We had the good fortune of connecting with Dana Miller and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Dana, what’s one piece of conventional advice that you disagree with?
Heavens, I feel as though I need a whole article to even halfway answer this one! Ha! I tend to think of conventions of any sort being solely in the service of equally conventional people and that’s not an adjective I’d ever be pleased to wear. Convention…it’s actually a bit of a dirty word to me in general, if you will. However, I suppose if I had to choose what I believe to be the worst of all utterly wrong-headed drivel that passes for social normality in this day and time, it would be the way modern culture encourages people toward what it classes as “healthy” limits. What a gross word “healthy” has become now that it has come to deftly imply inertia and mediocrity. I have seen precious little in this life of true greatness that was ever born of anything but fire-torched extremes, and the guts to push even those an inch further. It is radical efforts, fierce-tooth defiance of fences, all-out war with wilting, and the flat refusal to stop until you get what you want that generates any dream life. Throw out “Netflix and chill” mentalities forevermore. Those only marginally work in your favor if you work for Netflix. Kick in the overdrive and kick out the jams, I say! Active, even aggressive, exploration—particularly of self and individuality—is where all the good stuff happens. Passion is the one and only thing that will ever put you on your proper path. No matter what that path is, whatever you are running from is what you’re actually running toward, so don’t create a low-level hellscape that matches that of all your equally underwater neighbors and then have the audacity to call that success. Redraw the whole damn map with your own hand until it looks like what you really wanted. There is no other way to live free and full. I don’t think it helps people to tell them to slow down when things get hard. Even my track coach back in the Nineties would tell us to push more, not less, when the incline of the hill we were running for the 8th of 10 expected times began to really steam out what we felt we had left of our legs. I think we need to rewind a bit to the days when seeing how far you could go and how much you could do was the definition of interior cool, not how close to comfort you could cling and how prettily you could justify that to yourself. Comfort will kill you just as quickly as you let yourself crave its cushion. Dine on drive instead. It’ll take you everywhere the soft couch and softer habits that sofas breed never will. Despite what the online ogres of the laziness lineage will insist, you do have to pay the piper for anything you want in this life and very often the toll that the piper will exact is more energy than you think you have. But you do have it. I just think we need to get back to a social understanding that you encourage people to know that, not quietly help them to find pillows where persistence is required. I think people get a lot further in life, in every way, when they learn to embrace discomfort and even develop a curiosity for what’s on the other side of it, because what’s on the other side tends to be everything they ever wanted.
Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
Well, in both the simplest and most elaborate sense, what I do is write–all day and every way, all night and each twilight too. At the moment, I have a decently fattened-out portfolio of journalistic work on a good swatch of subjects, an essay book underway, and two poetry books in print with a third to be published next year, but the major magnifying glass of my ink life right now is centered on a full-length nonfiction book I am writing on the greatest music producers who ever lived, the “invisible rockstars,” as I call them. I’ve been racing off to points unknown all over the globe for about 18 months now to interview the people in music who are talked to the least and who are, ironically, the ones who may very well have the most sway over what the albums we love ultimately become. Legends like Craig Bauer, Anthony J. Resta, Paul Mabury, Peter Asher, James Chapman, Damian Taylor, Jan Smith, Steve Lillywhite, Rodney Mills, Matt Ross-Spang, Robert St. John, Simone Torres, Wayne Connolly, Mark Opitz, Cian Boylan, Emly Lazar, Niko Bolas, Larry Klein, Printz Board, Joel Jerome and so many more are all being (I hope!) handsomely herded into these creaturely chapters of mine with a level of care I find it impossible to impart to even my closest friends. I feel like the most fortunate documentarian in the history of the world for getting to do this, and also the most fidgety because these are all stories that have never been told and I have the Herculean task of trying to tell them not just accurately, but in a way that could ever harness my affection for these subjects. It’s a ball that absolutely cannot be fumbled. The genuine love I bear these people and what they do is of such an immensity that it could easily take up all the stage space and there’s not a person on this list I’m currently working from who doesn’t deserve his or her own multi-volume book. There is just that much to say and share about their incomparable contributions to modern music. I am taking my time with this project, not rushing myself or the trajectory of it, letting it unfold at its own rate, and following it wherever it takes me. Anyone who knows me will tell you how much I have to train myself to standard patience, but with this I have no trouble trusting the timing and I can already tell you that it’s simultaneously the most serious and the most salaciously fun thing I’ve ever done in my life, workwise or otherwise! I’ve also told all the producers so I’m putting it out there for the other good forces of the world to absorb and mirror back too: I have the most logistically insane dream of a group picture at the end…Let’s make it happen!
