Jeff Miller

In 1998 Saskatoon singer-songwriter Jeff Miller released Completely on Rockin’ Rod Records, catalogue number ROD 213. He wrote eleven of its twelve songs, sang and played guitar and bass, and co-produced the album with Phil Miller. It was recorded, mixed and mastered at Audio Art Recording in Saskatoon with a large cast of players from Saskatchewan’s country, folk, jazz, studio and orchestral circles.

Rockin’ Rod had been active in Saskatoon for more than a decade by then. The Independents released Save Yourself on the label in 1985, with American distribution through Midnight Records in New York, and Rockin’ Rod later issued Educated Guess and the early Breach of Trust EP Dead Issue. The company was formally registered in Saskatchewan in January 1996 as a music promotion and retail business, and Rockin’ Rod Management represented Miller. In January 1997 Billboard named Rockin’ Rod among the Canadian grassroots labels that had built national profiles for their artists.

Completely is mostly country and singer-songwriter material, and the lineup changes from song to song. Pedal steel, fiddle and mandolin sit beside acoustic and electric guitars, while keyboards and sequencing give several tracks a late-1990s studio polish. ‘I Love You, Spanish Eyes’ sets Spanish guitar and trumpet over programmed conga, drums and bass.

Glenn Ens played drums on ten of the twelve tracks and engineered the album with Dwayne Harder, a musician and producer long associated with the studio. Ens started out as a drummer and co-founded Audio Art in 1984. The Northern Pikes, Jordan Cook, Josh Palmer and Teresa Sokyrka are among the Saskatchewan artists who have recorded there.

Sheldon Corbett plays on eight songs, supplying piano, saxophone, string, organ and voice sequences, keyboards, conga and programmed drums and bass. A lifelong Saskatonian, Corbett earned a music degree in theory and composition at the University of Saskatchewan in 1980 and has spent more than forty years as a saxophonist, keyboard player, composer and arranger in jazz, blues, pop, rock, theatre and television. He became musical director of Kinsmen Telemiracle, and the Saskatchewan Jazz Festival gave him its Special Recognition Award in 2012.

John Leclair also plays on eight songs, moving among lead, rhythm and acoustic guitar, bass and mandolin. He is very likely the Saskatoon bassist John LeClair who joined Paul Emms’ country band Top Hand in 1984, when RPM noted that he also played fiddle and mandolin and sang.

Rocky Lakner plays mandolin on ‘One More Time’. His band Crooked Creek started in 1972 and played prairie dance halls, bars and festivals for more than fifty years. Kelly Read, who sings harmony on nine songs, has also performed with Lakner and Don Millikin in Crooked Creek. Dwayne McCullough, on lead guitar for ‘For the Nation’ and electric guitar for ‘The Angels Sing’, was a longtime guitarist and singer with Rivertown, a band formed in Big River, Saskatchewan in 1987 that played clubs, festivals and weddings and appeared on television over more than three decades.

Phil Miller plays six- and twelve-string guitars on the title track. George Friesen adds pedal steel and steel guitar to four songs, Ben Beveridge plays fiddle on ‘Suzuki Granny’ and ‘Shady Pictures’, and Ben Schenstead and Barry Redford handle the Spanish guitar and trumpet on ‘I Love You, Spanish Eyes’. Terry Long sings harmony on seven songs and background vocals on ‘Joyce’. Beveridge was still active in fiddle circles in 2014, when he judged the Grand North American Old Time Fiddle Contest.

‘Suzuki Granny’ is the one song Miller did not write. The album credits it to his late mother, Betty Miller. It is a comic story song about a grandmother tearing down the road on a motorcycle, played with Leclair’s acoustic guitar, bass and mandolin, Corbett’s piano, Beveridge’s fiddle and Ens on drums. The lyric page prints the writing credit as “B. Miller/Meyers.”

Most of Miller’s own songs deal with love and relationships. ‘For the Nation’ takes on relations between Indigenous people and settlers in the language of its time, calling for respect and unity while acknowledging bloodshed and displacement. It has one of the fullest arrangements on the album, with McCullough’s lead guitar, Friesen’s pedal steel, Corbett’s keyboards and Read’s harmony. ‘The Angels Sing’ turns to faith and hardship over Corbett’s organ.

‘Joyce’ closes the album with Miller’s acoustic guitar, Terry Long’s background vocal, Sarah Agrey on violins and Peter Hedlin on cellos, the two string players appearing courtesy of the Saskatoon Symphony. Hedlin grew up in Saskatoon, studied cello at the University of Victoria and came home in 1998, the year Completely was released, to join the orchestra. He was cellist of the University of Saskatchewan’s Amati Quartet from 2004 to 2010 and later joined the university’s College of Medicine.

-Robert Williston