I e-mailed Scott Miller - leader of the Loud Family, whose new album Days for Days is out now on Alias - at his day job, where he works on an object-oriented database product. I have no idea what the hell that is except that it involves computers and pays Miller's rent, which allows him to devote his spare time to recording. Despite his high-tech environment, the interview was delayed or generally flummoxed by a faulty server (his, not mine) and the loss of the first version of this interview when my computer hung on me - still, we managed to devour huge chunks of bandwidth in producing this conversation, carefully manicured into more fashionably presentable form for you, dear readers.

JJN: On a whim, and since you mentioned it in the notes to Interbabe Concern, I will randomly consult my "Oblique Strategies" program a couple of times and solicit your reactions. So...the first one is: "Ask your body."

SM: I do have to remember to ask my body things. Your imagination alone can make bad decisions because you forget how body parts move in the real world, either your whole body moving to the rhythm or just physically making your fingers and hands play the parts. You realize, oh, that's really unnatural when you actually do it, or hear it. Plus, there's a kinesthetic knowledge of how to generate music that comes from having an instrument you know how to play in your hands.

JJN: My first impression of Days for Days was that its sound and tone, overall, are considerably warmer and brighter in comparison with Interbabe Concern. Is this change intentional, or serving the nature of the songs, or for some other reason - personal, personnel, etc.?

SM: Kind of an even combination of all that, really. It's hard for me not to use this prophetic, accusing, bitter voice sometimes, and I wanted to introduce a dimension that's more accepting. Less pronouncement and more understanding of why people do what they do, although still pointing the same class of things out. And the new one was literally a less dark, cloistered process: we all played the songs together in a big open room and stuff, as opposed to dubbing instruments one-at-a-time over my bedroom demos like on Interbabe Concern, which I liked a lot as an album but you'd look at where it was recorded and think something like "a junkie died here."

JJN: The cover image seems to fit this brighter mood as well - the blue sky, the warm colors...

SM: I just told Cole Gerst, Alias's art director, "make it look like a land made out of white beans, with one bean up in the sky like the sun" and he did the rest. I didn't say "make it sunny and cheerful" or anything, but what he came up with did seem instantly right. 1997 was kind of the best year of my life, both in terms of my personal life and my cultural, would-be academic life or whatever the word would be, and all of that does give you a feeling of everything being well-lit.

JJN: How has the reconfiguration of the band affected the music - the return of drummer Gil Ray, and the arrival of keyboardist Alison Faith Levy?

SM: Both have been really great. Of course I miss Paul [Wieneke, ex-Loud Family keyboardist and guitarist] and Joe [Becker, long-time Scott Miller drummer with both Game Theory - Miller's 1980s band - and the Loud Family], who were both very long success stories for me, but Gil and Alison are huge successes too, and maybe in a way that makes for a change of pace.

Paul and Joe both played with sort of a metaphysical ominousnous. With Paul it was a Stockhausen, unexplored-musical-territory thing, and with Joe there was this sinister relentlessness in the way he hit drums - both of which I thought were great assets especially as foils for what I do, since I'm not too raw-power a singer. But Alison and Gil both have more of a human spirit focus; it's more natural to go into Neil Young or Brian Wilson mode, that kind of thing.

[Bassist] Kenny [Kessel] has also really started taking his vocals seriously. I've never done that sort of Simon and Garfunkel harmony like on "Lions" before, and that's a nice little grenade to be able to toss.

JJN: Days for Days is structured as a series of alternating short, untitled pieces and longer, more conventional titles. Why this structure?

SM: It's a way of keeping the song structure variation thing going - not using it in the element-of-surprise way I've done on some albums since Lolita Nation but rather in support of a variations-on-a-theme approach. I think it ended up having a palette-cleansing function, too. Clearly the titled songs are attempts to succeed in a culturally mediated way. Those songs have hooks, they're punchy, they play ball, for the most part they do their fly-catching with honey. The other tracks reflect some aspect of the content of those songs that doesn't do any of that. They kind of say that you could take any old aspect, a lyric, a melody, a drum part, out of its context and it could still speak to you, not because of or in spite of its relationship to the mainstream. I want to fool people into reacting to what's there when you subtract off both the fitting-in and the hip refusal-to-fit-in.

