Secret Session Vol 1

After his 2 country rock albums, some duets with local country greats and numerous European awards, country singer songwriter Marc Miner is back with an extraordinarily different sound. The new 6 track EP, "Secret Session Vol 1 : At The Creek" is reduced to the essentials. An acoustic guitar, a voice, here and there handclaps or a kazoo, recorded in a secret location in Vienna, Austria, near a forest glade on a quiet riverbank. The EP will be released in the rest of Europe on December 6th, 2024, on the Viennese indie label Between Music.

On his new EP, Marc Miner lets his songs sound the way they are usually created. After the previous, more rock driven releases, the country musician goes 'back to the roots' again and explains, "Sometime around the turn of the millennium, I was playing solo shows on many small stages. It wasn't really country music yet, maybe more the singer songwriter indie folk that was quite popular at the time. I guess I automatically sound like that when I'm on the road without a band, and that's exactly what I wanted to show here. All pure and raw. The way the songs sound".

And to enhance the raw in his sound, Miner recorded the entire EP outdoors at a secret location and also had himself filmed in order to use the material as music videos.

"That was quite a technical challenge. How do you record without electricity, so to speak, in the middle of the forest directly on the water?", Miner tells us about the origin. After many attempts and consultations with sound engineers, it finally worked. "In recent years, there have been some great country singer songwriter productions that have followed a similar concept, e.g. by Miranda Lambert or Oliver Anthony. You can hear every detail, such as improperly fingered strings on the guitar, maybe a slightly out of tune note in the vocals, but also the nature all around. I really wanted to do something like that".

The premise of putting the songs and not the production in the foreground immediately gave rise to the idea of recording the songs at a special location and making a 'series' out of it. "In the future, I want to make recordings that are as pure as possible. Maybe not necessarily always alone, other instruments are also allowed to play, but everything should be very simple and pure", Miner describes the concept of the "Secret Sessions" and continues, "And because this is supposed to be something special, every single "Secret Session" will take place at a special place that I will hardly tell anyone. For the 1st issue, it's on a quiet river spur in Vienna, hence the addition, "At The Creek". You can sometimes hear the water flowing, or a branch falling into the water or birds landing in the water and the forest cracks all around and the leaves rustle in the wind".

The EP is entirely Marc Miner, written, played, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered by the singer songwriter himself. "I've never dared to do everything on my own. With such a simple production, I dared to do it for the 1st time, and I am quite satisfied with the result".

Musically and thematically, the songs are very diverse, melodic, slightly melancholic and above all have one thing in common and the songwriter describes it with one word, 'wistfulness'. 5 of the songs were written in February 2024: "I took a little break from everyday life because after a few personal crises I was just looking for silence somewhere to think. So, I went to a small remote village in Burgenland, Austria, with the aim of meeting as few people as possible to think about myself and my life and to come to terms with myself again. Those were very nostalgic, but healing 3 days, on which I wrote 7 songs and came back mentally as if changed", says Miner. "5 of them made it onto the EP. The 6th song is an instrumental piece that I wrote back in 1996 on a river in southern Poland and never had the opportunity to release. Now its moment had come as the opening track for the EP and I'm happy that the song is finally being presented to the public".

Miner sings about his self discovery on the remaining 5 songs. "Better Man", for example, is about Miner's struggle to leave the bad patterns and finally become a 'better man'. "Get Up" goes in a similar, but musically more cheerful, direction, where Miner sings of new love and happiness after fighting his weaker self in the forest.

"Rowboat" is a love song in which Miner uses a rowing boat as a metaphor and promises to love and care for it until it falls apart and sinks. "I guess I have a affinity for 'broken' or not quite perfect objects and people and also wanted to deal with getting older, because we are all transient and the thought admittedly sometimes scares me a bit".

The song "Ol' Well" is an a cappella piece that is accompanied only by handclaps and lapslaps and is about seduction and the long awaited redemption.

"Rum, Sugar & Me" describes a love triangle between two men and a woman. Miner packs friendship, cohesion, love and a thirst for adventure into a pirate story that sounds light footed and is full of tolerance towards other lifestyles and loves. An openness that you rarely get to hear in the otherwise quite conservative country and folk music.