One song that didn’t make the cut for The Instigator is called “Love Bird”. Miller spent last September 10 seated in the plaza at the base of the twin towers, enjoying the beautiful weather and writing the song. “To me, it felt like it had to be on the record, it was so important personally. It was a love song with creepy overtones.”
He returned to the apartment he shared with Iahn three blocks south of the towers and continued chipping away at the song until 3 a.m. Early the next morning, phone calls from friends alerted Miller and Iahn to the drama unfolding just north of their own building.
“We watched it from the roof. We saw people jumping. We were trapped in the lobby for 15 minutes while bloody people poured in from the street,” he says. Their home was so close to Ground Zero, they feared a sideways collapse would crush their own building. Some of their fellow tenants chose to seek shelter in the basement of their building, and were trapped underground for nine hours without electricity, food or water. Miller and Iahn chose to run, just as the second tower collapsed.
“It was a cloud of smoke and burning pieces of metal in our hair. It was fucked up,” he says. The couple escaped with their lives, but without extra clothes, wallets or cell phones. It would be weeks before they could return to their home. They caught a ride to Ohio, where they stayed with Iahn’s family for two weeks. During that time, he wrote a song titled “She Loves The Sunset”, but had to compose it in his mind, as he obviously didn’t bother to grab a guitar when they escaped.
Several weeks later, they returned to their apartment, cleared out their belongings and decamped to California. In May, Iahn and Miller married.
Despite the intimate connection of “Love Bird” and “She Loves The Sunset” to those life-changing events, Miller says neither track seemed to fit the tone of the record he began compiling songs for The Instigator. It should be said that the WTC anecdote was offered up by Miller in the context of explaining those two songs, and not as a self-aggrandizing survivor’s tale. But it’s hard to steer clear of so monumental an experience.
“It makes me uncomfortable, because I see people trying to profiteer off of it,” he says. “I see the way people react to what Erica and I went through. It creeps me out, honestly, because we watched people die. We saw them that day on the ground as we were running, all around us. And,” Miller exhales a weary breath, “we’re fine. Our stuff was even fine. And we get to go away and keep on living.
“It changed the way we look at life and each other and what we are willing to put up with from our work. We are very, very lucky. Don’t get me wrong, we have nightmares, and there is stuff that is probably beyond what everybody else is going through, because everybody is scared, and it messed up everybody’s world view,” he says.
“I just keep going back to that: We are fine, and we saw people who weren’t. This is my first interview [for The Instigator]. I kind of made a deal with myself that I wasn’t going to talk too much about it, because it sounds like, feels like, profiteering. The thing is, it is impossible for me not to reference it, because it was such a big part of the time leading up to the making of this record.”
References to September 11 are not overt on The Instigator, but they’re in there. “Your Nervous Heart” hints at the kind of fear that may not be banished by the comforts of romance:
I know somebody must have gave you hell
Maybe you went running as the sky just sort of fell
Let me scoop you up and love you as you are
You’re terrified and it’s tearing me apart
Can I kiss your furrowed brow and calm your nervous heart?
“Terrible Vision” seems to dance around some unspecified trauma (“It felt like it was real/There was no God that I could believe in”). The upbeat “Hover” (“The city is dark, but we’re not scared/Wrapped up in each other”) celebrates Miller’s Manhattan neighborhood, with references to Governor’s Island and the Verrazano Bridge; the latter was visible from his apartment. “World Inside The World”, co-written with Brion, seconds author DeLillo’s contention (in his novel Underworld) that reality is only experienced in manageable chunks — that the true state of our world may only be unraveled with cautious consideration, and absorbing or acknowledging it all at once “would be crushing,” says Miller.
“It is not like a conspiracy theory thing. It is not a political statement necessarily. The way [DeLillo] uses it, and the way it struck me, is a way of personal relating. When you are having a conversation with a loved one, there are things you are saying, and things being said without saying them. Subtext is a way to describe it, but it is more sinister than that. The things we can’t admit to ourselves. Mortality. Our fears.”
