The Music of Mike Miller and the Boat Drunks

Update: 2025-01-02

Description

“I think for me, what's unique is that I've got a great band behind me. I mean, the Boat Drunks, every one of those guys could easily be a front man for a band, they're all very, very talented, they're all great guys, we get along, we like each other. “

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If you’re like me and you’ve been listening to Trop Rock / Island Music over the last 20 years or more, you know the Boat Drunks, a band that consistently draws large loyal crowds and wins big awards, including being named Trop Rock Band of the Year nine times, most recently in 2024, by the Trop Rock Music Association. While starting out mainly as a cover band for Jimmy Buffett tunes in the very early 2000s, the Champaign-Illinois-based band has since recorded a wealth of original songs that have become staples among Island Music lovers. These songs include A Pirate on the Caribbean; Beer, Buffett and Baseball; Callin’ in Gone; Tropical Standard Time; Corona Alone Again; and Long Time No Sea (S-E-A).

I had the pleasure to attend a Boat Drunks performance recently at a Parrothead event in Milwaukee, and it was amazing to see the fans crowd the dance floor, swaying to the Boat Drunks music, singing along and even line dancing.

When the band broke out its signature song Hollow Man – written by Mike Miller – this is what it looked and sounded like ...

The Boat Drunks clearly have worked their way into the hearts of Parrotheads and all Trop Rock / Island Music lovers.

Today I am talking with Boat Drunks frontman Mike Miller, who co-founded the band with Jake Tatar in 2001 and has entertained thousands of devoted audiences throughout the first quarter of this century.

Hello Mike, thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

I just played a clip from last weekend’s event in Milwaukee, with the Parrothead crowd singing along to Hollow Man while circular line dancing and singing right out loud. That must feel great to be playing a song like that and having such a powerful reaction. Does that happen all the time?

It frequently gets a good response at Parrothead events because you know they're familiar with the song and that's something we're very grateful for, we still have a lot of people who really seem to like that song, and we love doing it for them because it, it always gets a good response from Parrotheads, for sure.

What do you think it is about Hollow Man that gets that response from people?

I wish I knew. If I did, I’d try to write ten more just like it, but, I mean, that's one of the first songs I wrote with the band and, you know, it's for some reason I don't know if it's the idea of the escapism and starting over or you know what it is about the song, but it really seemed to have spoke to a lot of people which I'm very grateful for. I've had discussions with other songwriters about it and nobody can really agree on what it is that that everybody seems to like, but I'm just grateful that they do.

Sometimes, a song just has that magic.

Yeah, I mean, like I said I can't really take much credit for it, you know, just people like it and I'm grateful that they do. It's fun song to do for them.

What, what do you remember about writing that song back in the day? How did, it, come, about?

How it came about is the band had been together for about a year and we wanted to, I mean, at the time, we were doing all Jimmy Buffett, if he didn't record it, cover it or, you know, perform it live, we didn't do it, that was just our rule. And we were following other trop rock bands, and specifically St. Somewhere, they were kind of our musical heroes at the time, and so at rehearsal, Jake brought up, hey, listen, I want you guys to go home this weekend and start writing songs, because I want to record a CD of our own stuff, and present that so we have something to do besides just Jimmy Buffet covers. And so that weekend, I went home and I wrote Hollow Man and This Ain't DuVal Street all in one weekend, and both of those stuck, you know, and, you know, luckily for us they did, I guess.

Do you feel like sometimes those songs just come to you?

I mean it's weird. There have been songs that I've written that have taken months, and there are some that I've written, you know, in just a couple hours. Beer, Buffet and Baseball, I wrote that song in my head when I was out walking and by the time I got home, I had the whole song, sat down with the guitar and finished it up.

But other songs, like I said, I've labored over for weeks and sometimes months or I'll leave it alone and come back to it. There doesn't really seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, it just happens, you know.

So, aside from Hollow Man what are some of the favorite songs that you've written and performed over the years?

Well, um, Together We Fly. I like that one because, again, it was written as kind of a thank you to the Parrothead community who really stepped up, you know, when I got my cancer diagnosis and went through the bone marrow transplant and all that. They really came to my aid.

And I made it a point to want to get that one recorded and in the can before I went to Bethesda for the transplant, and we did, we managed to get the whole album recorded in about two days, which is practically a miracle in itself. And I drove home from St. Louis that night, packed up and left for Bethesda the next day.

So that one's kind of special to me. There's some songs from my solo CD that I'm pretty proud of. One's called Perspective.

At that time that I wrote most of those songs I was living and traveling on a sailboat, so my life at that time was kind of geared toward experiences that I felt like we're worth commemorating in a song, you know, and when I was doing that they came pretty fast and easy, so there are several songs on that album that I wrote while I was out traveling on the boat.

How long were you on the sailboat and where were you?

Five years. I left from Racine, Wisconsin, and went out through the Great Lakes to the Erie Canal to the Hudson out New York City that way and then went down the coast. Spent that first winter in the Bahamas.

Came back, and then I would just kind of run north and south, trying to avoid cold weather and hurricanes, basically met a lot of really nice people, had a lot of fun experiences, that kind of thing, and again, it was a kind of a lifestyle that kind of lent itself to songwriting. It really was, you know, kind of a rich pool to draw from, let's put it that way, and I wrote a lot of songs while I was doing it.

So during those five years, were you basically taking a break from performing?

Part of the year, I still probably played, oh, 30-40 years shows a year with the band, with the Boat Drunks. I come back, some of the people that were putting them on would actually pay me to fly in and join them just for the gig. And, you know, that made it easier, but then you know in the summertime I would come home and house sit for some friends and play with the guys all summer long and then go back to the boat, that kind of thing. So I was kind of in and out, even then.

What made you decide to go on a sailboat for five years?

It's something that actually came to me when we were playing one of our earlier Parrothead events at a place called Put-In-Bay, which is an island in Lake Erie, and it was a Parrothead event called Phlocking of the Phaithful, and the weekend that we played there they had the venue of Mr. Ed’s, one of the bigger bars in that area but it was still open to the public even though they were having the Parrothead event there, so a lot of people came in who were part of this big sailing regatta that stopped there that weekend, so I got to meet a lot of people that lived and traveled on their sailboats half the year. They would spend the summers on their boats and then put them in storage and then live in their house in the winter time. And they invited me out, and I got to visit them on the boat and stuff, and, you know, started thinking, you know, I'm gonna be retiring in a few, years, and I'm gonna have to live somewhere, maybe living somewhere I can take with me is not a bad idea. So. I, started taking sailing lessons and reading about it, and learning all I could, and ended up buying a boat, and I moved aboard in 2008 and took off, and it was a lot of fun.

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