JJN: In an online interview a year or so ago, I'd read that you were interested in a lot of artists whose music seems primarily concerned with sound texture, with music that's more or less generated from those sounds (rather than starting with a "song" as such: words, melodies, chords...) - I think Stereolab was mentioned, along with My Bloody Valentine. To what extent did this process influence Days for Days?

SM: The context of the conversation is probably important there...but come to think of it we did have some creative processes that started with textures this time. Both "Lions" and "Sister Sleep" started out as keyboard and guitar setting ideas that built into kind of drone jams that turned into multiple parts with varying dynamics. I'll probably always be somewhat influenced by Eno, though I usually think of myself working in antithetical ways, my "Oblique Strategies" joke aside. I do really like My Bloody Valentine. The great thing about Loveless is that it was one of those legendarily super-expensive records to record, yet it actually does sound great, and really sonically adventurous. Usually people spend a lot of money for one reason - they want to meticulously reproduce a prior success story. You know, "yippee, another record that sounds just exactly like So by Peter Gabriel."

JJN: In a way, the procedures that led to the shorter pieces - taking bits and pieces of the surrounding songs and amplifying them, expanding upon them, bringing their hidden elements out into the light - seem similar to the procedures of some of the more exploratory electronic artists - a sort of "microscopic view" of the more song-like songs' elements. Do you listen to any musicians working in those styles? Would you say there's any influence of their work on your own?

SM: There's certainly an element of "microscopic view" in what I was doing. I was a pretty big Stereolab fan before they became a college radio thing, and I think a certain portion of the electronica aesthetic came from them, [but] I'm so non-expert in that electronic stuff I couldn't say how close what I do is in spirit to that.

JJN: Is that an homage to Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" that opens Days for Days?

SM: I was reminded of "O Superman," too, once that was finished. It was a pretty accidental similarity - for a while it was just a drone harmony vocal, then Tim Walters did the chop program. Very ingeniously, I might add. He had to make it key on the kick drum but also start before the kick and slow down as the kick slowed down.

JJN: Any interesting or unusual recording stories or techniques concerning the songs on Days for Days - running a chicken through a Leslie, etc.?

SM: Pages and pages of stories, really. One funny thing that comes to mind is how carefully Tom [Carr, the album's engineer] set up the mikes for the tambourine hits in "Way Too Helpful." Tambourine hits are like, throw a mike up, light fuse, get away, right? He's fussing over this thing like it's concert piano. He settles on stereo U67s, these incredibly expensive mikes, far left and right, and Gil has to hit two tambourines together and then part his arms in this sweeping rainbow motion. I think there are maybe four hits in the whole song. But I will admit, they sound amazing.

JJN: I wonder about your reaction to two ideas that seem to come up in nearly every review or article about the Loud Family. First, the notion of "difficulty": I've read reviews that would make me expect a collaboration between Elliott Carter, Frank Zappa, and James Joyce.

SM: I can literally tell you about people whose 4-year-olds can sing "Don't Respond, She Can Tell" [from Interbabe Concern] start to finish and teenagers who clearly get exactly what sort of knotty adult psychological situations I'm talking about. People get it into their heads that lyricists are doing some impenetrably inward and personalized thing and then maybe laugh at anyone who tries to find meaning in them Rorschach-like. I can promise people that most of this stuff is intended to be pretty easy to get. Don't worry about the hard-to-resolve stuff that's in the minority. You'll be glad it's there down the road.

JJN: I think there's a certain critical laziness at work here as well - I mean, I remember a number of reviews of Interbabe Concern citing the "quadrophonic gin and tonic fever dream" lines from "Sodium Laureth Sulfate" as completely impenetrable - when in context they seem pretty apparent, albeit not "literal." Similarly, I think there's a certain strain of journalist who imagines that musicians in general shouldn't be very smart - that's for journalists - so that if the journalist alludes to T.S. Eliot, he's clever, but if the artist does...geez, he must be awfully pretentious doncha think?

