to keep myself fed, or at least drink”. The rough edges are what make the deepest impressions. “This town ain’t so bad, where else you gonna go?” he sings, and when it ends – or rather, survives our collective pursuit of it – ‘Parking Lots’ draws the loudest applause and cheers of the night.
It’s a satisfying moment for me, because the last time Miller came to town – opening for Tyler Childers – Manchester disgraced itself, chatting and bleating so obnoxiously that even much of Tyler’s amplified set was disrupted, and the acoustic, solo Miller was so drowned out that I remarked that it could scarcely have been more insulting if he’d had eggs thrown at him. Tonight, the fifty or sixty who fill the Lodge have redeemed the vapid locusts who spoiled that night two years ago, and not only have they provided a deserving Miller with a good memory of our city but they have ensured that the first time I’ve heard John R. Miller live – actually heard him, this time – it’s a good one. Both Miller and the crowd bring their best to Manchester tonight.
We’re treated to another new song, a clever, catchy anarcho-resistance song called ‘Cornbread and Pinto Beans’ that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and later the upbeat country blues of ‘Motor’s Fried’. “I can’t just let you guys ask for all the songs,” he says.
“Play ‘Wonderwall’!” someone shouts, cheekily.
“I was actually gonna do that, as a joke,” Miller laughs. “But I didn’t wanna piss you guys off real bad!”
“Play ‘Free Bird’!”
“Ay, ‘Wonderwall’s like your ‘Free Bird’,” Miller replies.
But he obliges one final time, not with the borrowed tunes of Skynyrd or the Gallagher brothers, but with the much-requested and twice-promised ‘Faustina’. It’s one of his best songs from a strong catalogue, and as the penultimate song in tonight’s set it’s a worthy place to end this review. Miller thanks us beforehand for coming out on a weeknight when it’s cold. Afterwards he mentions the records he has for sale, gesturing over to the merch table below me to my right.
“I’m a terrible salesperson,” he apologises, but this is not a bad thing when the world seems to be being made actively worse by salespeople and their schtick (among others, of course). At a time when many are becoming disenchanted with current events, John R. Miller arrives in England as a fine representative of his country. He is from the America that gave us Walden and ‘Whiskey River’, rather than the one that concealed carries and covets Greenland. Whatever your politics or your worldview – and Miller is non-political in his set tonight – it is rewarding to be reminded of that other side of America, an America in a blue check shirt picking tunes on a guitar, throwing back a beer and laughing and rolling through songs like he’s sitting lazily on a back porch somewhere.
“Someday, it’ll be worth the miles,” he sings on ‘Faustina’. And this was mileage worth adding tonight.
Setlist:
(all songs written by John R. Miller, unless noted)
- Shenandoah Shakedown (from Depreciated)
- Coming Down (from Depreciated)
- Red Eyes (from The Trouble You Follow)
- Smokestacks on the Skyline (from Heat Comes Down)
- Better in the Stillness* (unreleased)
- Lookin’ Over My Shoulder (from Depreciated)
- Old Dance Floor (from Depreciated)
- Half Ton Van (from Depreciated)
- Basements (from Heat Comes Down)
- Garden of Fools (from the deluxe version of Heat Comes Down)
- Toll Booth* (unreleased)
- Dollar Store Tents (from Heat Comes Down)
- Parking Lots (from Service Engine)
- Cornbread and Pinto Beans (unreleased)
- Forgiven and Forgotten (Ward Harrison) (from Fireside Sessions, Vol. 1)
- Motor’s Fried (from Service Engine / Depreciated)
- Faustina (from Depreciated)
- Conspiracies, Cults & UFOs (from Heat Comes Down)
* track title unconfirmed
My other concert reviews can be found here.
My fiction writing can be found here.
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