Marie Miller Focuses on the Beauty in the Broken

Singer-songwriter Marie Miller couldn’t have imagined the role her music would play during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because her album, Little Dreams, was released on March 27, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, Miller was forced to cancel her album release shows. Though it may have looked like a dream lost, like so many others, Miller improvised.

“The whole idea of Little Dreams is that it doesn’t matter the quantity, it’s the quality of the dream,” Miller explained to me. (Verily featured one of her single releases from Little Dreams, “Homeland” in our “Top 40 Remix” last Fall).

The inability to perform her tour thus far has inspired Miller to find creative ways to share her music with the culture—like live streaming her album release from her living room and also from her parents’ home in the Shenandoah Valley. But as events of the pandemic started unfolding, Miller saw how the messages in Little Dreams are needed more than ever in these uneasy times.

In particular, witnessing the courage of the health-care workers  on the front lines of the coronavirus battle, Miller decided to dedicate one of the songs from the album to them. To accompany the song, “Brave New Step,” Miller produced a new music video with photos she collected from her fans all over the world, thanking first responders for their work.

“It’s the artist’s role to make mosaics out of broken things,” says Miller, “to make broken things beautiful.” And a beautiful tribute this video and song is. You can watch the video, which is being released for the first time here, and you can listen to the entire Little Dreams album here.