From the first notes I heard Valorie Miller sing, I was hooked. She has a voice that you can’t ignore. Valorie’s album, Only the Killer Would Know, has been in heavy rotation for me. It’s an honor to host the video premiere for “Only The Killer” here on Red Line Roots.

As readers of this site know, Brian and I care deeply about the musical communities that we call home. This record, exploring the environmental devastation of the land she used to live on, near Asheville, NC, is a powerful representation of what it means to take care of, or to abuse, our communities. In this case, a company called Chemtronics, put so much toxic waste into the ground that, as Valorie says, “[it] will be toxic for our lifetime and for lifetimes to come.”  Valorie says that writing songs “is always how I’ve addressed things in my life,” and we are lucky that is true–just like so many great artists, Valorie manages to put into words what most of us could not. Check out the video below and Valorie’s responses to our questions about this song!

VM: Yes, the video is an emulsion if you will… I wrote my college thesis on dreams and one of the phenomena I wrote a lot about is known as condensation — when something in a dream is two or more disparate things at once. Like, in a dream, if I see a house and I know it’s not only a house but also my mother, and in the dream it makes a kind of sense for something to be more than one thing. It’s a tactic our psyche deploys, according to me, to facilitate the containment of large amounts of meaning. So, that’s kinda how the video is. 

I struggled with how to tell a story and ultimately decided to make it more impressionistic. using multiple scenarios and settings not to tell a story that “makes sense” but to impart an overall feeling. 

But if I had to describe the message, I’d say it’s about the tension between an individual and corporations, between nature and machines of all types, and the killing and destroying of human health that is subtly woven into the American experience. The video is like a rock I’m throwing at a tank. Also it’s a love song to the many medicinal benefits of marijuana, AKA “the killer.” 

RLR: I feel like the task of writing songs that hit on the hard truths of our social order (or dis-order) is a really different challenge than writing about the hard truths of personal challenges. How do you think about that? 

VM: In the process of discovering the Chemtronics superfund site and struggling with some health issues, my personal challenges merged with larger social problems in a non-consensual way. I definitely don’t see it the same as you. 

The two “tasks” you mention, to me, are inextricably interwoven. It’s all fractals. My issues are a microcosm of corporate issues, which are a microcosm of global issues, etc etc., but to tell the truth I don’t think about any of it when I’m writing. When I wrote “Only The Killer” I had no thought in my head of any issues, I just trusted my art brain to say what it had to say. 

RLR: The slide guitar, from Kayla Zuskin, on this song adds a truly haunting background. Is this the way you heard it in your head when you first started writing it? Can you share the sonic development of this song? 

VM: I love Kayla’s slide guitar on the song. She engineered and produced the record, as well as playing a lot of guitar parts. We didn’t talk about what happened sonically. I didn’t want to talk about things too much; I just wanted to stay in art mode and see if something came together, which it did in my opinion. I don’t know if she gave the guitar part such a dark quality intentionally or if she just sat down and played what was in her. 

To me, though, the song has a happy feeling overall. Maybe that’s weird, but it sounds uplifting to me, and I think that’s because it comes from the part of me that corporations can’t kill. 

RLR: Lyrically, this song is both spare and really vivid. Usually, that means it either fell out of the sky and was written in 15 minutes, or it was one that took a lot of whittling down to its essence. As a writer, what does your routine look like so you can both catch those songs that come on the wind and do the different work of paring down lyrics?

VM: The song did happen really fast. I guess if I have a routine at all I’d describe it as macro. Like, no morning pages for me. I just approach every day with a baseline awareness that some of the stuff I encounter will end up in songs. So I’m primed to recognize a phrase or a circumstance that seems dreamy and song-worthy. 

Maybe a metaphor could be a mushroom hunter. Two people can be walking through the same woods, but a mushroom hunter uses eyesight differently. The mushroom hunter’s eyes are trained to pick up on the colors and shapes of mushrooms, even while enjoying a nice hike just like everybody else. 

Regarding paring down lyrically — YES! I started noticing a bunch of years ago how verbally cluttered some of my older songs sounded, and I just set myself to the task of removing ALL unnecessary words, and/or finding a more distilled way to express something. You know, like how in culinary arts one premise is, don’t use inedible garnishes. Back in the day there might be something on a plate of food that the diner was clearly not meant to eat; it was a visual. Then somewhere along the line the paradigm shifted to ‘NO! Do not put anything on the plate that should not be ingested.’ Well, maybe it’s the same with words. All the little connecting words… and, the, etc… I try to strip them all away because they seem like inedible garnishes. I actually call this process the ‘Miller Brazilian’… as in waxing…. haha! True story. 

The “Miller Brazilian” is destined to become a famous phrase in songwriter circles. 

Only The Killer Would Know is available everywhere this Friday, May 6 from Blackbird Record Label.