Conrad Miller – Keep Pressing

Conrad Miller
Keep Pressing
Millcon Music (2013)
www.conradmillermusic.com
By Bob Marovich for The Black Gospel Blog

Doylestown, Pennsylvania singer, songwriter, and musician Conrad Miller has returned to the sacred solo spotlight with his sophomore release, Keep Pressing.

Miller is a balladeer with a polished and pleasant baritone who sounds like a musically trained senior choir soloist. In truth, he studied voice with Donald Everette at Kansas State University and has been a faithful church chorister. Miller was also a member of R&B vocal groups the Soulful Seven as well as the Softones, a group that could have been the Stylistics’ doppelganger. The Softones were best known for their quiet storm hit, the Miller-penned “Carla, My Love.”

When his daughter, Lauren Elizabeth Denise, committed suicide a day after her sixteenth birthday, Miller decided life was too short to forestall his thoughts of being a sacred soloist. In 2009, he released My Journey, his debut solo CD, on Millcon Music, his own imprint.

Whereas My Journey captured Miller’s vibrant soul influences, the new album finds him in more musically conservative territory. For example, “Amazing Grace” is the kind of robust production number you might hear at a July 4 program held on the Mall in Washington, DC. In the same vein, Miller tackles Richard Smallwood’s classically-influenced “Center of My Joy.”

On the traditional side, the album’s single, “I Need You,” is an up-tempo handclapper with Miller’s background vocalists serving as the energetic chorus. Steven Roberts’s “He’ll Never Let You Down,” a song about Jesus’s constancy, is another neo-traditional selection.

GRAMMY, Stellar, and Dove Award-winner Steven Ford produced the album, while other members of the Ford Family assisted Miller as background singers.

Conrad Miller acknowledges that the arrangements for Keep Pressing “are big, plush, and orchestral, as opposed to the sparse instrumentation of the first record.” Still, with its nostalgic sound, less was more on My Journey. Keep Pressing lacks that sweet step back magic.

Three of Five Stars

Pick: “I Need You.”