Universal United House Of Prayer

'Universal United House of Prayer' finds Buddy Miller's feet planted firmly in the territory that the roots-country musician staked out over the course of five previous records.

Again Buddy effortlessly blends a dozen American styles and idioms, again he evokes the mongrel force that breathed life into America's best mid-century pop and folk music. Yet his latest disc is also something new. The tip-off comes at once, at the top of the first track, a cover of Mark Heard's mid-tempo rocker "Worry Too Much." We hear the rapturous gospel voices of Regina and Ann McCrary (daughters of Fairfield Four founder Rev. Sam McCrary); Buddy then begins to sing of an everyday landscape where inhumanity and impoverishment portend despair ("It's the force of inertia/The lack of constraint/It's the children out playing in the rock garden/All dolled-up in black hats and warpaint"). To this problem, the next song, a black-gospel-inflected treatment of the Louvin Brothers' "There's A Higher Power," gently states the answer.

Buddy is a master of many disciplines - but note how all this mastery is ultimately pressed into service. With Your Love and Other Lies (1995), Poison Love (1997), Cruel Moon (1999), the co-billed Buddy and Julie Miller (2001, a 2001 Grammy™ nominee for Best Contemporary Folk Album), Midnight and Lonesome (2002), and his latest, Buddy has created a niche in American music all his own. Here, rich tones are coaxed from plastic guitars and trash cans; human desires are unveiled, picked over, mourned; remote musical origins are honored.

A living room, a Pro Tools rig, and a complement of vintage mikes make, somehow, an environment no proper studio can. Buddy's singularity is in his willingness to subordinate his extravagant technical gifts to a specific program: the creation of a music that is purposefully personal, naturally eccentric, and spiritually substantial. In this way he is to music as someone like Michael Powell is to film or Flannery O'Connor to literature. He is, simply, a thoroughgoing auteur, the only one in country music.