SM: In a case like that "phonic, tonic" line, people are going to get it but not realize they get it, or else not realize I'm making the same point they would want to make about using those words. It's just a list of things that are dazzling and maybe a little suspect in their ultimate transcendence.

With rock critics, there's still too much "just play your guitar out in the cornfield and I'll tell people if you tap some primitive urge." They're loath to take on the kind of explanatory role that film critics do, and I think that's why they don't get the demigod status of [film critics] like Pauline Kael or Siskel and Ebert. If one of them started rattling off what Michael Stipe's lyrics mean, or some equivalent, I think you'd suddenly have people going "my God, this person knows something I'd care about knowing." Because people do care about Stipe's content, just like people care about Pulp Fiction, Jules and his re-evaluating of his biblical rant or something.

JJN: It seems to me that in the past couple years there's been a generally greater acceptance of ambition in popular music - the critical oohs and aahs directed at Radiohead might be the clearest indicator of this phenomenon. Does this accord with your impressions? If so, how do you think this acceptance will affect the reception of Days for Days critically, and commercially?

SM: I don't know, I always get myself fired up that either pop music or what you call "ambitious" music is getting a foot in the door, and I've just never seen any of these global factors end up having the slightest effect on me. Clearly when labels started getting excited about "alternative" bands, I thought, here's a sign from God for sure, but the fact is that if the industry needs something, infinitely many bands will spring to life that are better fits than mine. God bless us all if we're enough like Radiohead to get some attention, but believe me, if the Radiohead market explodes, a mindset will grow up that'll think we might as well be doing Garth Brooks covers for all we fit into it.

Barely apropos of that, I remember us being a "new faces" act in Rolling Stone in 1993, and that two of the other acts were Liz Phair and Radiohead. I'm sorry - I'm not big and important after all! What would be really funny is if we could get in another one of those.

JJN: Relatedly, how much does what's going on in music - whether in terms of critical trends or popular trends - affect you when you're writing or when you're recording?

SM: Exactly the amount to do me the most harm, actually. I'll just absorb a little bit of everything, and that means there will be not enough of anything to meet anyone's coarse fashion threshold, yet just enough of whatever the hated five-year-old thing is to turn off the truly discerning mavens.

JJN: I ask because sometimes you'll read interviews with musicians who say "oh, I never listen to anything except Mozart sonatas" - and that's always struck me as disingenuous: if he really listens only to Mozart, why isn't he trying to write sonatas instead of huge thunderous stadium-pummeling riffs? On the other hand, I'd imagine that as a musician you don't want to turn into a human jukebox, just playing back all the favorite songs you've been hearing - especially since, as you imply, there's a lag time between writing and recording and release.

SM: You certainly don't want to unwittingly steal big chunks of ideas, but I think the humbling truth is that everyone is a human jukebox. The right way to do music is to use all pre-existing music as a language, and tell a new story with it. When people do what you're talking about and claim only to listen to out-of-genre music, I can't help but think this is the fear of being reminded that you didn't invent your entire style of music yourself, you're part of a big soup where everyone's claim on who came up with what is disputable.

JJN: I'm 36; you're 38 - I notice that there seems to be more openness to older musicians, and not just as MOR artists or as nostalgia acts. You've got your Robert Pollard (who drinks like a man half his age) and the continuing viability of Pere Ubu, most of whom are old enough to look like your uncle who used to run a butcher shop in Dubuque. How does not being 24 affect your music? (Of course, even when you were 24, you weren't writing songs about drinkin' all night long...)

SM: Well, even worse, when I was 14! I was this hard-lovin' hard-drinkin' guy in my really early songs, and the incongruity didn't even occur to me. And you know what? I think equally obvious incongruities fail to occur to older musicians. Too many of us are reacting to age, trying to retool for the kids while at the same time having this big goal of showing that yes, the old ways are still the best. Yuck! I think you have to face the complexity of the new equation humbly. The first thing that has to die is the desire to see the old ways prevail. Ask, is there a way to make music a new way which relates the truth of the young then, the truth of the young now, and the truth of those who are now old? Let the multiple vantage points drive discovery in higher dimensions; let one dimension's truth test the other for strength. There's no such thing as the new actually being recognized as such at the time. It'll just seem like something that's missing the boat.

