Preview: Scott Miller on the cover of Weekend for Friday, April 24!
Got a great cover story on singer-songwriter Scott Miller, who performs Saturday, April 25, at “The Shed” at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson in Maryville. It’s coming your way in the print edition of The Daily Times Weekend entertainment section on Friday, and you can read it on the Weekend website on Thursday.
Should be a rocking package; the photos are already up in our “East Tennessee Bands” photo gallery on our Myspace site. The story will include a kick-ass podcast and, we hope, some video as well.
Something that didn’t make the final cut of the story but I found too good to delete: the story behind his sing-along anthem, “Drunk All Around This Town.”
He wrote it for closing night of his old hangout, Hawkeye’s on the Cumberland Avenue “Strip,” where he found a solo gig shortly after moving to East Tennessee from Virginia.
“I knew when I wrote it that it was gonna be like John Prine’s ‘Dear Abby,’ that I probably shouldn’t ever play it,” he said with a chuckle. “I wrote it specifically for Hawkeye’s, because that place was a mish-mash of everybody – college boys, hard drinkers, rich folks. It’s kind of like looking for your favorite barbecue place; just look for the pickups and Cadillacs in the parking lot, and you know it has a wide swath of clientele.
“I almost put it on ‘Citation,’ but it’s just one of those songs that I knew not to put on a studio album. It ended up on the live record (”Reconstruction”), obviously. And Stephen King loved it. He listed it as one of his Top 10 favorite drinking songs in that column he writes for Entertainment Weekly.
“I sent him a letter thanking him, along with a T-shirt, but I never got a reply,” he added.
For more information on Scott Miller, hit up his website. For a calendar of future shows coming to “The Shed,” visit Smoky Mountain H-D’s “Shed” website.