Doctor Millar: Ruining Everything — a feast of Americana

There is such ease and comfort to Doctor (Sean) Millar’s sixth solo album that you’d never think it was recorded (as Millar says) “during a difficult time personally, while I stumbled from health crisis to health crisis against the backdrop of the pandemic, lockdown and what was being predicted as the possible end of the live gig scene”.

And yet here we are: eight songs and one instrumental played as if there wasn’t a care in the world. The music style throughout certainly helps as every track is imbued with broad strokes of Americana, rootsy folk, old-time country, and occasional nods of the fedora to early Bob Dylan (Dublin Girl). Assisted by musicians as nimble-fingered as Donal Lunny (Unhappy Woman, Look What She Threw Away), Liam Ó Maonlaí (Danny McCoy, Communion Money) and Bill ‘Banjo’ Whelan (across the album), the record belies its carefully concealed looseness with (as you might expect from such a developed writer) songs that tell tales.

The almost-title track (You’re Ruining Everything) looks back at Millar’s teenage sense of flawed self, while Look What She Threw Away is full of regret for a life that wasn’t lived to its fullest extent. The album closes with the instrumental Flow Sacred Magical, a gorgeous, wistful folksy-tinged slip of a tune that brings the album title into disrepute: that teenage lad did well, indeed.