I Guess You've Never Actually Seen a Person Die of Loneliness

Scott Miller is dead.

I don't know with any certainty how he died, one poster on his site stated that the cause was suicide. The cause of death is not mentioned in any of the releases, official or unofficial, that I have found.  He was 53, married with 2 young daughters, and besides being one of the most prodigiously talented songwriters of the last 30 years, he was apparently also a talented software programmer.  Talented programmer?  Not surprising, given how industrious and intelligent he was.

This loss cuts deep.  In a way, deeper than Alex Chilton's, who experienced great success (albeit at age 16), critical acclaim, and a life that seemed to be lived in an actualized way (lots of praise from the public, critics, tribute records, etc.)  It would have been hard to be Alex Chilton and not love the fact that the coolest band of the 80s recorded a (great) song called "Alex Chilton."

There are no songs that I know of called "Scott Miller".  Yet there deserve to be.

Maybe this cuts deeper because Scott and I share some traits, we both went to UC Davis in the 80s, we both played and loved the same type of music, I suppose he was about a million times more talented than I am as a songwriter, and maybe twice as talented as a singer, I could probably hold my own with him as a guitarist.  We're roughly the same age.  So, there's a thread of identification there.

I saw him open for Aimee Mann in the early 90s in San Francisco, when he was playing with the Loud Family. I remember loving the set but really sort of annoyed at his stubborn insistence at playing a Telecaster as the lone guitarist in the band.  The guitar sound was telephone-thin, any guitar with a thicker, more substantial sound would have served the band so much better.  Petty, I know, but then Aimee came out and her guitarist played an Epiphone hollowbody and just sounded great.  The Michael Lockwood era.  I just felt that maybe there was an element of self-subversion there in choosing the Telecaster.

Around that time, I purchased "Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things" which pretty much won me over with its wry title.  The songs, well, there were something like 18 songs on the CD, many of them a minute or so long.  The concept - and there appeared to be one, in a "The Who Sell Out" sort of way - seemed too high for me to grasp, but the songs that got me, "Take Me Down (Too Halloo)", "Inverness", "Last Honest Face" and "Slit My Wrists" really got me.  They were filled with knowing puns, yet accessible, complex and catchy.

The last song mentioned, it is so brilliantly written that it goes well beyond "cry for help."  Scott was so completely in command of his craft it would have been hard to question whether it was an artistic or a personal statement.  He seemed invulnerable simply because of his mastery.

It, of course, sold poorly, and I never heard any songs on college radio, satellite radio or anything other than my CD player (and later, iPod).

Sad.

Which makes this loss so much harder for me to deal with.  There will be no justice (late career recognition) of the type that Alex received. The possibility is now foreclosed. And with so much great work in his catalog (and a vast one it is, maybe 15 or so full length CDs), that recognition would have surely occurred.