Dean Miller - 1965 (2020)

There’s more, much more, to 1965, ending in a kind of painful optimism on “Undying Flame,” whose dance-floor, honky-tonk fiddles incongruously accompany “a longing and desire only lovers understand. And once you start that fire burning, there’s no turning back.”

All of this is music born from liberation, from Miller’s decision to be true only to himself in his work. For this same reason, he chose to write all 11 tracks alone, without collaborators. “When I write with people, often there’s this push/pull going on,” he explains. “Somebody doesn’t like a line you thought of, or vice versa. I did that for a long time, thinking it would give me a better chance of getting a cut. It was a business decision. But I didn’t want that anymore. I’m past making business decisions. I’m just making my music.”

1965 is also the first album Miller built from top to bottom without any investors. “When you have financial partners attached to a project, they want to be involved in every aspect. That’s understandable; it’s their money. But money doesn’t make you creative, so I didn’t want somebody asking me every few minutes, ‘Why do you need a piano there?’ When the answer is simple: Because I do!”

That’s also why Miller produced 1965 on his own and looked beyond the usual studio crews to put together the band he needed. “I chose people I love, who have worked with me and who get what I’m doing,” he points out. “They’re not ‘cookie-cutter’ musicians who just look out the window while they play the same three chords. These guys really care.”

As a result, the sound and feel of 1965 is a little rough, sometimes a little raucous — deliberately so. “I wanted this to sound like musicians who get together and make songs. It’s a response to the sterilization of music in our drum-loop society. Of course it’s hard to make a record just sitting in a room with everybody playing, but I didn’t want it to sound smooth. It was more important to me that we sound organic.”

Today Miller enjoys a balanced life. When not writing, recording, doing live shows or producing young artists, he pursues his other great passion: dog training. As an official trainer for the Tennessee SPCA and recipient of Nashville Paw Magazine’s Best Trainer award, Miller has helped Sheryl Crow, Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, Emmylou Harris and Kenny Chesney, among other clients, enjoy happier home lives with their furry friends. Additionally, this service reinforces Miller’s commitment to do only work that has meaning for him.

“Dogs just fill me up,” he insists. “When I take a dog that’s been abandoned, that nobody wanted, and I can transform that dog, with each one I’m healing myself and learning more about who I am. So I have two lives that I love very much: music and dogs. Each one supplements the other.”

That’s the way life ought to be, particularly in a world where so many have run out of gas out on the highway to stardom. “I love what a friend of mine said: ‘I’m tired of making my music for an audience of seven: myself, my co-writer, my publisher and the four people he pitches it to before he gives up,” he says, with a smile. “I don’t want to work in that system. I just want to make my songs.”

Like they did, perhaps, in more innocent times. Maybe even in 1965 …