Deron Miller

At 48 years old, Deron Miller has this physical status:

Deron John Miller (born May 21, 1976) is an American heavy metal musician.

He is best known as the former lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of alternative metal band CKY, which he co-founded in 1998.

Other bands Miller fronts include the progressive metal band Foreign Objects, the melodic death metal group World Under Blood and the band 96 Bitter Beings.

Early life

Miller has stated that his first musical influence, at the age of three years, was Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley. He started taking guitar lessons at the age of eight, after "losing interest" in playing the piano, and was later influenced by death metal band Death, including vocalist Chuck Schuldiner and guitarist James Murphy, followed by "more extreme music ... and more underground musicians" such as Cynic, Pestilence and Malevolent Creation. He has described his first guitar as a "$50 piece of crap", noting that it was possibly J.C. Penney-branded, followed by an "imitation B.C. Rich" and, later, an Ibanez RG570 in 1992.

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Career

Miller formed Foreign Objects with future CKY drummer Jess Margera, who appeared in kindergarten for the first time in his youth. In 1995, the band's debut EP, The Undiscovered Numbers & Colors, was released. The pair, as well as bassist Ryan Bruni, appeared under the name Oil shortly after learning about guitarist Chad I Ginsburg (who was then working as an audio engineer) and changing the band's name to CKY. Miller is credited with inventing the term "Camp Kill Yourself" and being "a good name for a horror movie."

In 1999, CKY released Volume 1, which had exclusively written credit for Miller. "Deron Miller w/ Chad I Ginsburg and Jess Margera," is credited in Infiltrate•Rebuild's 2002 sequel, with Margera being dropped from the formula for An Answer Can Be Found and Carver City.

Miller was announced in December 2002 that he would be working with guitarist James Murphy, drummer Dave Culross, and vocalist Bret Hoffmann on a tribute album for the band Death to support the family of founding member Chuck Schuldiner. After Schuldiner's family approved the initiative, bassist Terry Butler, Slipknot members Mick Thomson (guitar) and Paul Gray (bass), as well as others joined the initiative, which was titled Within the Mind: In Homage to Chuck Schuldiner's Musical Legacy and planned for release via Mascot Records.

Miller and Murphy also worked on Universal Culture Shock, the second album by Foreign Objects, in addition to their collaboration on the Death tribute tour. Murphy contributed lead guitar and mastering to the collection, with Miller lauding the guitarist for making the album "one thousand times better."

Miller was embroiled in a slew of scandals surrounding the music industry during the build-up to the unveiling of CKY's third studio album An Answer Can Be Found. He called out Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine for threatening to cancel shows at which "Satanic" bands were also scheduled to perform, demanding that "stop creating drama." He chastised a number of commentators on the website Blabbermouth.net for making derogatory remarks against CKY, referring to them as "lonely, jealous music enthusiasts." Following the release of An Answer Can Be Found's album, Miller referred to Jenny Eliscu's one-star review of the album as "juvenile" and a "ugly skank" and implying that she was "not intelligent enough to comprehend" the band's lyrics, assassinating it. Eliscu responded by claiming that the frontman had launched a "harass campaign" against the journalist, causing fans to call her with death threats.

Miller was pictured on October 6, 2006, alongside drummer Tim Yeung and producer Logan Mader on a demo for a new death metal side project titled World Under Blood. On its MySpace page later, the band added a few songs to its MySpace page. Miller appeared with Malevolent Creation and recorded with thrash metal band Believer in 2008, and later with progressive metal band The Alien Blakk. On Gabriel's opening track "Medwton," his Believer contribution later emerged in the form of a guitar solo. World Under Blood's debut full-length album Tactical was eventually released by Nuclear Blast Records in July 2011.

Miller allegedly had an altercation with Ginsburg in the tour bus in 2007, which caused the guitarist to claim that the frontman had left the band after a CKY show in St. Louis, Missouri. Miller retaliated against allegations to the contrary, while Ginsburg suggested that CKY with Margera continue.

In 2011, the fate of CKY was put into question; all members except Ginsburg wanted to record solo albums; the guitarist wanted to record another CKY album; although Ginsburg preferred to release another CKY album. Miller delved into the matter on his Facebook page, claiming that Ginsburg had left the band and that no one in the "CKY camp" kept him up on plans and updates, which had caused to frictions. For the first time since the band's inception in 2012, Miller was replaced in CKY by frontman Daniel Davies, a former Year Long Disaster frontman who appeared at the Australian music festival Soundwave. Miller reunited with Ginsburg for a planned reunion of the band and a new album in 2014, but no further activity was recorded and by 2015, he had been replaced by Davies.

Miller's debut solo album Acoustified! features acoustic recordings of CKY and Foreign Objects songs, as well as a resurfaced the Foreign Objects moniker for a new album, Galactic Prey, following the singer's inactivity. Both campaigns were funded by crowdfunding website Indiegogo. Miller revealed in 2016 that he was concurrently working on several projects, including a deluxe vinyl reissue of CKY's Volume 1, the debut album by MechaCKY), two albums by World Under Blood (Life Is Too Long to Like You and Tetanus Invasive), a new Foreign Objects album entitled Lean, Mean and Bleeding Green, and a sequel to Acoustified. 96 Bitter Beings would debut two albums, Synergy Restored and Camp Pain, as part of an Indiegogo campaign, later revealed.

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