Lynn Miles
Website:
http://www.lynnmiles.com
Discography:
2005 - Love Sweet Love
2001 - Unravel
1999 - Sunset Boulevard - EP
1998 - Night in a Strange Town
1996 - Slightly Haunted
1991 - Chalk This One Up To the Moon
1987 - Lynn Miles - Cassette only
| Born outside Montreal, Miles grew up in a musical home. Her father's jazz collection was augmented by her mother's love of both opera and country music. Her mother recalled once that she knew when her infant daughter had finally fallen asleep in her crib: Lynn stopped singing. Miles learned guitar, violin and flute at school, then switched to piano, and was writing her own songs by the age of 10, many of them inspired by the books she loved to read, and the music she listened to on the radio.
Miles's link between music and literature remains to this day. *Love Sweet Love*'s opening track, *Flames of Love,* for example, was the result of a long period of reading Sufi poetry. "I love the way the Sufis write about love," Miles says. "Their love is a spiritual love, and I reinterpreted it and wrote *Flames of Love*, about jumping in the fire and letting go and not being afraid, and letting it get hot and not caring about what other people think. Just really going for it." The idea - and the song itself - is exhilarating and exciting, yet full of hidden corners and alleyways from where the joy can be blind sided without notice. But as Miles notes, "You don't learn from happiness."
If that's true, one gets the sense that Miles has learned a lot. In a career that has seen her move from Ottawa to Nashville to Los Angeles and back to Ottawa, and release albums as varied as the slick *Night in a Strange Town* (co-produced by Larry Klein, of Shawn Colvin and Joni Mitchell fame, and featuring renowned west-coast studio musicians David Piltch, Dean Parks, John Cody and Tal Bergman) and the stark *Unravel*, Miles has consistently been unflinching in putting it all out there: the unreined ecstacy of new-found love, the fragile process of sweeping up the pieces when it breaks.
The accolades, meanwhile, continue to pour in. Her 1996 album, *Slightly Haunted*, was a *Billboard* magazine Top 10 pick for the year, while *Unravel* was praised by *All Music Guide*, which described it as "sounding as if it's been produced by Daniel Lanois in an Appalichian town" and "a diamond in the rough." Canadian folk-music icon Valdy once said, "I'm sorry for all the heartache she has to go through in order to get those juices going, but, yeah, she's marvelous." *The New York Times* summed up her music best when it wrote, "Lynn Miles makes being forlorn sound like a state of grace."
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