A razor-smart songwriter shaped by Knoxville, history, and hard-earned survival returns home with new music—and a lifetime of stories that still cut straight to the bone.
By Terry Adams | Photograph Provided By Scott Miller
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 1 (Jan/Feb 2026)
T
he first time I ever saw Scott Miller, he was onstage in a Knoxville bar singing a song about big-haired girls. The lyrics were sharp, funny, and razor-edged. He reminded me of Shel Silverstein but he could play and sing, I mean really play and sing.
Back then he had a band called The Viceroys, until someone with a cease-and-desist notice forced a name change to The V-Roys. Didn’t matter. The songs were too good, the band too tight, the spark too bright to ignore. But sparks burn out, bands break up, and eventually Miller found his true form as a solo artist.
I caught a lot of the Knoxville shows in those days. He was a street poet, a thunderstorm with an acoustic guitar, and I knew what he was talking about. Hell, I made a mess of this town, too. Bought guitars in Ciderville. And I knew then what I know now: you can’t shake Knoxville, even if you rock and roll.
Now he’s coming back, playing the Bijou on January 23, 2026. He’s got a new album ready, plus a sprawling vinyl retrospective, Farm to Vinyl: The Collected Works of Scott Miller. It’s the sort of release that forces a man to look backward, whether he wants to or not.
When Miller listens to those old songs, which he does only when necessary, he hears “a guy who didn’t know how to sing,” a man still figuring out how to get what was in his heart and mind onto tape. The memories are vivid. “I can remember where I was when I wrote them,” he says. “I liked how they sounded for the most part — especially on vinyl. Then I put them away.”
As for what lights the creative fuse these days, Miller gives the kind of answer only he can: deadpan truth mixed with Appalachian fatalism and humor. “Farming ain’t no way to make a living. Neither is being a singer/songwriter, really. Find me a third job that loses money, and I’d probably do that, too.”
His most recent writing was born out of a brutal year. “My father died, my wife just left, my barn burnt down, and I broke my leg,” he says. “Both my managers passed away that spring, but I didn’t put that in the song. No need to pile on at that point.” After he wrote about all of it in one cathartic blow, the rest of the songs started showing up.
Life at home is no less demanding. Miller splits his days between the road and the family cattle farm, a balancing act that would exhaust most people. Farming, he says, “is like having a house cat, you think you’re in charge but you aren’t.” He’ll start the day planning to fix fences or rehang gates, then walk outside to find “the cattle have busted the waterer, and there’s a foot of mud.”
His loyalty to his mother and to the land that raised him is absolute. “If I’m doing something for my mom, that is first,” he says.
Miller’s parents shaped him deeply. “I was an accident,” he says. “My parents were old when I was born. They were amazing and complex humans.” His stories sound like something out of a southern novel: his mother returning rubber bands to the post office, his father working for a nickel a day during the Depression, a neighbor teasing him, “Yeah, I bet you still got that nickel.”
Ask him about herding cattle versus managing musicians and he waves off the comment, but the job of looking out for you folks, that’s the comparison.
For all his historical insight, Miller studied the American and Russian Revolutions at William & Mary College. He’s cautious talking about modern America, but notes that the country is slouching somewhere he doesn’t like. That’s the thing about smart people, they know what they don’t know. He makes no claim to be a prophet, and he saves his soap box for conversations off the record. “If I was truly smart, would I choose farming and the music biz?”
The reality is that there has been a cataclysmic shift in Miller’s world. Industry studies show songwriter mechanical royalties dropped 80–95% from the CD era. The average professional songwriter today earns less than $5,000 per year from streaming. Even Grammy-winning songwriters often report needing side jobs (touring, merch, sync licensing) to survive. In order to match the amount of income from having a song on a record that sold 1 million copies, you have to have 300 million streams. In this wake, Miller perseveres.
“There are dairy farms fully automated these days,” he says. “When is AI gonna do the dishes? Or the laundry?” But the humor gives way to a more bleak reality. “Every song has a digital fingerprint, but the songwriter gets one-hundredth of a penny. Streaming is a killer.”
Nonetheless, history still whispers to him. “I like history for songs because the story is already there,” he says. If he had to pick one song for every young songwriter to study, he chooses “Tennessee Waltz,” though he quickly adds a list of others: “That’s How I Got to Memphis, Havana Moon, Souvenirs, This Land Is Your Land, America the Beautiful, Louie Louie.”
As for the “rules” of the music business, Miller says: “Can’t break rules when there are none. I’m just trying to survive. The record industry wouldn’t put anything out close to the holidays but it makes sense for me. What a friend we have in Jesus.”
And what’s next? For once, he’s content to let this new record speak for itself. “I feel really good about the new songs,” he says. “I really enjoyed making this record. So right now it feels good to take a breath and let what’s next find me.”
Scott Miller has always lived slightly out of sync with the mainstream. In some ways, the Revolutionary War scholar has been fighting his own revolution, too sharp for Nashville, too honest for the algorithm, too soulful for anything that can be measured in streams. But that is precisely why he matters now more than ever. In a world drowning in noise, he’s one of the few still making music that cuts through it, music that remembers where we came from and hints at where we still might go.
And in 2026, he’s still speaking. Still writing. Still singing. Still needed.
