Why ask why?
Expect to receive a song a month and an essay accompanying each release. I’m hoping to keep this going for the long-run as a creative practice and plan to keep the verbiage concise as well as fresh, incisive, clear, persuasive, retractable, and mildly amusing.
Please consider the entirety of the content, including nonfiction, fiction and video as part of the artwork.
Who is Miter?
Miter is the name for the solo recording project of legendary Denver rocker, Ryan Stubbs. Ok, the word “legendary” is doing a lot of work, but Ryan achieved some mild success playing in bands in the late aughts and can accurately say things like: he has played Colorado’s Red Rocks and D.C.’s 9:30 Club; festivals such as SXSW and CMJ; and shared the stage with Nathaniel Rateliff, Kings of Leon, Grimes and Liz Phair. Sure, that sounds semi-impressive but these tangential musical achievements are similar to what you’ve heard from your neighbour or cousin. Ryan releases music, writing and video via his Substack Washed Memoir in Real Time, a publication that is guaranteed to change your life for the better.
laBelaBel Business
Are you interested in being “signed” and joining laBelaBel? Here’s some information from the original post.
Or, just say hello via Notes, Chat, or any comments for anyone in the group. There are absolutely no restrictions, obligations or costs. It is 100% about building solidarity and support among music creators on Substack. We need your help to improve and evolve the idea, or to make it your own.
Why Miter?
There is an astounding amount of duality in the world. For example, power and corruption should be diametric terms but only exist together. Cohesive beliefs and groupthink are a ways for us to share commonality but they end up excluding the beliefs of other groups. These types of incongruencies speak to the duality of our world as we perceive it. The frequent occurrence of paradoxes and the codependency of the antithetical are the types of ideas that I want to explore. The music I am making under the moniker “Miter” attempts to explore these ideas among others.
The word miter has at least two definitions:
1. A hat worn by Catholic bishops.
2. The joining of two pieces of wood at a 90 degree angle.
I’m trying to stay away from cringe-y philosophy (too late) or religious diatribes (still ok) in this writing, so I’ll steer clear of definition #1 for now. I do like the meaning and metaphors that can be taken from combining two things at a perfect angle.
Phonetically, mite-r could mean a type of insect, a dust mite, something insignificant. Also, the words “mite” and “might” sound exactly the same while being antonyms. The term “Mites” is used for youth hockey players aged 7-8—not to be confused with “Mini-Mites” who are players aged 5-6 years. As a youth hockey player myself, I was a mite. And a mini-mite.
With these phonetical expansions, the name Miter has a wonderful number of meanings that are tangential and paradoxical. I don’t have a preference regarding the meaning of the word Miter but it is important to me that there are multiple meanings. It’s the duality between the blurry and the focused that is part of what I want to explore, and music is a good vehicle for doing so.
