The twists he leads his lyrics through seem to me to expose some intrinsic spatial variables in the thoughts themselves, as if not only is this the only way these lines could be sung, but on some level this is only way they can be properly said . Days when I scrutinize this question too closely threaten to undermine pillars of my existence. And so, conversely, anything that, even momentarily, seems to assert the opposite, a sort of linguistic Right Makes Might, is desperately welcome, no matter how fleeting or illusory the impression. Seventhly, Miller's lyrics are also easily the least constrained by genre conventions that I know of. The bulk of rock lyrics are constructed out of large prefab rock-lyric molecules that few people ever bother to disassemble.
Rock trades in familiar lyrical tropes even more than it does in musical ones.
I was really proud of, about a visual artist frustrated by the weight of history trying to defy it by editing out the quirk in the Mona Lisa's smile in Photoshop, and after listening to it he told me, like he was letting me in on a lesson I'd simply missed learning by not spending my song-writing adolescence playing weeknights at the Rat, that you can't write rock songs about pixels. In this context, Miller's wilfully and unapologetically abstruse collages of shampoo ingredients, cult figures, massively overthought relationship dilemmas, offhandedly trenchant social criticism and the residual thought patterns of computer programming are manifest impossibilities. Might Be Giants have teamed up in a failed bid to relocate their temporarily misplaced ironic detachment. The liner notes are even more complicated, with unglossed references, just counting the ones I got, to Lou Reed, Yes, the Posies, Brian Eno, Nine Inch Nails, Peter Frampton, Ben Folds Five, the Who, Harold and Maude , Unix and calculus. And yet, finally, behind the polysyllabic camouflage nearly every Miller song harbors some glowing shard of pained failed-romantic Kryptonite.