Editor's Note: John R. Miller, whose new LP titled The Great Unknowing came out July 17 via Rounder Records, is No Depression's Spotlight Artist for July 2026. Read more about Miller's fifth album here and watch an exclusive, acoustic performance of one of his new songs here. On July 5th, I turned 40 and spent the day in a rented Toyota Camry, driving home to Berkeley County, West Virginia to bury my dad. Currently I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a borrowed van, careening across central Pennsylvania. We had been gifted a modest amount of homegrown weed by a fiddle player friend in Vermont, having stopped there on our way back down to West Virginia from Montreal.