This is the ballad of Scott Miller. A California computer geekbrandishing a Fender Telecaster electric guitar. The definitiveromantic, gone sour after one too many front porchlights shut offwithout a kiss goodnight.
Throughout the '80s, Miller, 32, led the Berkeley-based GameTheory, a pop band served by a whirling turnstile of friends andlovers, Donnette Thayer being among the latter.
"We broke up under pretty devastating circumstances," saysMiller. "It sapped me for a while. You get into a relationship andeven though you work as a unit, you still retain your pride as anindividual. It leads to this adversarial position and, so . . .that's what the song `Some Grand Vision of Motives and Irony' isabout. When I figured out how to deal with it, I was alone."
Now, Miller is on tour with his new band, the Loud Family, andthough it is really just Game Theory Mach I-lost-count, Miller feltthe need to rechristen the amalgamation as a gesture of togetherness.
"These guys were already a band called This Very Window when Ibegan playing with them," says Miller. "I sort of absorbed them intomy thing, meaning a new version of Game Theory, then I realized Iwanted the band to be more democratic.
"The album is crowded with my ideas just because of the greatinterim between this and the final Game Theory record."
"Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things," on Alias, was shuffledout with deafening kazoofare earlier this year, and has since beenpinched between thumb and forefinger by radio dullards nationwide.
And that's criminal, because the disc is a glistening flotillaof ideas: toy pianos, manipulated tape effects, gorgeous acousticguitars, cut-and-paste chord charts, feathery backing harmonies andblushing pop jangle, all of it stitched together by Miller'sde-cauterized language needle.
"I haven't had any radical departure in the way I write songs,"says Miller, laughing, "so there isn't any radical departure in soundon this record.
"I decided to let sensory overload be sensory overload where itfelt right. Before I would have fussed with it more. It's not that I'm any less demanding, it's just that I'm trying to purge my needto please everyone. It's a very hard thing to unlearn."
One aspect of Miller's craft that hasn't changed is his debonairlyrical flair. The boy eating drugs, the kid slitting his wrists,the girl with an honest face - they get names to garnish theirlyrical situations.
And whether a character is `feeling broke and 17' or `smokingcourtesy cigarettes and rolling up the tinted glass,' Miller'sTruffaut-like caress of booming details is rude genius.
"I don't include a printed lyric sheet because I don't believein the adage that says `whatever you hear is what you were meant tohear.' I write specific lyrics and they are not open tointerpretation. If people want to get the lyrics from me they can,but I want them to have heard the songs first."
After the train wreck that was the last two Game Theory records- bad marketing, internal squabbles - it is surprising that Miller isso eager to re-enter the fray.
"My career, if you can call it that, has been upswings, followedby tremendous drops," Miller says. "I'm braced for that type ofoscillation again. It's nothing I can control. I just write songs,always will. It's just something I do with my arms."
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