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Past and Present
Ask most people around the city and they’ll tell you times are tough in Detroit. Flip on the news or grab a paper and all you’ll hear about is how theUAW is on strike and that wretched state budget crisis. Blanche’s Dan Miller wouldn’t argue that, but he’s staying put for now.
“I think it's such an odd time in the Detroit area because things are so low right now with the economy and everything,” Miller says. “People who have moved, they seem to thrive on kicking the city and the state when they leave.”
Miller doesn’t see the point of trashing your hometown. And if anyone had a good enough reason to pack it up and leave, it would be Blanche. Miller’s wife, Tracee is a talented and successful painter (traceemiller.com) and Dan has found himself stumbling into acting roles since he played Luther Perkins in Walk The Line alongside Joaquin Phoenix.
The new Blanche album, Little Amber Bottles, is a terrific collection of spooky, mid-Western twang that glimmers like polished antiques in a vaudeville road show. Blanche’s label, V2 Records, folded, so that has kept the album’s stateside release delayed until now. But the songs have been unofficially available in the States for some time, as Amber Bottles was first released in the U.K. earlier this year and then on a specially packaged vinyl release that Miller hasn’t even seen yet.
Sitting in his scenic Oak Park backyard, Dan reveals that the old barn house from the 1920s that the Millers live in does, indeed, have modern amenites like a refrigerator. As squirrels throw nuts at him, Miller and I chat about how different Little Amber Bottles sounds compared to anything else coming out of the Detroit scene right now.
“I think we’re not a typical Detroit band in terms of what people think of when they think of Detroit,” Miller says. “We’ve definitely got a different mood to our music. We didn’t wanna do a really schtick-y recording to make it sound like it was recorded in the 1930s or something like that.”
The music doesn’t come accompanied with microphones popping and crackling feedback from cobwebbed phonographs, but Blanche do put the past into a modern perspective. To this writer, the stand-out track on Little Amber Bottles is “What This Town Needs,” a driving, honky-tonk humdinger that could be an anthem for Detroit’s struggles. “I think that song applies to Detroit or any town that’s going through a difficult time, or any person,” Miller says. “Whether having sympathy for people, or having a belief that no matter how bad things are getting, that with perseverance you’ll get through it."
Blanche shot a video for the song at the old Model T plant in Highland Park, which for Miller was a mind-boggling experience: getting in touch with the history of that factory, picturing scores of trains and workers that once flooded the immense complex. The band’s Web site pays homage to another Detroit relic, the Book Cadillac hotel. “I love the fact that, after such a struggle, they were able to save the Book Cadillac — with all the people that stayed there and all the history that it represents. I think finally, in the city, people do wanna stop demolishing old things.” | RDW
Blanche • 10/19 • The Crofoot Ballroom
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