SPOTLIGHT: John R. Miller - Living and Dying on The Road in America [ESSAY]

Editor's Note: John R. Miller, whose new LP titled The Great Unknowing came out July 17 via Rounder Records, is No Depression's Spotlight Artist for July 2026. Read more about Miller's fifth album here and watch an exclusive, acoustic performance of one of his new songs here.

On July 5th, I turned 40 and spent the day in a rented Toyota Camry, driving home to Berkeley County, West Virginia to bury my dad. Directly after the funeral, I was to get back in the car and drive down to Lexington, Kentucky to meet the band for the first leg of a tour. I didn't feel the familiar urgency or stress of the pre-tour ritual (usually consisting of mundane, but crucial tasks like packing checklists and inventory and and logistics), which I found curious given the emotional whiplash of the new travel plans. The recent emergence of a cold sore and a heavy blanket of fuzz around my cognition were clues betraying my overall state of mind, but either my tolerance to stress was increasing, or I had grown numb to the swirling void around me. I was grateful either way. Thus was the start of the trip I'm on now, and time seems to have mostly righted itself in the week since, though not quite.

Currently I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a borrowed van, careening across central Pennsylvania. The July heat was too much for the air conditioner in my own aging Express van (which we dubbed "Squealy Van" for self-evident reasons), so a friend permitted me to use his — no small favor. We have an early radio gig in Philadelphia, and the band is running pretty ragged after some late drives and early mornings. We've done worse, but the fly-by-night, get-up-and-get-in-the-van lifestyle doesn't necessarily get easier as you get older.

I recall an occasion a little over 10 years ago when a close songwriter pal of mine and I got pulled over and busted with some pot by Pennsylvania State Troopers not far from here, outside of Carlisle. We had been gifted a modest amount of homegrown weed by a fiddle player friend in Vermont, having stopped there on our way back down to West Virginia from Montreal. This was after a couple weeks doing bar gigs between there and Toronto, and we were an hour and a half from home. The cop had been following me closely for miles, waiting for me to slip so he could pull me over, pretending to pass and then resuming the tail, tactics I was used to seeing, but now found particularly aggressive.

Eventually I signaled, exited, and he pulled me over as I drove into a Walmart parking lot. After the requisite grilling and calling backup (to an eventual total of five police cruisers around us, canines and all), they found my buddy's part of the stash. Once they were done feeding me the bullshit ("If you'd just been honest and handed over the weed, we wouldn't have to arrest your friend now") I followed them to the jail to pick him up after processing. He had to return to Carlisle for court, but the judge would ultimately throw it out. I hadn't consented to search, his stated reason for pulling us over (going over the line) proved false, and on top of that, he had made a clerical error on the paperwork.