If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Well, if you’re hanging with me in Atlanta, you will quickly learn not to be a neighborhood localist. I go where the very best stuff is no matter where it is or how far I have to go to find it. Nothing in my life is handled or chosen due to proximity as that’s right back to comfort being pretty poison, isn’t it? I would argue that, since its earliest incarnations and maybe almost exclusively because it was never originally intended to be a capital city, Atlanta has always been a sprawling secret diamond worn best by those who were eager to look where some didn’t think to, but there is no question that the last twenty years have seen this city go from patchwork mini-municipality to velvet-pocketed megalopolis, and with all the trimmings to show for that transcendent transformation. Still the hidden gem sought by the stars searching for simpler skies and now the Hollywood of the East Coast too. It’s no accident, exaggeration, or cute little metaphorical moniker. I fully believe Atlanta earned all that by being what every innately cool thing and place must be: un-striving in effortless confidence. I could go on forever about the way this city chooses to peek-a-boo itself to both hometowners and outsiders, but there are certainly a few places that no visiting friends of mine are ever allowed to miss. Those include:
The Flying Biscuit in Candler Park – because nothing feels more Old Atlanta than that place on Sunday morning at about 11.
Rag-o-Rama, Criminal Records, and The Vortex in Little Five Points – because you’ll walk a long, long way on this road of life before you find better vintage, more beastly-badass vinyl, or taller food anywhere.
Eddie’s Trick Shop and The Australian Bakery on Marietta Square – because you can live your Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure dreams and your Sydney-fied obsessions (if you’re me!) in one gloriously tucked-away little spot.
The Old Fourth Ward Skate Park – because my spirit needs daily reminding that Tony Hawk’s blood still runs deep and dark in the broken trucks and endless guts of the guys and gals I see grinding it out there every single week.
Midtown Art Cinema and Richard’s Variety Store – for the deliciousness of the innumerable days that require a mixture of independent film and self-deprecating cardstock.
The Drunken Unicorn in Virginia Highlands – because I am the nostalgia nymph of the century and I can remember when this place had no hilarious mural, just its requisite (and now famous) propensity for getting the Hugh-Grant-in-L.A. out of even the very blandest of patrons! Anyplace that incites such internal moral riots sits well with me.
The Frosty Caboose in Chamblee – because if you have not bought coffee and raspberry ice cream, mixed, from an old train car, you can be sure and certain that you have never yet truly lived.
Fantasy Records and R. Thomas Deluxe Grill in Buckhead – because these folks were vinyl and fully vegetarian before any of it was considered cool elsewhere—and yes, firsts matter!
Bell Street Burritos and The James Room on the Beltline – because a born taco critic as lasciviously luxe as me cannot ever be fooled and because proper speakeasies are tragically becoming rarer by the second.
Flashback Games in Loganville – because, for as much as we adore every millimoment of that show inside and out, we should not all have to live full-time inside Stranger Things just to be able to go back and live right in our 80s kingdoms and this place is a time warp untouched by any infectiously irrelevant modernity.
Fenders Diner in Cornelia – for that aspect of a true 50’s soda counter that only mountain people seem to be able to get all the way right these days.
World of Coca-Cola – because this place is so commercially magical that even the Pepsi people come out reborn!
The Waffle House Museum in Avondale Estates – because you can’t grasp the magnitude of what this company became, fiscally or culturally, until you see its origins, and any excuse to visit the Tudor beauty of Avondale where my Mom was raised is a great excuse.
The Skywalk at Atlanta Botanical Garden – because you will see everything from snack-stealing squirrels to side-eye-able streetscapes to Sting drinking a nice, earthy red on this boardwalk in the trees.
Hellbender Harley-Davidson in Fair Oaks – for that good-good when it comes to the fringed leather no one else will carry, and because I won a pudding wrestling contest here once and you need to know any business that unabashedly puts on pudding wrestling contests!
The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Please send my highly heartfelt shout straight to Cathie Kobsa Fennell at Salon Greco in Suwanee, Georgia! Not only is she the brave recipient of a friendship with me that has lasted nearly a quarter of a century, she is also the natural model on which all courses on woman-led businesses ought to be designed. Cathie has been making first-rate fairy art out of my filaments for decades now and there is so much I could say about her unmatched creative abilities that you would indeed need a full article or twelve for that! I can bring her any tangible item and she can recreate it to exactitude on my hair. Over the years, I have brought her things like peacock feathers, a bowl of raspberries and blackberries, the cover of one of my favorite albums, one of my Dad’s sunburst guitars, and once even a picture of a crushed, rusted Coke can on a dirt road (for a red that could be visually described no other way!). She is like a Renaissance painter, capturing light in a static form in that way, and there is nowhere on any coast that you can go for a more expansive and immediate update on all the latest cool coming out of Europe. Going to Salon Greco for any reason, not even necessarily to get your hair done, is an indescribably fun experience worth having no matter what kind of aesthetic you enjoy. Cathie and I make whole events out of our days together, complete with coffee, chocolate, completely crass memes, and travel stories for the ages. Not only would I not look like my truest self without her irreplaceable influence, I wouldn’t be my most content self either. Friends and businesses like this are the world’s most priceless rarity and should be cherished, protected, and loudly upped at all times. Consider this my 100-klaxon alarm with no off button for this Greek goddess and her grotto of oracular color!
Website: https://danalynnmiller.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stereojunglechild/
Other: https://muckrack.com/dana-miller-77
Image Credits
Hector Amador