IN THE SWING OF THINGS. We Are The Willows doesn’t play swing music.
Nope – rather heartfelt folk tunes.

Former local Peter Miller is the lead songwriter and angel-voice behind the now-South-Minneapolis-based folk group We Are The Willows. Miller hass always had a knack for writing heartbreakingly sentimental songs about love, death, and his family. He has a keen eye for sweetness and kind heart for the people he loves. On the bands’ latest full-length, Picture (Portrait), Miller did the bulk of the writing based around letters his grandparents wrote to each other during World War II. We caught up with Miller, who was just featured on NPR, just before the album released earlier this month to talk family, music and the band’s “homecoming” of sorts.

Volume One: You’re first single is called “Dear Ms. Branstner” – is she a real person? Tell me about her.

Peter Miller: Ms. Branstner is a real person. She is my grandma. Before she married my grandpa her name was Verlie Branstner. My grandpa fell in love with her when he first saw her. His siblings had been talking about how beautiful she was and he had to get a look at her. He volunteered to chop wood for Verlie’s dad just to see her. When he did see her he said his heart dropped to the floor.

I know you often write about family and tell stories about relatives, etc. That’s clearly something you’re going for on the new record. What inspires that? What sort of understanding do you hope to gain through writing about it?

Family narratives have always made a really strong impression on me. They are really complicated and interesting. There are such interesting tensions between one’s biological make-up and the choices one has the freedom to make. Family is also, at its simplest form, the most shared human experience. We all come from someone else. We are all, for better or worse, informed and sometimes determined by that.

I tend to find the most self-discovery in family stories. I consider who these people are, how they relate to me, how they differ from me, and what that might all mean about how I am supposed to exist in the world.

What was your process like for putting Picture (Portrait) together? This is really your first official output since your EP in 2011, which I still have rolling around in my car somewhere. Is it similar? I know you guys have added members and stuff since then.

This record was a long time in the making. In 2010, I did a residency at a bar called the 331 in Minneapolis. I had like 11 people on this tiny stage. I had a string quartet, contra bass, keys, drums, guitars, and voices all re-imagining my first effort, A Collection Of Sounds And Something Like The Plague. I’ve always been really compelled by wide and expansive sounds and strive to achieve that. That performance was the first time those songs felt like I was close to achieving the right sound. That was how they were meant to be performed.

The Places EP (the one rolling around in your car) was my first attempt at prescriptively coming to that sound. I wrote and arranged most of it with the help of my buddy Josiah Waderich on string arrangements. That process reminded me of how much life there is to collaboration and how that needed to a part of the process.

Since then, it’s been a process of writing new songs and finding the right bunch of people to work with. I would work on the nuts and bolts of the tunes; the chord structures, melodies, words and arrangement and bring it to the band. Then everyone would put their two cents in and we’d arrive at this really different end-point.

This album is the manifestation of a lot of hard work and discovery. In the end though I feel like we’ve gotten to a sonic destination that I’ve always wanted to be at.

Now this is more of a concept album, right? Based on letters your grandfather wrote to your grandmother during World War II? What was it like going through that correspondence? How do you transform that into an album?

Yeah, I suppose “concept album” is the best way to understand it. My grandpa wrote over 350 letters to my grandma between 1942 and 1946 while he was stationed in the Southwest Pacific during World War II. My grandma gave me the letters after I graduated from college. It was quite an undertaking to read all the letters, mostly because I’m so darn sentimental and sensitive – insert eye roll here – that I could only really read one or two in a sitting. It was a lot for me to digest.

As far as it becoming an album, I began noticing dynamic shifts and changes that reminded me of how songs work. It felt like a pretty natural decision.

Finally, are you excited to come back to EC? How long has it been?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Eau Claire is so important to me. My first French kiss was at the Oakwood Mall. I farted really loud during reading time on my first day of school at South Middle School. There is always a feeling of home in Eau Claire.

We Are the Willows is headlining at the House of Rock on Nov. 14 with opening acts Meridene and sloslylove. Pick up Picture (Portrait) in person at the show or at The Local Store, 205 N. Dewey St.