Listen to this track by Vancouver Washington-based singer-songwriter on a leisurely comeback trail Milo Binder. It’s “I Should Be Your Man”, the kick-off track to his second album, 2024’s The Unspeakable Milo Binder. The record was a long-time coming, with a 33-year gap between it and 1991’s self-titled debut. In that earlier period, the buzz in the air was about a new kid in town who knew his way around writing songs set in the classic singer-songwriter golden age of the 1960s and 1970s. His debut proved the rumours to be true. Then, things took an unexpected turn.

The currents and eddies of fashion and timing were partly to blame. By 1991, record labels were looking for the next Nirvana, not the next John Prine. Then, some personal priorities emerged for Milo Binder that demanded more attention than a music career deserved by comparison. A marriage was one. Fatherhood to a child with special needs was another. He’d also lost a best friend, manager, and “chief cheerleader” John Schillaci in a car accident. Observing grief was necessary. All told, the era shifted without permission or warning as eras often do.

In the ensuing years, word on the street was that Milo Binder had disappeared. But that was only true in the context of expected music industry career cadences. For the people in his life who needed his attention most, he was very much visible and present. While he was engaged in other things besides making new music, the passage of time lent greater maturity and a wider sense of perspective. Once he’d passed a certain point, new songs just came to Milo Binder unimpeded.

From his Bandcamp page:

It was never anybody’s plan to take decades to release a second record. But life happens, and I just went with it and figured that I was just a one-record guy. That was fine by me. Then all of a sudden it’s as if I’m Rip Van Songwriter or something…grey beard and all. New songs started just throwing themselves at me. How does a well-rested old bastard say no?

~ Milo Binder (visit the page)

His time away from the promise of the spotlight certainly didn’t dull his senses when it comes to writing and performing. In fact, the material on the new album informed by life experiences and well-earned perspectives outside of a music career only make his songwriter’s voice that much richer. “I Should Be Your Man” is certainly a prime example, rife with scriptural gravity, and yet somehow remaining light as air at the very same time.

Milo Binder. image: Bandcamp (cropped)

The image of Moses coming down from the mountain and related wanderings in the desert are everything but portentous here. Instead, they become symbols for deep and personal devotion and emotional breadth. “I Should Be Your Man” is an expression of awe of a love for another that feels like nothing less than an unexplainable (unspeakable?) divine force, like a bush burning in the desert.

I came upon a burning bush
It spoke these words to me
It said ‘only one thing certain
About God’s majestic plan’”
And baby, I should be your man

In this, “I Should Be Your Man” expresses deeply-felt emotional impact rather than broadly applied religiosity. At the same time, it’s also universal and indicative of what it is to be human in an unpredictable world; that each of us contains whole universes of thought, feeling, memory, identity, and experience that we quietly tend and sometimes get to share with another, only if we’re very lucky. When we do, it feels like the totality of everything that matters to us – because perhaps it is.

“I Should Be Your Man” turns that internal wonder of what it is to be aware of love and its magnitude inside out so that listeners can hear it, and feel it with greater clarity in our own lives. The voice at the center of it sounds like one who’s earned every syllable. In this, the song, along with the rest of the album, is not so much a product of craft as it is a document of how a person who has lived a life of intentional connection to others can reach a clearing in the forest, realizing how grateful they are to sing all about it when the time is finally right to do so.

You can learn more about Milo Binder at, appropriately, milobinder.com

Listen to the album on Bandcamp.

Click through to Real Gone Music to buy The Unspeakable Milo Binder.

For more insight on his earlier history around the time of his debut record, check out this 1991 feature about Milo Binder from the Los Angeles Times. In part, the piece shows that he was on another road than the darker and angrier zeitgeist of the time was, and that prioritizing relationships was always the most important thing to him, even above the life of a touring musician.

Enjoy!

https://thedeletebin.com/2024/09/04/milo-binder-sings-i-should-be-your-man/

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