After forty years of marriage, Buddy and Julie Miller have learned to welcome a song however it arrives, questioning only where the song is taking them rather than where it originated. There’s no process, no assembly-line procedure, just an openness to those bursts of inspiration and those hours of refinement, which means their fourth album together, In the Throes, sounds lively and diverse, eccentric and slightly askew: a deeply soulful collision of mournful gospel, dusty country, cosmic blues, ecstatic R&B, and anything else that crosses their minds. 

Take “I Been Around,” a wild and otherworldly stomp that arrived in Julie’s brain one night. “I was asleep upstairs, and Buddy was downstairs in the studio,” she recalls. “I got up, walked downstairs, and sang a few notes for him to play on guitar. I sang the whole song in one take, then went back to bed.” She promptly forgot all about it. Buddy tinkered with it a little more that night, then he too forgot about it. “It almost got thrown away,” he says. “I only found it by accident, when I was erasing some old sessions. If it'd been erased, it would have been like it never even existed.” He loved what he found, which he describes as a “spontaneous mess,” like a signal from another world. Julie was less impressed. “I didn’t have any memory of it, and at first I wasn’t about to let it get out! But we played it for some friends and they all liked it. So I just gritted my teeth and let it go.”