JJN: The question about age is really a variation on the "musical influence" question - how do you balance the need to not turn into a relic while avoiding "fronting" as a person you're not (a guy in his early 20s)?

SM: I don't balance anything - I just go whole hog toward being a relic. Who isn't just a funny little relic of all the things that have affected them? I can't imagine some grander, preferable thing to be. If young people are uniquely qualified to create some new scene, great, and far be it from me to horn in on their action, but there's such a thing as working in areas that aren't going to see their rules overturned in five years or even in fifty years. It seems silly to think of Elizabethans in 1598 looking around at each others' poetry and going "oh, how 1580's this is." But of course that way of thinking was around then, too.

JJN: I'd almost forgotten - but the other critical default about your music I'd alluded to earlier is an apparent need to refer to Game Theory, which then gets categorized as an "eighties" band (which is technically correct, I guess) - but then the comparison is used to imply that somehow there's something inherently "retro" about the Loud Family.

SM: I think you have to see that in the context of how critics at the time used to call Big Star a sixties throwback, or how any band that's not reacting to the times in some dramatic way is considered kind of quaint and rinky-dink. In the '80s they were calling Game Theory '60s and '70s names like "psychedelic" and "art rock" or whatever; no one was saying "ah, here's the sound of the '80s." Then grunge happens and the reaction is "oh, [Game Theory] had that 80s sound."

JJN: In an interview with Robert Schneider of The Apples in stereo, I suggested that "newness" is a trap - in that nothing will make music seem more dated than whatever sound is au courant. Whereas looking backward, making something new with older materials, actually stands a greater chance of becoming timeless, or at least less ridiculous than that high school yearbook photo with the giant sideburns and collars out to here.

SM: The illusion of newness is a sort of hat trick that only works as a staged performance. If you showed a cubist painting to the art world of the early 1800s, they wouldn't say "my God, it's a hundred years ahead of us," they'd say, "how lacking in sophistication," right? "How unevolved." Or you could imagine playing Prodigy for a Blondie fan in 1979. They'd think "this is some sort of old people's prog rock, like Genesis."

JJN: The ghost of prog rock having been disinterred, I just have to mention: in an online interview recently, you mentioned being favorably impressed with Jon Anderson's lyrics with Yes. Since even among people who like that band's music, his lyrics are often thought of as cringeworthy, I'm curious about your rather against-the-grain reading of them.

SM: I guess I sort of fell into thinking that way until it occurred to me to want to decide for myself. There's a powerful critical consensus - I'm thinking of people like Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau - saying a lyricist like Jon Anderson is off in fairyland. I almost don't know where to begin to address all the forces at work, but I think critical discourse is inherently conflictual, one person's point ousts another person's point, and music which is itself structured as conflict fares better in that kind of conflict-based realm. If the record is either one of these ostentatiously original records, or if it's literally about conflict, it has has a leg up in that area, and all that has nothing to do with the artist-listener relationship.

With someone like, let's say, the Clash, people think oh, now that's real-life, as if most artists are ignoring the real concerns of their listeners, such as what machine-gun to use in a Central American uprising. I mean, come on. I really don't think people start with the issues affecting the revolutionaries, or with the idea that any fighting man is more essential to the world than any artist because the artist is in his la-di-da ivory tower, I think they just have this vague sense that music about conflict kicks the ass of music that isn't, so that's what's safer to stand behind in a hostile forum.

Not many lyricists can even dream of functioning outside this really simple-minded model of the world where we supposedly have to topple some authority figure who's bent on curtailing our freedom. I think [Jon Anderson] does a fine job of addressing tricky issues like community, spirituality, proper relationship to time and to the land. But you just have to shudder to realize how doomed anyone is to try to put that stuff across to today's brand of self-consciously hip audience.

