MILES BENJAMIN ANTHONY ROBINSON
Troubled Troubadour
It’s the day after a day of shows and Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson has been up all night drinking booze, taking mushrooms, and stealing towels from his friend’s fancy hotel gym.
“Drinking alcohol is kind of troublesome,” he declares before stabbing himself in the chest with a large syringe. “I’ve been a diabetic since I was twelve, and I’ve probably been drinking almost every day since I was seventeen. I recently studied what it does to me and I discovered that I’ve been poisoning myself every day for nearly a decade. Apparently.”
Spend any time with the intense singer/songwriter and you quickly realise that mixing beer and insulin is just the tip of a deep toxic iceberg. Since arriving in New York from Portland back in 2000, Miles has had to live two paces ahead of his demons, teetering between musical success and self-destruction. Fittingly, his eponymous debut album opens with “Buriedfed”, a surreal slow burner about his own funeral.
“If you’re going to make music that has some degree of darkness and angst like mine does, then you must have a sense of humour. Otherwise your music is terrible,” he says with an excitable machine gun patter. “That’s why I never liked Nine Inch Nails, they don’t have a fucking sense of humour. It’s like being beat over the head with someone’s awful diary.”
At just 24-years-old, Miles’s own diary is shaping up to be substantially more interesting than Mr Reznor’s. After winning and then dropping out of a NYU film scholarship, he fell in with The Strokes when they were just playing pubs, got engaged, became a drug runner/fiend, and made the benches of Coney Island his home for weeks at a time. A natural storyteller, he penned six albums worth of material on his acoustic guitar before finding musical salvation in the form of TVOTR’s Kyp Malone and Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor. Together they transferred his tumultuous life into a recorded set of folk fables, veering from anthems of defiance to ballads of vulnerability.
“I had a real chip on my shoulder for a long time,” he says, poking at a greasy chicken fried steak. “I moved to New York and it was a real struggle. I never had any support from my family but was surrounded by all this Manhattan wealth. I was just a really pissy kid who played in a bunch of arty punk bands who’d get in physical fights with club owners. I was constantly being approached to model, but I just thought that was the worst way to discredit my art, you know? Now I’m like, ‘you idiot!’ I could’ve had money to live off and make music! I always seem to do things the hard way.”
Having lived with the same ten songs for the past three years, Miles is excited about the direction of his next album (“all the titles are alliterated!”). But most importantly, he wants to become known for his songwriting more than his personal vices.
“I had to grow a lot this year, but I feel bad because I had to do a lot of it with people watching,” he says. “At my record release party I got very drunk and blacked out by the third song. I did a terrible job. My life was really falling apart and I said to my friend, ‘am I too late? Have I just fucked up? Could I maybe go to law school, marry a nice girl, start going to church and get a nice house?’ And then I realised, yeah, it’s too late for all that.”
Text Tim Noakes / Photography Paul Rodriguez
