When I was much younger, I was quite the aficionado of Game Theory, Scott Miller's second band. My devotion continued into the next iteration of the band, called The Loud Family.
It's been over a year since Scott Miller died, but there are three songs that come to mind tonight as I get ready to go to sleep, entirely too late for my own good.
The first was "Last Day That We're Young," which was perhaps the song I most associated with transitions in my life, the first being graduation from the boys' prep school I attended for 12 years, and the second being my graduation from college. It seemed apropos at the time.
The second was "Room for One More, Honey," which I perhaps associate most with the fall of my senior year in high school. I was living through the disintegration of the relationship with my first girlfriend, and it was not good. On the other hand, one of the girls with whom I was running cross-country had caught my eye, but I didn't have the fortitude to ever ask her out. I found out two years ago, while I was attending the Joint and Combined Warfighting School, that my onetime teammate had killed herself after her mother had died. I took a pretty substantial detour on my way back from Norfolk and went by the graveyard where she (and her mother) had been buried. It was recent enough where there wasn't a marker for her or her mother. Perhaps one of my regrets, although I have a lot of regrets. The lyrics "elegance of line" and "sense of place" were an allusion to things I desperately (and futilely) tried to impart to my life back then.
The last song doesn't have its own video, but The Loud Family's song
"Give In World" was an expression of Scott Miller's engagement to his then-girlfriend, Shalini Chatterjee. They were eventually divorced, which puts this song in a very different light for me. Now it sounds like a statement of misplaced hopes, which has some very striking parallels to my own life (for the same reason why
"Never Say Never" by that dog has equally loaded symbolism). I remember when
the album it was on,
Plants and Rocks and Birds and Things, was released some 13 years ago, and it was then a joyous song. It still sounds the same, of course, but it now has a very different context for me.
It is perhaps notable that the one time I got to meet Scott Miller up close was when the Loud Family played in Atlanta in 1998. I was wearing my that dog shirt, and he mentioned that he really liked their music.
I'm still trying to figure out how to make things work, one way or the other, but I'm still looking elusively for elegance of line and sense of place in my life.
