Emotionally Ranged

Game Theory “An Overview of Item Response Theory”

The name of the final Game Theory record is Supercalifragile, which is definitely the best album title to come along this year, and a perfect example of Scott Miller’s wit as a lyricist – a mawkish bit of Disney nostalgia broken in half to reveal a vulnerability that was always right there in front of us. I can imagine his delight upon first thinking of the joke, and then a moment of reflection and self-identification: “Yup, that’s me, super Cali fragile.”

Scott Miller was a clever and funny guy. I listened to his music – primarily his Loud Family work, though his Game Theory discography is what made him an indie hero – for a very long time before noticing how much of it is about depression. That didn’t become obvious to me until after he killed himself in 2013, and then it became very hard to not hear it on every record. Anxiety and misery was present in an alarming number of his songs going back to the beginning, and sometimes it was not even a subtextual thing. This is a guy who wrote a song called “Slit My Wrists” with a chorus that goes “what I need is not ways to go on / what I need is to slit my wrists and be gone.” That song came out 20 years before he actually killed himself. He was living with this for a very long time, and even when he stated it plainly everyone just nodded and thought “Scott Miller is a clever and funny guy.” Maybe it was a literary reference or something.

Miller was working on Supercalifragile before he died. It was his idea to revive the Game Theory name – to bring things full circle, I suppose, but also because the name would draw a little bit more attention than making it another Loud Family release. Maybe he wasn’t happy with how it was coming together. Maybe he felt stuck. I have no idea why he didn’t finish it before ending his life, but I figure there were many other factors in making that decision that weren’t directly related to the music he was writing. The record was completed by his friends and fans – Aimee Mann, Ted Leo, Ken Stringfellow, Mitch Easter, Peter Buck, Will Sheff, Doug Gillard, Matt LeMay, Spiral Stairs, and Nina Gordon among others. The songs were in various states of completion at the time of Miller’s death, and a few of them are sung by someone other than him. I find it harder to deal with those. All I hear is his absence.

Supercalifragile doesn’t sound like a cry for help. It mostly sounds perky and melodic but a bit skewed, like almost all of Miller’s music. Reading through the lyrics doesn’t yield much in the way of “oh, now I get it,” but there is a certain calm and distance to his perspective in most of the songs, and a sense that he’s taking stock and tying off some lose ends. He reckons with his sideline careers as a programmer and a music critic, he visits a sick friend in the hospital, he writes a love song for his widow that is absolutely crushing to hear in the context of how he died. “An Overview of Item Response Theory,” an up-tempo psychedelic jangle rocker with a typically obtuse title, is where he flat-out says what he must’ve been wondering at the end: “Is your life worthwhile?” It’s there, clear in the mix, hiding in plain sight like so many other bleak lines throughout his career. I hope that despite how he decided to end things he realized that it was worthwhile. It really was, and the music always will be.

Buy it from Bandcamp.