CD Review
Bill Miller
ghostdance
(Vanguard)
This album has won many Indian heritage awards. But from the first notes of the orchestral opening, I found it both too much and too little. The minute and a half string orchestra introduction seemed inexplicable to me - tacked on and somehow pretentious, especially for writing that never quite rises above Nashville blandness. For instance, the opening song is promising at first:
i saw judas iscariot with a bottle of wine
talking suicide with an old friend of mine
they gathered a crowd down at the end of the tracks
and a woman cried out when is God comin' back?
But the vision abruptly ends, and instead of this surreal, symbolic drama, most of the rest of the album turns into flat moralizing along the lines of:
and they pretended not to notice
they came down hard on the weak
causing war and starvation, refusing
to let them speak
Miller, both because of his Native American heritage and the hard work he has done, clearly has stories to tell, stories that need to be heard. And the opening lines show that, like Dylan, he has a handle on the mythic mode that might be the key to telling them. Maybe Miller had a vision at some point and lost it. Maybe he couldn't sustain it in song. Maybe the combination of Indian heritage and Nashville formulas is to blame. But very early on, it's as though he does not trust the stories, the images, the dreams, to give the message. Over and over, he must give us the message himself. And to make up for it, he overcompensates - in the production as well as in his own presentation. The printed lyrics for the title track, for instance, ask "Where are all your warriors," but Miller sings it as: "I am a mighty warrior." Too much and too little.