Guster frontman Ryan Miller doesn’t mind if you think his band is Christian. He just finds it hilarious. “The three founding members were all Jewish,” he laughs. “We all had bar mitzvahs.” That didn’t stop one fan from tweeting, “I was loving the Guster show until they started doing their God songs.” Miller not only saw the tweet—he retweeted it.
That anecdote is one of many digressions in a conversation that was technically about the band’s 2015 album Evermotion, but—true to Guster form—sprawled in a dozen directions, from religion and musical reinvention to being misread, misunderstood, and still kind of proud of it.
Evermotion marks the band’s biggest sonic departure, produced by Richard Swift, whose fingerprints grace records by The Shins and The Black Keys. “Swift hates bongos,” Miller laughs. “He wouldn’t have listened to our early stuff, let alone worked with us.” This was no small dig—Guster’s early sound was built on acoustic guitars and hand percussion. “Visually and sonically, that was the band,” he says. “When we stopped doing that, that was our Dylan-goes-electric moment.”
Fans didn’t exactly riot in the aisles, but they definitely let the band know how they felt. “That was the big seismic shift. We lost some of the purists. But the ones who stuck around, they’re in it for the adventure now.”
And Miller is grateful for that, because Guster has never wanted to be a nostalgia act. “We don’t want to be a band that’s only about the time you made out in the back of a car to Lost and Gone Forever,” he says. “That’s great, and I celebrate that. But we’re trying to make new songs that still fit in the set, that feel like part of the journey.”
That journey includes a lot of musical exploration—and some existential reflection. “We’ve always written pop songs,” Miller says, “but we never talked about groove in the early days. Which is probably why I don’t like our first couple records.” He says their evolution has been driven not by trends or desperation to stay relevant, but by curiosity. “We just want to learn how to do new things. And then see where that takes us.”
Even Evermotion’s political overtones weren’t intentional. “I’ve never set out to write a political record,” he says. “A lot of times I’m just writing melody-first. I’ll spit out a word that fits, then reverse-engineer the lyric around it. Sometimes it’s only later that I realize, oh… this is actually about something.”
The result is a record full of lyrical moments that land with sly specificity. There’s “Stay With Me Jesus,” which sounds like a spiritual plea but is actually something else entirely. There’s “Do What You Want,” with its synth bassline. There’s “Endlessly,” which features Miller’s favorite lyric: “I tried to take your picture and you covered your eyes.”
But don’t try to pin too much on him. “If someone tells me they think a song is about something, I love that. They’re probably right. Or maybe they’re totally wrong. But either way, it’s great. That means it’s working.”
When asked if the new direction ever felt like a risk, Miller shrugs. “We’re not clawing to stay on the radio. We’re clawing to not be stuck in the ‘90s.”
He gets it, though. He’s a fan, too. “My sweet spot for Wilco is Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Summerteeth. For My Morning Jacket, it’s Z. I love what they’re doing now, but those were my eras.” Guster fans, in turn, have their own eras. “That’s just how music works. You stamp a band into the part of your life where they first mattered.”
So why keep pushing forward? “Because if we didn’t, I wouldn’t still be here. We would’ve made the same record four times, and people would’ve said, ‘That sucks. Play me that record I liked in 1999.’” He pauses. “To varying degrees of success, that’s what we’re trying to avoid.”
That creative drive has kept Guster evolving—and kept Miller grounded. “You just try to make something you can stand behind. If you’re proud of it, then that’s all you can do. And if people want to come in under the tent you’ve built, great. If not, well… you didn’t make something from a cynical place.”
He laughs again, self-aware to the end. “God, that sounds pretentious. But it’s true.”
This video was shot with virtual reality cameras (just for fun). It works best on your phone, but you can also move around the camera from your desktop. If you are on your phone, the camera will move with your motion. There is a performance at the end, so stay tuned after the quick blackout.
