wildbleedingheart

A drum kit sits at one end of the wood-paneled room & a couple of vintage amplifiers are lined up neatly at the other. A promotional poster for Matador Records hangs on a wall; turn around & there's a decent view of the cascades. A computer stocked with recording software sits on a table in the corner. Just outside the entryway, in a white crate, is a stack of Tape Op magazines, the bible of home recording enthusiest. Across the adjacent room is a record player, spinning a black slab of vinyl at 33 1/3 RPM. Two keyboards lean against the wall. Under the coffee table lies a big, strong, black dog that used to be named Sgt. Now he's called Sgt. Pepper. Daniel Miller, who lives in this house, loves music. When something has treated you so well for so many years, it's only fair to love it this much. At 26 years old, Miller has been through alot, & there's always been one constant. "music has always been there for me", he said, "whether it's listening to something or just playing." Now after years of playing his music pretty much for himself, Miller is ready to give it to the world. His band, wildbleedingheart, will play it's first gig on Wednesday night @ The Grove in Bend. A native Oregonian, Miller split time between his mom's house in Salem & his dad's in LaPine growing up, & he graduated from high school in Salem. By Junior high, he was already digging into the independent music scene & playing in a rock band. At 15, Miller was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammatory condition that can affect the entire gastrointestinal system. Shortly thereafter, he was in a serious car-wreck that triggered a major flare-up of the disease & propelled him into 9 surgeries over the next decade. The last one cost him his colon. Already a kid who was discovering music outside the mainstream, the long hours in hospital beds pushed him farther into certifiable music nuttiness. It also gave him plenty of time to write songs. "I spent a lot of time alone in the hospital, so I ended up befriending my guitar & getting into music a lot heavie," Miller said. It was junior year when Miller met Heather, the girl who would become his wife & his biggest supporter, & in 2000, they intended to move to San Fransico so Daniel could pursue a music career. But they ended up in Arcata, CA, when the city seemed too, well, big. Arcata was good for Miller. He learned a lot about things he could do to make his Crohn's disease more manageable & played music here & there before moving back to Oregon to be closer to his family. He & Heather at first moved into a cabin near Wickiup Reservoir with no power or running water, where Miller felt he could work on developing his music to a point where he felt comfortable playing it publicly. "I wasn't ready physically," he said. "I wanted to get in the right head space, & I wanted to really think about what I was going to do instead of just going places on a whim." After a couple of months in the cabin, the couple bought a home outside of Sunriver. Daniel started working at Boomtown(local record store) in Bend, while Heather got a job at Deschutes Brewery's downtown pub. "It started to get to me," he said. " It was like I'm not really at the place I want to be. I really need to focus on my music, because if I don't do it now, when am I ever going to do it?" It was Miller's biggest champion, Heather, who encouraged him to quit Boomtown & focus on turning his homebound musical exploits into a career. It's crystal clear when you meet Heather Miller, 26, that her support for her husband's music stems not from some sense of obligation or thirst to be a rock star's wife but from her firm belief in Daniel's talent & the potential in his songs. "We're going to do everything in our power to make sure Daniel can play music," she said. "Everybody puts their dream on the back burner, like, I'm not that good, so I'll just work my day job & music will be my hobby," she said. "I told Daniel, this is your dream, & not very many people get a chance to follow their dreams." In December (2006) the Miller's sold their house in Sunriver & moved to Bend, with Daniel still unsure about his musical quiver of songs. He set up the studio-with-a-view & started experimenting with different recording techniques-the fruits of which can be heard on myspace.com/wildbleedingheart. And he kept writing. There are around 48 songs so far, which run from straightforward singer/songwriter-type stuff to fuzzy indie pop to distorted, bluesy rock songs. He began toying with a life-&-death concept for an album, "with life prevailing over everything," he says.
On Valentines Day, that direction was cemented when his stepfather was killed in a head on collision on a highway southwest of Salem. Ten days before the accident, after working for years to get control of his disease & craft songs he felt good about, Miller set up a Myspace profile & posted some tracks. He did it, in part, because the peer pressure finally got to him but also beca - GO! Magazine

In his 26 years, Daniel Miller has lived through some rough times.

“I spent a lot of time in the hospital when I was a kid,” says Miller, the Bend songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist who calls his emerging music project Wildbleedingheart. “I’ve had nine surgeries, had a colon removed, a clamp left in me…the list goes on and on.”

In 1995, Miller was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease – a bowel disease that causes inflammation and ulceration throughout the digestive tract. As a result, he’s probably felt more pain than most people will feel in their entire life, and his digestive system is all but completely destroyed. Add to all that serious injury in a car crash at the age of 15, the recent, sudden death of his father…the list does, indeed, go on.

Still, speaking with Miller, he’d have you believe he doesn’t have it all that bad. He’s friendly, smiling, and unquestionably in love with his art, and seemingly with life in general. From more than a decade of pain, real beauty has emerged.

A thoroughly self-taught musician, Daniel Miller started out playing the piano by ear. He picked up the guitar around age 10, and started playing and composing jazz tunes around the age of 15. Some ten years on, the sound of Miller’s recent Wildbleedingheart recordings – on which he plays guitar, piano, drums and bass – isn’t immediately recognizable as jazzlike. Even so, the chords and playing techniques he uses echo his jazz past, and help add dimension to a style that may be most convenient to describe as shoegaze or indie pop.

“Disappearing Noises,” the first track on a preliminary CD from Miller’s solitary home recording sessions (a CD-R marked with a red heart drawn in permanent marker) is dominated by crushing, distorted bass and Sonic Youth-reminiscent guitar chaos. One of 40-some songs that Miller created and keeps stored in his memory and in lyric books, “Noises” features half-moaned, half-screamed vocals that seem to complain vaguely of some personal horror. The repeating line “Into the sun / Into the sun” evokes either a searing trial by fire or a passage into a calm place of light, or both.

Miller’s quieter modes, represented by the Fender Rhodes-centric instrumental “no name” and the song “arefastmovingcloud” on the Wildbleedingheart MySpace page, as well as a piano-and-vocal song and others on the heart CD – speak of lonely disturbances, love and moments of calm and escape. “All We Ever Knew,” also audible on MySpace, brings to mind a fuzzy, colorful realm of muffled joy with distorted vocals, drums that splash and bubble like ocean waves, keys and lo-fi electronic warbles.

Miller takes Wildbleedingheart public at the Grove this week, with drummer Brent Barnett and another player on bass. He plans to finish recording and release an LP entitled Wildbleedinghearts Never Die in the near future. In the meantime, you can follow the progress of the project and Miller’s other experiences on MySpace at myspace.com/wildbleedingheart.

Wildbleedingheart at Hi-Top Sessions
10:30pm Wednesday, March 21. The Grove, 1033 NW Bond St. 318-8578.
No cover. - The Source Weekly