Name: Adam Charles Miller
Nationality: American
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, producer
Current release: Adam Miller's Illusion Pool EP, featuring Mikal Oor, Lol Tolhurst, Heidi Saperstein, and Hannah Lew, is out November 10th 2023.
If you enjoyed this Adam Miller interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit him on Instagram, Substack, Threads, and twitter.
For more on his thoughts on the voice and singing, read our earlier Adam Miller of Chromatics interview.
I have long been fascinated by hearing the beauty of a vocal unadorned by other instrumentation.
Looking back on my life, one of the first times I was ever moved by a solo voice performance was when Lois Maffeo sang her a cappella version of the Zombies “The Way I Feel Inside” as the last track on her album Strumpet.
This album came out when I was a teenager in the 90s and still deeply influences me today.
A few years later when I found a used copy of Nico’s Desertshore, I became obsessed with that song of hers, “My Only Child.” That song still evokes so many feelings whenever I hear it.
More recently, my brother turned me on to an a cappella group called The Singers Unlimited. They have a version of The Beatles' “Michelle.”
It brings up the same feelings for me as Nico’s “My Only Child.” It is eerie, bare, and just feels beyond this world.
Sometimes hearing a beautiful a cappella performance can really take me somewhere else. I live for those moments on Mamas & Papas or 5th Dimension albums when the instruments drop out leaving the voices to sing alone in harmony.
Like at the end of that Mamas & Papas song, “Midnight Voyage.”
Wow!