John R. Miller w/ William Matheny

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10TH @ 8PMDOORS, BAR, & KITCHEN OPEN at 7PMSHOW at 8PMTICKETSGENERAL ADMISSION: $25 + admission tax & processing feeDAY OF SHOW: $30 + admission tax & processing feeAdvance ticket sales end at 11:30pm the day before the show. If tickets are not sold out by this time they will be available for purchase when the doors open.ALL TICKET SALES ARE FINAL. NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES unless the show is postponed or cancelledIMPORTANT INFOThis is an ALL STANDING showThere will be no tables availableAll agesFOOD & DRINK available for purchaseJOHN R. MILLERAs John R. Miller started making plans to record his fourth album, his thoughts turned to challenging himself not just musically, but geographically.“I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, go somewhere less familiar to me and try a new approach,” he says.Born in the Washington, DC area and raised in West Virginia, Miller is a studious and acclaimed representative of the sound usually categorized as alt-country or Americana, but his work is rooted in sources from the punk he grew up around to more unconventional paths in rock history. So when the idea of heading to Tulsa and working at Leon Russell’s legendary, recently reopened Church Studio came up, Miller took notice.“Immediately the gears started turning,” he says. “Tulsa is one of the great legacy-bearing cities of American music—J.J. Cale is one of my all-time favorites, and Shelter Records was based there. So much of what I love in music history happened right around that block.”The result is The Great Unknowing—an ambitious, sprawling project that extends the sound and scope of Miller’s previous releases, 2021’s Depreciated and the 2023 follow-up Heat Comes Down. Those albums earned him praise from outlets including Spin and American Songwriter; Tyler Childers called him “a well-traveled wordsmith mapping out the world he’s seen, three chords at a time.”But the singer-songwriter wasn’t content to just keep his direction and his momentum, chugging along in the same lane. In addition to changing location, he wanted his new music to explore new sounds and approaches, even if that meant rolling the dice on different players and processes.“My goal was to get into a room with a bunch of people that I didn't already have a rapport with and track the record live,” he says. “I wanted to go into a new situation and hopefully strike up some new creative ideas as we were doing it.”With his longtime friend and collaborator Adam Meisterhans as co-producer and guitarist, Miller approached Tulsa-based drummer Paddy Ryan to help enlist the band, a line-up which came to include Grammy-nominated John Fullbright on keyboards. Feeling both apprehensive and excited, Miller was thrilled by how quickly things fell into place. Other Tulsa-based players in the band included Aaron Boehler on bass, and Muskrat Jones on pedal steel.The album was engineered by both Gary Laney (Don Williams, Merle Haggard, The Marshall Tucker Band) and Mike Prado (Ziggy Marley, Sara Bareilles, Matt Kearney). A longtime Nashville engineer, Laney brought decades of experience into the room along with a deep and varied resume that quietly underscored the caliber of the team Miller had assembled.“Once we got in there, we realized that these were all guys that were cut from the same cloth,” he says. “As soon as we started playing through the songs, it sounded like a band. These guys are so adept and intuitive, and we found a lot of common ground to mine, connecting not just on Tulsa music, but psych, heavy metal and all sorts of stuff. Having Adam there was key, too. He has a deeper knowledge of music and guitar than I do, and was a major part of the session’s connective tissue, both interpersonally and musically.”There’s a buzzing, fuzzy ambience that permeates songs like the opening “Far from the Station” and “Don’t Bet on Me,” creating a distinctive sense of space and mystery. Miller asserts that the easy lope of “Cornbread and Pinto Beans” helped def