JJN: Even though the Loud Family draws from a broader range of music, there's a strong pop influence from musicians like Big Star, the dB's - whose music often gets lumped into the "power pop" category. That's a style that doesn't necessarily get a lot of critical respect - and I think the lyrics are often why. Its lyrics are often seen as self-consciously childish - yet there's a certain continuity of awkwardness, insecurity, and so forth that carries over from childhood to adolescence, and rock often glorifies adolescence - indirectly if not always directly. At the same time, that adolescent intensity you mention is what gives it such energy and power - and the best pop draws from that energy. (By "pop" I mean rock that doesn't posture at shunning popularity and doesn't regard all non-rock musics except the blues and R&B as muzak.) If pop songs don't have that power, they tend to seem kind of flimsy and shallow. None of which should be taken to suggest that guys in their thirties writing as if they're sixteen is a good thing. Insofar as the Loud Family plays "power pop," it avoids one of that genre's major pitfalls: lyrics that act as if the singer's in perpetual high school.

SM: Boy, I hope that's true, because I know the exact kind of tiresome dwelling on adolescence you're talking about. Of course, it's also true that once in a while one of those succeeds brilliantly, so I don't know if the whole idea is amiss.

JJN: Alex Chilton's "Thirteen" leaps to mind - maybe "Sixteen Blue" by the Replacements...and that's because Westerberg doesn't pretend to be sixteen, only to know what it's like to have been sixteen.

SM: Dante had this big thing about the intensity of adolescent desire being the key to proper religious life - you had to preserve the intensity across the disillusionment with the particular object, or rather the learning of the arbitrariness of the object.

JJN: A couple of more specific questions pertaining to the new album. A friend speculated that the album title might refer to a line from Echo & the Bunnymen's "Villiers Terrace" (from Crocodiles) - "I've been in a daze for days." Any truth to this rumor? Or are there other reasons behind the title, other than the phrase being a line from "Crypto-Sicko"?

SM: I didn't think of [the Echo & the Bunnymen song], but it would explain why everyone asks if we spell one of them D-A-Z-E. Maybe I unconsciously had that phrase in my mind from that song. It really would be unconsciously, though. I don't even remember that part of that song, to be honest.

To get the title you'd have to first know the expression "legs for days" which means long, attractive legs or whatever. I felt that substitution was good food for thought, but I'm always prepared for people to find my album titles a little mysteriously motivated. I try for titles which give a passing nod to cleverness but I'm more concerned that they can potentially open up with some meaning over time.

JJN: Why don't we live in Mauritania?

SM: I didn't know a thing about Mauritania when I wrote the song ["Why We Don't Live in Mauritania"], but as it turns out there are one or two reasons to hesitate before buying a one-way ticket there. There's at least one Mauritania web site, and the one I looked at is more or less a guide to which ways of entering the country correspond to which ways you could get killed - border disputes, roving bandits, and so on.

The context of the song is very different. I'm asking why we'd hate so much to live in a place people consider less modern and cosmopolitan, and I guess I'm saying a big part of it is an intense distaste for being left alone with our thoughts long enough to conclude anything. It's not an anti-big city song or anything; it's along the lines of being amused that this urge toward sophistication is a whole lot like what teenagers feel when they want something to distract them from their homework.

JJN: What sort of things are you reading recently?

SM: There's one very easy answer. Rene Girard's Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World may have had the greatest effect on me of anything I've ever read. He's a French-born Stanford literature and sociology scholar. Not that Girard is for everyone, or much of anyone, I should add; he writes plainly, but he puts forward this radical interpretation of Christianity, which is guaranteed to lose a lot of people on both sides of that fence. Unless it was complete rubbish, of course, like The Bible Code, in which case it would attract a giant following.

What's remarkable for me is that I was a long way down his path before I read any of his stuff. Anyone interested in why I would come up with shrill annoyances like "It Just Wouldn't Be Christmas" [from 1994's The Tape of Only Linda] and the blather about crucifixion on that album jacket will have it all explained in Girard. To make a long story hopefully short, he traces the origins of sacrifice in primitive religions to social mechanisms which are still operating, and constantly threatening to manifest themselves in rivalry and scapegoating structures.

