“Just keep my secrets, that’s all I ask,” sings Buddy Miller on Breakdown on 20th Avenue South, his third duo album with his wife Julie Miller. She wrote all the songs herself (except for one song title, which was provided by the couple’s 4-year-old nephew) and takes the lead vocal on seven of the dozen songs. On the song “Secret,” however, she puts the words in Buddy’s mouth, and he asks that the confidences of their relationship be protected.
It’s ironic, therefore, that the album lays bare the tensions and struggles in the Millers’ marriage — especially in the 10 years since their previous joint project, 2009’s Written in Chalk. And the two musicians were even more forthcoming in recent phone interviews from their home on 20th Avenue South, not far from Music Row. But both the recording and the conversations affirm the strength of that marriage and how its generous rewards justify its steep costs.
Marriage is a tough gig, which is no secret to anyone who’s been in one. The strength of this record is that even as it’s discussing the give-and-take of a romantic partnership, it’s demonstrating that in the interplay between Julie’s lead melody and Buddy’s guitar harmonies, between her voice and his.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff about marriage in there,” Buddy says. “It’s hard sometimes, but it’s worth it.”
“The key is communication,” Julie adds, “to let your heart go to the other person’s heart and really feel them. It takes a lot of work. It was hard for me that Buddy couldn’t understand me, but I realized that when women say something, men don’t always understand what they mean. We argued it out and prayed it out, but it’s been on a foundation of a rock. The woman needs to talk till the man hears it, and the man needs to listen till they hear it — and vice versa.”
Julie released four Christian pop albums between 1990 and 1994, followed by two secular masterpieces: 1997’s Blue Pony and 1999’s Broken Things. She has now released three duo albums with Buddy, who has produced all of her recordings, but she hasn’t released a solo album in this century and has not toured since early 2003. When she performs with Buddy, Colin Linden, Chris Donohue and Tanner Jacobsen at City Winery on Wednesday, it will be only her second public appearance in 16 years.
In 2003, when Julie was halfway through a solo album to be called Underneath the Sky, she got the news that her beloved brother Jeff Griffin had been killed by a lightning strike while mowing his mother’s yard in Waxahachie, Texas. (The new album’s last song, “Storm of Kisses,” is Julie’s elegy for Jeff.) The next day her role model June Carter died, and six months later, a good friend leapt to his death from the 42nd floor of a building. On top of this, she was experiencing the pervasive muscle pain of fibromyalgia, which made it nearly impossible to continue touring with Buddy, as well as others like Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris.
“I knew what was going on before the doctors did,” Julie says. “They thought I was crazy, and I thought they were crazy. The disease had been building up while I was on the road, and the physicality of traveling increased the pain. Because of that, I couldn’t sleep in the bed; I had to sleep on the floor. I pushed myself so much. When we played with Emmy on David Letterman, I was so tired that I lay down on a dusty stairway. Paul Shaffer opened the door and said, ‘Are you all right?’ ”
She shut down the album, withdrew from the stage, and holed up in her bedroom to grieve and to heal. Meanwhile, Buddy plowed on — partially because someone had to make some money, and partially because he’s wired that way. He likes touring with artists such as Harris, Earle and Robert Plant; he likes producing records for artists such as Richard Thompson, Patty Griffin and the late Solomon Burke. He even liked being music director for the Nashville TV show from 2012 through 2016.
“I like having guys come over,” he says, “looking each other in the eye and coming up with something. I get people I like to play with, and then we bash it out. The TV show was like making a record every week, five songs a week, several iterations of each song. Everyone wanted to play on the show, so I could call up anyone I wanted. It was fun, but it was just one more thing that kept me away from home.”
“I was alone a lot,” Julie adds, “which is not a good place to be when you’re hurting like that. But someone had to make a living, so Buddy was out on the road. Everybody needs a Buddy, but there’s only one Buddy, and I had him. But I had to share him with a lot of other people.”
“When I left the show,” Buddy continues, “I turned down a lot of work, because I wanted to spend more time at home. I hadn’t spent that much time there in the past 30 years. Now I’m kind of digging being home. I like my stuff. I like coming down in the morning, picking up a guitar and playing it without being under any pressure.”
But it took a while “to mend fences,” he says. He likes to work quickly, and Julie likes to work slowly, and when he presses ahead, she can feel stepped-on. That happened on Written in Chalk, and they were both determined to not repeat that mistake. Buddy has produced most of his records in the couple’s home studio, but Julie refused to work there. So Buddy hauled an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, a tom-tom and a laptop up the stairs to Julie’s bedroom, and they started making music there. They worked on some of her older songs, such as the title tune from the aborted Underneath the Sky. But as things progressed, the songs started pouring out of Julie.
“After all those years at home,” she says, “I had recuperated to a point, and I had so much inside me that was ready to come out. I have never experienced that kind of fountain before. It was like I had my own personal radio station in my head. I truly felt, after these 10 years of not doing anything, I had somehow gotten way better, especially lyrically. If it weren’t for Buddy, there wouldn’t be any songs. Sometimes when he’d be splitting, I’d grab a guitar and start singing a song just so he wouldn’t go.”
One time when Buddy was getting ready to go out, Julie started to sing what became “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” improvising all the ways she was going to do it. Buddy turned around and recorded it on his phone, which he does whenever she’s singing a new song. He even recorded and arranged “Everything Is Your Fault,” a song of accusations so over-the-top that it ends up being a bit funny, even if there’s an angry truth at its core.
“You have to thank Buddy for letting me put ‘Everything Is Your Fault’ on the record,” Julie says. “This is how humble Buddy is — he doesn’t care if people think it’s about him. If it’s a good song, he wants it on the record. There was some truth in it, like him shutting me down, but not all of it was true. A lot of it was said tongue-in-cheek. But I credit Buddy for being so open. He says it’s his favorite song on the album.”
