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![]() Buddy & Julie Miller (from the album Breakdown on 20thAve South available on New West Records) Life put up barricades delaying the release of Breakdown on 20thAve South, the latest album from Buddy & Julie Miller. Health issues sidelined Julie after the release of the couple’s 2009 album (Written in Chalk) and as she battled both illness and its subsequent complications, Buddy became a go-to producer (The War & Treaty, Richard Thompson, Shawn Colvin & Steve Earle) and bandmate joining Robert Plant and Patty Griffin as Band of Joy. “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” from Breakdown on 20thAve South was the shout out Buddy Miller heard to put recording back on track. The Julie Miller song was ‘a message to Buddy, because we kept putting off making our album because he was so busy’ while for her husband, hearing the tune was a reminder that ‘what Julieand I create together is fulfilling to me in a way nothing else is’. Cutting the track became the model for Breakdown on 20thAve South, Buddy & Julie Miller recording in their upstairs bedroom, Buddy realizing that ‘after that first song, we wanted the record to be just us. The songs are all Julie’s, and she wanted the sound to be as raw as the lyrics are’. Accusations mix with confessions in the storyline of “Everything is Your Fault” and sharp electric guitar chords poke at the requests bubbling up in “Underneath the Sky”. Breakdown on 20thAve South shuffles the past in the lyrical spit of Buddy & Julie Miller for the title track as they strip the melody to show “Unused Heart” and rumble a rhythm that forms storms clouds over “Spittin’ on Fire”. Inspired by the raw frame provided by recording in the intimate environment, Buddy & Julie Miller collected the cuts for Breakdown on 20thAve South upstairs from Buddy’s infamous studio that played home to albums from Emmylou Harris and Solomon Burke. Nodding to the historic RCA facility, the pair dubbed the space that captured their sound Studio B. Once recording began, the songs flowed, Julie Miller writing fifty to sixty songs for the album. Scars still show as the healing process of the past few years is mended with words and music when Buddy & Julie Miller put a marching beat under the military madness of “War Child” while a stomping beat accompanies “Feast of the Dead” and guitar notes sparkle like a night sky over the two hearts promising forever in “Till the Stardust Comes Apart”. Listen and buy the music of Buddy & Julie Miller from AMAZON https://www.buddymiller.com/
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