T-Roy Miller, Gluttons For Punishment by David Pilot
	T-Roy Miller's voice is a lot like his website, www.t-roymiller.com. At first listen/glance, it's not impressive. We listened to "Gluttons for Punishment" one time on our high-tech ultrasonic Windows 2000 CD player in the office and promptly emailed Rockzilla to ask just why in the hell he had spammed us with this slop. Dammit, we wanted to review Chris Wall or Brian Burns (if either of 'em ever puts out something new again) or Jack Ingram or the Hag's new CD or something. Not this crap. While we waited for the response telling us to review this disc anyway, we figured, what the hell, let's listen to it again-we're gonna have to review it regardless. So we did. Which turned out to be a pretty good thing. T-Roy's got a reputation, well-deserved, as an excellent guitar picker. Hasn't played with anybody, really, just Slaid Cleaves and Max Stalling and Mark David Manders and Terri Hendrix. . . . . This kid's got a list of bandmates and musical partners a mile long!! And he's only 23. His first CD, "Christmas Pieces," an instrumental treatment of holiday standards, got him compared to Chet Atkins (!!!!!) by Tim Farrell of Bluegrass in Review. Yeah, we could've done that. . .. His second disc, "Junction Three Twelve," got good reviews in Italy, of all places. And now, disc number three, "Gluttons for Punishment," gets the official Rockzillaworld treatment. T-Roy, you've arrived. This is T-Roy's first real shot at a vocal album, and his first effort produced as the frontman for a band (Generation teX, not here in entirety for the CD, but touring as we type) instead of as an exceptional sideman for the likes of those listed in the paragraph above. To a point it shows. In a genre that prides itself on distinctive vocal styles that sometimes might not play in Peoria, T-Roy fits right in. Not a lot of timbre and depth in that voice box. And that may be the last complaint we'll make about him. "Gluttons" is a concept CD, a story from start to finish. Acoustic and spare, it hews to the core of a bare bones tale of rodeo life and forlorn love. T-Roy voices the cowboy who can't stop rolling with the rodeo wind. Terri Hendrix breathes life into the woman who wants with all her soul for that wind to stop blowing, and Max Stalling steps in as the corporate brother bored to tears and jealous of the cowboy's carefree life. So I keep laying it on the line One ride at a time Hoping that the next one'll pay As you might expect, that hope for the next one turns into pain, in more ways than one. In "Gone Again" the woman, tired of being "just a warm place to stay when you were passing through and I was on the way," packs it in and leaves. Hendrix makes this song accessible and touching, and Bonnie Whitmore's harmony vocals blend into Terri's lead to provide one hell of a sucker punch-this song sneaks up on you, and it hurts. The rodeo can have you, I never had you anyway From there it's on to the longnecks and longer nights, where a heartbroke cowboy in the depths of soul searching has to listen to his corporate clone of a brother pine for the freedom of the life that's killing the rodeo man. Before long there's a ride that just goes south and takes rodeoing with it, and nothing's left but a guitar. This is where a pretty good country song would end, but T-Roy must've been in a bad mood when he wrote this material. There's a minor and short-lived revival for the cowboy's soul as he renews his lifelong love for music and gains enough acclaim to sustain himself and fall in love again. With a rodeo girl in Fort Worth. Oooooooooooooooooops. With my own rodeo past Still so close to my heart It's like turnabout déjà vu Now it's me that's going through it My rodeo life once tore someone else and me apart. In the end he's back with the first woman, having learned that the rodeo will win you girls but cost you women, and wondering why this particular woman takes him back when all she ever wanted is exactly what he lacks. Which makes him just like us, the way we figure it. All in all, this is a tasty slice of Piney Woods music. We'd like to see T-Roy and Terri and Max and the rest do it as a story around a campfire at the next Pickin' In The Pines get-together, because in a quiet setting like that this album's full impact could not help but be felt. It's not "Redheaded Stranger," but it's in that vein and evokes a lot of the same moods and sounds and introspective contemplations. The music itself is well written and very well played, and the lyrics are pure poetry. Good good stuff. We still don't like T-Roy's voice as much as some of you out there do, but hell, this CD's a keeper. A campfire on the Brazos, a bottle of Jack and stars for miles and miles with T-Roy's tale as soundtrack sounds like a heck of a night to us. Check out www.t-roymiller.com for lyrics, CDs, photos and schedules along with info on the bi-annual Pickin' In the Pines campout. There's a lot of great stuff there; don't let the drab front page convince you otherwise. The way this kid picks the guitar, who cares if he never learns HTML. Just check him out, have a listen for yourself, and see why so many in Texas expect so much from a 23-year-old kid who evokes memories of Chet Atkins himself.

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