JJN: What current cultural trend most annoys the hell out of you?

SM: Black-audience vs. white-audience music marketing is a real scandal, because there's a pattern of black contributions to music getting thought of as whites' music, then blacks aren't allowed to use those aspects anymore. Blacks and whites both conspire to pull this off.

Generally speaking, black musicians really have to fit a narrow job description to stand a chance in the industry. They pretty much get to choose between being violence-selling rappers or sex-selling teen soul crooners, period. Now, white people are allowed to do both those styles and nobody blinks, and of course all other styles. If black groups play any other style, they're treated as going against color or something, which is just too bizarre because pop styles such as I work in are so historically black it's ridiculous. What is white pop music? The Beatles? The Beatles were a black music cover band for God's sake! I'll bet any group like an all-black ska band is pretty used to hearing "why are they doing a white thing? Don't they want sports logos and Glocks and stuff?"

JJN: I agree on the cultural limits idea - although I'm not sure that pop music is as "historically black" as all that. Not to deny the huge influence of any number of black musicians - but there's a lot of other streams there too. Greil Marcus tells a great story about "Hound Dog": written by two Jewish men (Leiber and Stoller) who were strongly influencd by black music; promoted to Johnny Otis, an R&B singer whom Marcus describes as a "dark-skinned white man...who many thought was black"; Otis in turn giving the song to Big Mama Thornton, a black blues singer - and finally Elvis covers it. And of course there's the infamous Sam Phillips line about Elvis as a white boy who could sing black...

It's a mix - not really reducible to black or white. But certainly in terms of credit, you're right: say all you want about Elvis, but I'd argue that Chuck Berry had and has more influence - not only musically, but lyrically.

SM: Oh, I definitely agree with all of that. I didn't mean it's only historically black, I mean the way credit gets divvied up is fishy. Society appears to me to have this tendency to credit any melodic or intricately arranged aspect to whites, and credits blacks with prominent rhythms and getting down and dirty, loosey-goosey. The evidence of my own eyes is that when I actually see black writers and musicians in, let's say, the fifties, these are typically reserved, well-spoken gentleman in suits who fret over theory and craft. There are weird boundaries; people are perfectly capable of being in awe of improvisational jazz players like Miles Davis or John Coltrane, but I think if you say something like "Jimi Hendrix was a melodic genius," you'd be thought a little off the mark. People would want to say "well, not so much that; the point was that he was so skilled," or "so out there." Black musicians' strictly melodic contributions go strangely unacknowledged.

JJN: "Little Wing" is a good example. Or consider James Jamerson, who played on seemingly every Motown record ever made - one of the most melodic (and undercompensated) bass players ever.

Returning to more immediate concerns - do you have any current touring plans? Is there going to be a video for "Deee-Pression," the first "emphasis track" or whatever they're calling singles these days?

SM: We're going to tour for the month of July. I haven't seen a schedule yet. We're frankly sick of flogging the video horse, just because the music channels are so impenetrable nowadays. If you absolutely bust your ass focusing on the video you might get one play very late at night, and let me promise you we can ill afford to make bad marketing decisions to the tune of the cost of a video. It's sad, too, because I get told things like that Matt Pinfield likes the band, or, I don't know, likes "our kind of music" as they say in Spinal Tap, but MTV seems to be committed to round-the-clock frat party coverage or whatever it is you always see on there.

JJN: It's a giant crap shoot - you could get the one cool hot video that makes everyone buy your record, like Weezer - and then disappear, also like Weezer. But the better odds are that you might as well have buried the money spent on a video in your back yard - or bought lottery tickets with it.

SM: Pretty much. Most of the big indies like Matador or Sub Pop don't bother with videos now, I don't think.

JJN: Oblique Strategies #2: "Children: - speaking; -singing."

SM: And then an old man tells them they can't have any pudding! And then a helicopter lands!