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The 12 broke-down and beat-up songs that made up Miller’s 2014 Poisons Sipped solo debut album rang like a bell for the doomed and lonely.

Just think of a particularly downtrodden William Elliott Whitmore (though with a far more impressive beard), soused and at the wrong end of a whiskey bottle and you’d be close to summing up the experience of listening to it.

A year later and this sometimes magical Buffalo-based blues guitarist is still down at heel – but how he makes the sound of heartbreak ring. With a studio full of equipment built some time before the second world war, Miller’s created an album that is as much Allman Brothers as it is Muddy Waters. Gospel soars, the blues shudder and soul music sings, as Miller’s earthy baritone wails betrayal and lessons hard-learnt.

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.